Which Came First: the Egg or… the Egg?

In an unmarked space in the Eastern suburbs of Davis, a biotechnology startup and its group of researchers are participating in advancing the future of sustainable food.

In recent years, the market has seen the appearance of plant-based meat substitutes, some of which have become synonymous with meat-based dishes using vegetarian and vegan ingredients. Two very popular producers of such foods are Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, the former of which launched its first product in 2012 while the latter released its famous Impossible Burger in 2016. Those foods are meant to look, taste, feel and smell like real meat and offer an alternative to the intensive farming of livestock and the exploitation of animals.

But they are not meat. A competing school of thought proposes that traditional meats should be replaced with cultured meats一actual animal cells reproduced and grown in laboratories一and that the only way something can really behave like meat, is if it is actual meat.

And while the majority of players in that field are focusing on some of the most common proteins, such as beef or chicken, Optimized Foods of Davis is focusing on a much less common product: caviar. Maja Segerman Nielsen, Cody Yothers, and Minami O are some of the researchers and entrepreneurs working to bring fish-free caviar to life.

Caviar, at first, may seem like an unconventional avenue into the world of cultured meat. But after exchanging with the scientists and entrepreneurs, the strategy starts to make more sense. Cody Yothers justifies: “One of the primary reasons why we’re looking at caviar, is that we can do it at a more reasonable scale.” Caviar happens to share many of the characteristics of early-stage cultured cells; it comes in very small quantities, it is expensive to produce, and it is sold at a premium price point. His colleague Maja Segerman Nielsen explains that once the product enters the market, “we can already be at price parity, we can sell it to restaurants, and we can kinda break even.” Contrasting it to larger, more common proteins, she explains: “chicken or beef are probably gonna take another ten years before being even close to what traditional beef or chicken is right now.”

One major difference between the real caviar and what is grown by Optimized Foods is the time and resources it takes to create a complete product. Nielsen explains that farmed female sturgeons won’t yield caviar before 10 to 15 years, and those are 10 to 15 years of maintaining the infrastructure and feeding the stock, whereas for caviar cultivated in laboratory, the current process Optimized Foods is using takes “a month maybe, from start to finish.”

The company was initially looking at launching a platform to grow pellets of mycelium, a type of network or structure formed by fungi. One of the applications of mycelium is that it can mimic the extracellular matrix, or ECM, that connects cells together and provides them with a support to grow. According to Nielsen, they found “that these mycelium grow as really nice little pellets of, really, any size, but caviar just happens to be one of those sizes.” It then became really easy to replicate the ECM found in caviar eggs, and in turn use it to grow and structure those animal cells.

Over 8500 kilometres away, in London, the CEO of Exmoor Caviar, Kenneth Benning, has also embarked on a journey to bring lab-grown caviar to the market. Except he is not new to the caviar game. In the early 2000s, he started selling caviar online. “Before, you had to go to Central London, you had to go to a very specialist store, just to buy caviar. It was a very select product.” Then in 2010, he opened what is still England’s only caviar farm, at a time when all caviar would be imported into the country. “We gambled that British chefs would want to buy British beef, British chicken, all British ingredients. This is now really ingrained in the UK, but 20 or 30 years ago, you would not want that in London. People didn’t really care about food in the same way as they do now.”

This newfound societal interest in food as more than just sustenance is not without consequences. “Because we care about food so much, and because there’s such a demand for food, there’s this new insatiable appetite for cooking, culinary TV shows, books, magazines, etc. We’ve all become a lot more gluttonous, and as a consequence of that, we are destroying oceans.” And, even before that, there were already massive environmental impacts from the excessive fishing industry. Recent research conducted in collaboration between the University of Montpellier in France and the University of British Columbia in Canada, among others, places the emissions of the fishing industry at almost three quarters of a billion metric tonnes, not only from the direct emissions from fishing vessels and all of the other machinery associated with the industry, but also from the CO2 that would normally have been absorbed by healthy fish populations and eventually trapped into the ocean.

