Plantish is the first FoodTech company in the world (according to the company) to develop an entire portion of plant-based salmon fillet. The main goal is to develop vegan meat substitute.
Seafood is in demand for its inherent health benefits, but much of it is contaminated with mercury and other pollutants, while farm-raised fish are often full of antibiotics and pesticides. The fish stocks in the oceans and seas are already almost fully utilized.
Producing whole cut fish fillets from plants is complex because fish have a fibrous texture that plants do not. Other companies working on plant-based or cell-based salmon are developing products such as smoked salmon slices, ground products or small pieces such as sushi-style pieces that are not as technically challenging.
Plantish uses a reverse engineering approach, based on extensive analysis of real salmon at the molecular level, and then looking for these specific molecules in plant-based ingredients.
By mastering both the machinery used in production and the chemical formulas, Plantish claims to have the tools necessary to accurately replicate texture, structure and flavor.
“A fish is the most hunted animal,” explains Ofek Ron to Yuval Man from YNET (Hebrew). Ofek, a staunch vegan, CEO and founder of Plantish and the living spirit behind the company adds: “If we don’t do something, in a few decades there probably won’t be any fish in the sea.”
Plantish was founded in 2021 by Ofek Ron, Dr. Hila Elimelech, Dr. Ron Siksik, Dr. Ariel Shaklani, Eli Zinal and Eyal Briler and has so far raised about 2 million dollars. The product is not yet ready for launch but investors and journalists can see and even taste it.
In an interview with YNET, Ron explains: “Salmon is the most sold cut in the world. It is a 50 billion dollar market. In the US, which is the first market we are targeting, it is 10 billion dollars. We know that salmon is a product that people just love, consensus. It was important to us that our first product be a winning product.”
So how do you actually make a substitute for salmon? “We start by reverse engineering the real fish,” explains Elimelech, Dr. in Chemistry and responsible for the company’s research and development field, “and then we come to the laboratory and take materials from the plant – for example, soy protein, fat, water, omega 3, omega 6 – and create the composition that we Put in a 3D printer and reassemble into a fish configuration. 3D printing is the name of our game, because we want to produce exactly the structure of the fish.”
In order to achieve the exact taste and to find out what the advantages and limitations of the salmon substitute they developed are, they recruited veteran chef Nir Tsuk at Plantish. “Ofek came to me with the salmon and I just fell in love with the piece and the people. Since then it’s been a love story,” he says, “this tiny laboratory made a leap in a few months. The progress is simply meteoric.”
Plantish prefers to focus on plant protein as meat substitutes rather than cultured fish (real meat produced by extracting several animal cells and growing them in a laboratory) whose application seems further away but its taste should be closer to the real thing. One can assume that there is a business strategy behind this decision: while its competitors sweat in the lab and strive to obtain regulatory approval, Plantish will already have a product on the shelves, a set of marketing and distribution, and maybe even a successful brand.
Video: World’s First Fish-Less Fish (Salmon) – Nas Daily