Plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products have had huge success in recent years, and seafood replacements may not be far behind. Companies like BlueNalu and Good Catch are providing tasty seafood alternatives to the market, along with the all-female company, Modern Meat, now producing plant-based seafood.
Overall, consumer awareness, and curiosity, are driving demand. But creating the right kind of seafood alternatives can be tricky, and outright complex. A BBC report earlier this year explained how the supply of seafood alternatives is rather precarious, and marketing efforts have not been sufficient. Among the reasons for the lack of supply is, as mentioned above, the complexities of imitating seafood.
That’s why The Good Food Institute’s Sustainable Seafood Initiative has developed the Phylogenetic Index of Seafood CharactEriStics, or PISCES, a new navigation tool used to provide information for alternative seafood development, an effective resource for companies seeking to produce plant-based and cultivated seafood.
For now, PISCES “simply organizes existing information in a more accessible, user-friendly form,” according to the website. But in the near future, The Good Food Institute (GFI) will also be working with researchers to create a database of new empirical data. As stated per the GFI website, “Our goal is for PISCES to eventually be a one-stop resource for everything you might want to know about a given species in order to guide the product development process for convincing and delicious alternatives.”
Modern technologies like PISCES are an effective accelerator in the future of cultivated and plant-based seafood alternatives, potentially revolutionizing the market to another level.