Before his current venture into cellular agriculture, Benning had already dipped his toes in biotechnology by founding Caviar Biotec, a pioneer in the manufacturing of caviar extracts and other derived products. But Benning’s transition to lab-grown caviar didn’t really begin until two years ago, when he was approached by Darren Nesbeth, professor of biochemical engineering at University College London. “He asked: ‘How do you fancy growing caviar without the fish?’” This jump-started a long process of research and discovery that ultimately led to finding out about the potential of artificially growing fish egg cells. “I learnt a whole new knowledge base of biotechnology way beyond what we were doing before.” There were already some players in the market, but in other areas. “They have focused on beef, they have focused on fish meats, they have focused on chicken. But they’re quite far away. They’re saying 2030.” Caviar is advantageous as it can be made much more simply. “We’ve already cracked half of the project, and we’re moving on to the next phase where we grow cells out.”

And the stocks and production of natural caviar are shrinking. From a high of nearly 3500 tons of caviar in 1984, the worldwide output is now well below 500 tons. Unlike 30 years ago, when most of the caviar stock was extracted from wild sturgeon, today’s products are almost entirely issued from farms. And while near-universal bans on the fishing and trading of wild sturgeon and caviar have prompted the rise of commercial caviar farms around the world, it is the massive shrinking in sturgeon populations due to excessive fishing that initially destroyed the supply of wild product, in turn prompting the bans, including worldwide restrictions put in place by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an arm of the United Nations. Back in California, Cody Yothers adds, this is, in a way, positive news. “It’s rare to have the whole world agree to a sustainability outcome and that’s because of how dire the situation is for these fish.”

The trick now will be to convince the public of the viability and especially of the appeal of cultured meats. Optimized Foods is hoping to start by targeting Michelin-starred restaurants and chefs. Nielsen argues: “It’s kind of a natural start. If you look at the 2-star restaurants, I think like 75% of those have caviar on the menu, and at 3 stars, it’s almost 100%.” The response so far has been very positive. Yothers continues: “The chefs are super into it. [San Francisco’s Dominique Crenn] is an example of someone who says ‘this is weird,’ or rather, ‘this is new, and I want to be the one to show people how cool it can be.’” In a way, this presents as a massive opportunity for top and aspiring chefs looking to stand out. According to Nielsen: “The chefs want to talk about their dishes and the ingredients that they’re using, so it’s a very nice way to educate people about cultivating caviar cells.” Since 2021, the Michelin Guide has awarded “green stars” to restaurants that excel when it comes to sustainable practices, and many establishments now display their green star alongside their actual stars as a second, third, or even fourth star, and the use of top quality cultured meats is definitely something that could attract positive critics from Michelin inspectors.

Conversely, Kenneth Benning is hoping to capitalise on larger partners. “The cruise lines and the airlines are the biggest customers of caviar. They underpin the whole caviar industry, because they’re the ones serving it in business class and serving it in first class, and they have the biggest contracts.” As an example, United Arab Emirates-based airline Emirates recently announced it would improve its customer experience in first-class by offering unlimited caviar paired with bottomless Dom Pérignon champagne, for fliers willing to splurge on tickets starting at over $14,000 for one-way travel between New York City and the airline’s hub in Dubai. Caviar is an easy food to serve to premium passengers on an airline as it’s a high-end food that can be served raw without first needing to be cooked and/or reheated. Luxury all-inclusive cruise lines such as Silversea are following suit.

What can be daunting is what happens when lab-grown caviar hits the mass market, in specialised stores or even in supermarkets. There will undoubtedly be concerns familiar to people who have witnessed the rise in GMO crops, which prompted the creation of “GMO-free” labels for supermarket packaging. From a safety perspective, Minami Ogawa. of Optimized Foods is not particularly concerned. “If you think about it, a lot of food-borne illnesses come from farms, and animal-derived products carry a high risk of such illnesses.” The United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that each year 48 million people contract food-borne illnesses, 128,000 thousand are hospitalised, and 3,000 die. “In comparison, our caviar is made in a completely sterile environment, and there isn’t any of the kind of risk that you would find in a farm environment.” And this is not a derived or a modified product. “Biologically speaking, our caviar is the same.”

