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Chef Tsang Chiu King is preparing a subtle but important change to his menu: He replaces fish in some dishes with a plant-based alternative.

“The flavor is mild and soft and the texture is a bit tougher, like grouper,” said Mr. Tsang, referring to the alternative fish varieties he tested at Ming Court, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Hong Kong. He adds ingredients like dates and goji berries to enhance the flavor.

“This can offer a new experience or surprise to our customers, which will help our business,” he said.

After years of vegan burgers and dairy alternatives circulating the market, plant-based products are entering the mainstream in the United States. This is partly because more companies are targeting omnivores who are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat rather than giving up altogether.

Now, as sophisticated fish alternatives begin to attract investment and open up to restaurants in the United States and beyond, people who follow the fishless fish business say it may be on the verge of significant growth.

One reason is that consumers in wealthy countries are becoming more aware of the environmental problems of the seafood industry, including overfishing and the health risks of some seafood. Another is that today’s plant-based start-ups approximate the flavor and texture of fish better than ever before—an important consideration for non-vegetarians.

“This isn’t your grandfather’s alternative fish stick,” said Joshua Katz, an analyst who has worked on the sub-protein industry at consulting firm McKinsey.

There are a lot of people already looking at alternative hamburgers,” he added. “You can actually say, ‘I need to work on something else,’ and seafood is still a huge market with compelling reasons to work on it.”

‘Smarter’ seafood

People who usually reduce their consumption of animal protein for environmental reasons stop eating red meatThis requires enormous amounts of soil and water to grow and sprays a lot of methane as a byproduct.

But alternative fish advocates say seafood also comes with environmental problems. Unsustainable fishing practices have destroyed much of the fishery in recent years, a problem for both biodiversity and the world. millions of people dependent on the sea To come and eat.

“It’s a smarter way to make seafood,” said Mirte Gosker, executive vice president of the Good Food Institute Asia Pacific, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes alternative proteins. “Full stop.”

So far, plant-based seafood in the United States accounts for only 0.1 percent of the nation’s seafood sales, according to the Good Food Institute; That’s less than 1.4 percent of the US meat market, occupied by plant-based meat alternatives.

But seafood startups worldwide received at least $83 million from investors in 2020, compared to $1 million three years ago, according to the institute’s data. As of this June, 83 companies were producing sub-seafood worldwide, which has nearly tripled since 2017.

All but 18 of these 83 companies focus on plant-based products. Six more, including a French start-up makes smoked salmon from microalgae, specialize in proteins from fermentation. A dozen others are developing lab-grown seafood that is not yet commercially available in any country.

plant based moves

Impossible Foods, dominant power in the alternative protein industry, developing fishless fish project for years. Jessica Appel, spokesperson for the company, said it has not yet produced alternative fish products.

There are other big companies. For example, California seafood giant Bumble Bee Foods last year Partnership with Good Catch, a plant-based seafood company in Pennsylvania that sells products like fake fish sticks and crab cakes at Whole Foods and other retailers.

Some startups are developing alternative fish protein designed to mimic raw fish. One of them, Kuleana, sells a plant-based version of sushi-grade tuna at markets in Los Angeles and nationally through its Poké Bar restaurant chain.

Jacek Prus, CEO of Kuleana, said that while breaded fake fish sticks have done well so far, products that attempt to approach raw fish need further refinement if the industry is to impress non-vegetarians.

“We basically need to make the product better,” he said. “That’s the biggest challenge: How can I recreate the structure in really, really believable ways and mouthfeel?”

eyes in asia

According to the Good Food Institute, 47 of the 65 companies currently producing plant-based seafood are outside the United States. People in the industry say the Asia Pacific region is a logical place to predict significant growth because it already consumes more than two-thirds of the world’s fish, according to one estimate from the United Nations.

Thai Union, one of the world’s largest traditional processors of canned tuna, Oh My God Meat, a sub-protein brand targeting “flexibles” who want to reduce their carbon footprint. And the startup New Singularity has been selling algae-based, fermented bottom-fish products in mainland China since last year.

In Hong Kong, Green Monday company has been releasing alternative fish at various venues since June. This includes Ming Court, where Mr. Tsang flavored the fake groupers with goji berries.

Green Monday sells its fake pork brand OmniPork in nearly 40,000 locations worldwide, including the UK, the United States and most of the Asia Pacific region. The company’s CEO, David Yeung, said he expects OmniSeafood to be in most, if not all, of the same markets within six months.

Mr. Yeung said that his company has designed fake fish products to appeal to a variety of tastes and cooking methods. For example, while Americans love to grill or stir-fry fish, people in China often stew them.

“You can’t just tell consumers that you can’t fry and steam them, or just steam them but not stew them,” he said. “You can’t do that because to them fish is fish.”

A lab grown future?

next frontier lab-grown seafood, where edible products are grown from real cells in a laboratory. This technology is still a long way from retail sales and wide commercialization, although perhaps not as much as many consumers assume.

To date, the only company selling cultured protein of any kind is Eat Just, a San Francisco company that sells cultured chicken nuggets. approved for sale in Singapore last year. The city-state’s Food Agency said in a brief statement that it has yet to approve “any other cultured meat product.”

Ms. Gosker of the Good Food Institute said more cultivated protein start-ups could gain regulatory approval in the United States this year. Food and Drug Administration said last October He said products containing cultured seafood cells “could soon enter the U.S. market.”

At least two cultured fish companies in California — BlueNalu San Diego and wild type San Francisco – they have already announced plans to start selling commercially in the near future. shiok meatsHe also said he plans to “go commercial” next year, which is a cell-based meat and seafood company in Singapore.

Whatever cultivated seafood comes to market, it will almost certainly be a hybrid of lab-grown and plant-based technologies, said Frea Mehta, a scientist specializing in cellular agriculture in Germany. That’s because companies will need to place cells in a plant-based “scaffold” to give them structure, at least until the science of cellular agronomy develops.

Mehta Hanım, who works for the cultivated seafood company Bluu Biological SciencesOne challenge to developing lab-grown seafood is that scientists often don’t know as much about marine species as they do about mammals, he said.

He added that it wouldn’t help if animals defined as “seafood” were often too far apart in the organisms classification system. This means that it will be difficult to switch from cell-based fish production to, for example, the lobster, a marine invertebrate.

“From a culinary standpoint it makes sense,” he said. “From a biological standpoint, it’s not like that at all because they’re wildly, wildly different.”

tiffany may and Amy Chang Chien contributing reporting.