Wildtype

Seafood Without Fishing or Fish Farming

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About this episode

Wildtype is a cultivated seafood brand on a mission to create the most sustainable seafood on earth, starting with their highly anticipated sushi-grade salmon. Aryé Elfenbein, a cardiologist, and Justin Kolbeck, a former U.S. diplomat, set out to protect our planet’s wilderness, and to reverse trends of global food insecurity. Using cellular agriculture techniques, Wildtype will provide consumers with a new option for real seafood that provides the same nutritional benefits as the most pristine wild-caught fish, without common contaminants such as mercury, microplastics, antibiotics, or pesticides and without relying on commercial fishing or fish farming. Wildtype is the first and only cultivated seafood brand to raise $100 million in Series B funding with high-profile investors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downing Jr., and Jeff Bezos.


Wildtype’s first product is a sushi-grade salmon block (saku). Soon to be found in sushi restaurants around the country, Wildtype saku incorporates natural ingredients like salmon, plant proteins, and algae to achieve a taste, texture and appearance remarkably similar to conventional salmon. Their skinless, boneless salmon saku offers a 100% yield, zero-waste substitution for conventional salmon.

Crafted in a brewery-like facility they call a “Fishery,” Wildtype’s salmon is made using cellular agricultural techniques where cells are taught to replicate processes that occur naturally in salmon in the ocean. Wildtype’s unique cell line was developed from juvenile coho salmon over three years ago, and batches are grown in steel tanks similar to those used in beer brewing. Every few weeks, salmon cells are harvested and integrated with a plant-based mesh known as a "scaffold" that helps guide the cells to form fibrous muscle or fat-like tissues. A small amount of cells are used to start each batch in the same way a baker might use a small amount of a sourdough starter to bake each loaf of bread while simultaneously tending to the starter.

ABOUT JUSTIN KOLBECK, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO OF WILDTYPE


Born and raised in Los Angeles, Wildtype co-founder Justin Kolbeck’s immense curiosity about the world and humanitarian compassion is at the forefront of Wildtype's mission to solve the 21st century’s sustainability and food insecurity challenges. After university, he entered the foreign service, fulfilling a childhood dream of being a diplomat. His career journey led him to an assignment in Pakistan during a tumultuous period for that country (2007-2008), followed by Australia where he focused on macroeconomic and political issues, and finally to Afghanistan, for a final term in Paktika where his exposure to the impact of acute food insecurity left a lasting impact on him. That assignment and subsequent research left Justin convinced that planet earth is on a collision course with a global food security crisis if we do not find new ways to produce the foods we love.

After leaving the State Department, Justin completed his MBA at Yale, where he met Aryé at a dinner. The two exchanged ideas, connecting through their shared interests in food and sustainability. While entrepreneurship was never in Justin’s plans, he was deeply inspired by the promise of cellular agriculture to address what he thought was the defining challenge of his generation and made the leap to co-found the company with Aryé in 2016 after working for several years as a strategy consultant.