ASIA'S MOST INFLUENTIAL Future Fish

Carrie Chan hopes to answer Asia’s appetite for seafood with a novel, planet-saving technology

- Kristine Fonacier

Carrie Chan, the co-founder and CEO of Avant Meats, is on track to set up the company’s pilot production plant this year, where it hopes to start rolling out fish fillet and fish maw by 2024. But the company won’t be sourcing its seafood traditionally. When consumers choose Avant seafood, they will be dining on cultivated fish protein, which is grown in a lab from fish cells. It is fish meat, but it does not come from an actual fish.

Meat, as a video from the company explains, will in the future be made “just like yogurt or beer”, in an incubator. Avant does this by taking carefully selected fish starter cells and placing them in a warmed, nutrient-rich mixture made of glucose, minerals, vitamins, amino acids and protein powder. This is placed in an incubation tank for several weeks, where the cells multiply just as they do inside a fish. Somewhere along the way, plant-based scaffolding might be added to lend the culture more structure. The result is fish meat that is virtually indistinguishable from the original, but that has been produced in an environmentally sustainable, clean, and—with more research and development— potentially economically viable way.