March 1, 2021 — The leaders of Gathered Foods, BlueNalu, and AquaBounty are each predicting a big year for their respective companies.
Speaking at the 2021 Global Seafood Marketing Conference, which took place virtually last month, Gathered Foods CEO Christine Tsai, BlueNalu CEO Lou Cooperhouse, and AquaBounty CEO Sylvia Wulf agreed the U.S. market is warming up to alternative proteins.
May 6, 2019 — High-tech meat alternatives are grabbing a lot of headlines these days. Last month, the Impossible Burger marked a meatless milestone with its debut as a Burger King Whopper. Meanwhile, Lou Cooperhouse was in a San Diego office park quietly forging plans to disrupt another more fragmented and opaque sector of the food industry: seafood.
His company, BlueNalu (a play on a Hawaiian term that means both ocean waves and mindfulness), is racing to bring to market what’s known as cell-based seafood — that is, seafood grown from cells in a lab, not harvested from the oceans.
BlueNalu is aiming for serious scalability — a future where cities around the globe will be home to 150,000-square-foot facilities, each able to produce enough cell-based seafood to meet the consumption demands of more than 10 million nearby residents.
But unlike Impossible Foods, BlueNalu is not creating a plant-based seafood alternative like vegan Toona or shrimpless shrimp. Instead, Cooperhouse and his team are extracting a needle biopsy’s worth of muscle cells from a single fish, such as a Patagonian toothfish, orange roughy and mahi-mahi.