Likewise, it’s not fully clear how people who currently avoid eating animal products or certain types of meat for spiritual and/or ideological reasons will react. While none of the major religions of the world seem to forbid caviar, there is an increasing number of people following vegetarian and vegan diets around the planet. UK-based The Vegan Society indicates that the number of vegans in Great Britain has quadrupled between 2014 and 2019, crossing the 1% threshold of the population. In the US, review aggregator website Yelp recently released its list of top restaurants for 2023, which mentions the word “vegan” 41 times, and a non-trivial chunk of establishments on the list either feature partially or fully-vegan and vegetarian menus. According to Benning: “Cellular agriculture can redefine the conversation, it can redefine the arguments. You have the ‘hardcore’ vegans for whom because it comes from an animal cell in the very first place, it’s not vegan. But the reality is that actually the mass population of people, they’re not ‘hardcore’ vegans, they generally give a damn about the planet, and where their food comes from, etc.” Optimized Foods’ Cody Yothers follows in the same vein when asked if their products are vegan “If you’re motivated by animal welfare, exploitation, then [our products] fit the category.”

And how can world leaders help the cellular agriculture industry? Yothers is straightforward. “There’s a simple answer to that: it’s money. The amount of subsidies that go into the traditional protein production market are a ton of money.” Indeed, a 2022 analysis from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found that the US Department of Agriculture gave almost $50 billion in subsidies to livestock farmers between 1995 and 2021. This does not even include the additional billions provided to producers of livestock feed. Worldwide, such crops, like corn and soybeans, represent up to 33% of the planet’s agricultural land. “If they took one half of one percent of that and put it towards policy development in Washington, perhaps funding the FDA to have a special division to focus on this future food idea, that could help.”

This being said, there is some work currently underway at the federal level in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) entered an agreement in 2019 to forge a path towards the regulation of cultured meats. However, this agreement mainly establishes responsibilities between the agencies for developing regulations without enacting many policies. Other countries, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, use the “novel food” designation and require any new food item to undergo rigorous approval processes before being greenlit for market commercialisation. It is possible that, ultimately, actual regulations will not be fully put in place until the first commercial-ready products apply for approval.

Berkeley-based Upside Foods recently received a “No questions” letter from the FDA meaning that the governmental body accepts the company’s conclusion that cultivated meat is safe to eat. This will pave the way for selling products on the U.S. market soon. “Upside Foods will be the first-to-market with cultured meat in the United States. In a way that sort of opens the gates a little bit,” explains Cody Yothers, before adding that it reduces the legal legwork for other producers in the future. “It doesn’t take as much time because [Upside Foods] went through a huge iterative process and so because they did it we can all do it.”

Things are further ahead in the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore, where San Francisco-based Eat Just Inc. became the world’s first company to win full approval for its GOOD Meat brand of cultured chicken, in November 2020, and followed with further approvals, including that of serum-free media in January 2023, allowing for the even more efficient production of cultured chicken. A few months prior, the company had served its products to special guests in the Singapore pavilion at COP27 held in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.

When it comes to caviar specifically, labelling regulations are just the tip of the iceberg. The European Union, a major region for the production of caviar, has long had tight laws restricting the use of the word “caviar” to designate the roe of sturgeon and paddlefish. Similarly, the FDA in the United States only allows the use of the unqualified term “caviar” when the eggs come from sturgeon and requires the word to be prefixed with the type of fish when the roe comes from a different species; for example, trout roe may only be sold as “trout caviar.” It is currently unclear whether such regulations will also apply to eggs made from cultured cells, as even though the underlying cells are of the correct type, they never came from an actual fish.

Regardless of labelling requirements, the entrepreneurs are hopeful they will be able to produce all types of roe in the future. Optimized Foods sees it as a natural evolution. “We’ve validated that our platform can be changed to approach some of these other caviars and then even further in the future, to look at roe markets.” Notably, the eggs from other fish are frequently used in the confection of sushis. Benning is also confident. “You can grow [the roe] in the bioreactor. It’s the same product. We have the technology to do it.” Production costs might however have to come down for it to be profitable, as non-sturgeon types of caviar such as salmon roe command prices of less than $10 per ounce, compared to authentic caviar which can start at $30 to $40 per ounce, going way upwards.

It is very believable to think that we are at the verge of a revolution in the food world. As more and more problems in the field are being solved, it is very reasonable to think that cultured meats will become an integral part of our diets at some point in the next couple decades. “This is a really ripe time for investment in this space,” expresses Cody Yothers.

Kenneth Benning tells of a future where naturally cultivated meats will fall out of favour.

“I can imagine somebody walking into a restaurant, and asking: ‘Excuse me… is that killed caviar? That’s disgusting.’”