Finless Foods’ Michael Selden: “The tuna roadster”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent brings on Michael Selden, co-founder and chief executive of Finless Foods, to talk about growing tuna in a lab (2:45), getting the price down from $300,000 to $150 per pound (5:45), a publicly available bluefin tuna genome (8:45), replacing fetal bovine serum (11:30), using plant based material for the flesh “scaffolding” (14:20), scaling up (16:10), aiming for the mass market (19:55), why almost all American seafood is imported (21:20), the problems with seafood (22:40), the hardest moment(s) (27:30), the challenge of turning “clean meat” into an industry (32:00), and the science that is yet to be figured out (35:40).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Yo, technology.
0:02.9	What is it all about?
0:04.5	There will be multiple companies, I believe, that will be exposed as hucksters in this process.
0:11.6	And will that tar our entire industry as being the same?
0:14.7	Right.
0:15.2	I think that will be a challenge, you know, being able to separate, like which companies are kind of fudging it and which companies genuinely have technology.
0:35.4	Hello, and thank you for tuning in to Danny in the Valley this week.
0:40.7	We have a great show for you.
0:42.3	We're reaching back, way, way back, nearly five years to bring on an early guest to talk about everything that has transpired.
0:51.3	Since what must have been a high point in his life at that time, his
0:54.4	appearance, first appearance on Danny in the Valley way back in 2018. I'm talking about Michael
0:59.9	Selden. He is the co-founder and CEO of Finless Foods, which has been toiling away on a very
1:06.8	hard idea, manufacturing tuna rather than fishing it. So this is a clean meat company and in
1:14.6	the clean meat world or synthetic meat or, you know, cellular agriculture world, whatever you want to
1:19.5	call it. Certainly in the kind of clean fish world, Finless has been at this longer than most in
1:26.0	March, seldom raised $34 million in the hopes of bringing the company's first product
1:31.5	bluefin tuna to market.
1:34.0	So it's been a long, very windy road, and there's still some way to go.
1:37.8	But it's always fun to have people back on years after they first appear on this show
1:42.6	full of hope and optimism to give an update on
1:44.9	kind of how real life is building a company over, you know, many years.
1:50.4	And that's what you'll get in this episode.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.