According to Singapore-based company Avant, eating farmed seafood will become a “more efficient” method to get protein by reducing waste and allaying concerns about ingesting microplastics.
At the Growth Asia Summit, which took place at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore between October 11 and 13, Avant’s CEO Carrie Chan delivered the keynote address.
Chan discussed “Epicentre APAC: Why the area is prepared to see grown seafood take-off” during his presentation. “[Cultivated seafood] uses resources much more effectively. We only make what we consume. We don’t develop it if we don’t consume the bone or the tail, according to Chan.
With operations in Singapore and Hong Kong, Avant is reputed to be Asia’s first cultured fish enterprise. We are a full-service technological company, from the cell line to the bioprocess.
Examples of its efforts include creating a fish mouth made of cells and cultivating fish fillets; commercial manufacturing is planned to begin in 2024. Currently consumed seafood is also linked to issues with overfishing, mercury exposure, antibiotic use, and microplastics.
Climate change, ocean warming, and algae blooms are among problems that fish providers must contend with. However, Asian customers are not particularly concerned about these issues. They place higher value on factors such product cost, availability, flavour, food scandals, and safety.
Chan thinks businesses like hers should make the case for the necessity for farmed seafood in a way that customers can understand. “I believe that our entrance point may also be slightly different for Asian customers.
For instance, when it comes to seafood food safety…Microplastic, as an issue, is well known.
However, the only reason humans continue to eat seafood is that we are unable to perceive the microplastics. She emphasised that China and India are the two Asian nations with the highest acceptance rates of grown cell meat, at 59.3 percent and 56.3%, respectively.
He made the point that there were more than 100 start-ups working on cell-cultivated meat, which was comparable to more than five times increase in the previous three to four years, using information from the Good Food Institute’s “2021 State of the Industry Report: Cultivated Meat.” Some of these businesses are focusing on creating the scaffold or cell-line for growing cell-based meat. She consequently thinks that this would start a supply chain of businesses providing particular parts required to grow cell-based meat.
However, growing cultured seafood comes with its own set of difficulties, including the need to cut back on the use of scaffold when the cells are reproducing and the cost of doing so.