Fish fry spawned by 3D printers

A worker removes a piece of cultivated grouper fish from a 3D printer at Steakholder Foods in Rehovot, Israel, in this photo taken on April 23, 2023.| A worker removes a piece of cultivated grouper fish from a 3D printer at Steakholder Foods in Rehovot, Israel, in this photo taken on April 23, 2023. (REUTERS)

REHOVOT, Israel — Forget your hook, line, and sinker. An Israeli food-tech firm claims to have 3D printed a ready-to-cook fillet of fish using animal cells that were cultivated in a lab.

Lab-grown chicken and beef have gained attention as an alternative to conventional farming, and a way to reduce the environmental impact and address animal welfare concerns. However, very few companies are experimenting with seafood.

Israel’s Steakholder Foods has now partnered with Singapore-based Umami Meats to make fish fillets without the need to stalk dwindling fish populations.

Umami Meats extracts cells—for now from grouper—and grows them into muscle and fat. Steakholder Foods then adds them to a “bio-ink” suited for special 3D printers. The result: a narrow filet that mimics properties of sea-caught salmon.

Markets

Umami aims to launch its products in Singapore next year. Then, pending regulatory approval, it will expand to countries like the United States, Japan, and other Asian countries.

Cell culture alone is too expensive to match traditional seafood prices, so the bio-ink contains plant-based ingredients instead of fish cells.

“As time goes by, the complexity and level of these products will be higher, and the prices linked to producing them will decrease,” said Arik Kaufman, the chief executive of Steakholder Foods.

The 3D printer slides a glass dish back and forward, building up the mass of the white finger-length filet with each pass. It has the flakiness and texture of traditional fish, and when fried with seasonings it is difficult to tell the differences.

There are some advantages to using beef as opposed to veal.

There are still many unknowns

Cow stem cells have been studied extensively but much less is known about fish, said Umami’s chief executive, Mihir Pershad.

“We have to figure out what the cells like to eat, how they like to grow, and there’s just not so much literature to start from,” he said. “The number of scientists, you can imagine, working on fish stem cell biology is a small fraction of those working on animal cells and human cells.”

He said that they have developed a process to capture grouper and the eel. They hope to add three more endangered species in the months ahead.

The price of fish caught in the sea is a major challenge.

“We want consumers to choose based on how it tastes and what it can do for the world and the planetary environment. And we want to take cost off the table as consideration,” Pershad added.

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