Out-Of-Body Experience

Singapore-based startup Shiok Meats hopes to build a sustainable future with lab-grown seafood

- Charlene Chow

It looks like your average prawn dumpling. It may even smell like it. But the shrimp meat within isn’t fished off the ocean or reared on a farm. It began life in a petri dish. This is Shiok Meat’s prawn dumpling prototype, made with stem-cell-grown shrimp meat. Three of their pilot eight dumplings were showcased at the Second Disruption in Food and Sustainability Summit on 29 March. Says co-founder Dr Sandhya Sriram, “When we opened the steamer, everyone got a whiff and said that they smelt like the ocean. The taste (sweetness) is exactly what regular shrimp tastes like. We have to do a bit of tinkering on texture for sure, and are already working on it.”

Still in its R&D phase, tinkering is an everyday affair for this company started last year. Dr Sriram and co-founder Dr Ling Ka Yi, who met as Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) colleagues, are more than up to the task. Dr Sriram has been working on stem cells from her undergrad to postdoctoral research days. A few years ago, she left full-time research to manage her other technology startups. Dr Ling, on the other hand, is a developmental stem cell biologist with over a decade of experience. She did her Bachelors and PhD at University of Wisconsin-Madison and was last a research fellow at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR.

What spurs them on is the goal of launching their cell-based shrimp meat first in fine-dining restaurants and specialist grocers, and eventually in supermarkets and grocery stores in three to five years. They are already in talks with premium seafood suppliers and fine-dining restaurants in Singapore, Hong Kong and India for possible trials by the end of the year. After shrimp, they hope to move on to cell-based crabs and lobsters.

CELLULAR SOLUTION