The Importance of Global Allies in Creating Cell-Cultured Sea Change
By Lou Cooperhouse
BlueNalu President, Co-Founder & CEO
BlueNalu has publicly announced a total of nine global strategic partners to date.
As a lifelong entrepreneur in the food industry, with 40 years of diverse experiences in building and leading innovative food businesses and organizations, I have continually received tremendous value from strategic alliances and partnerships, as I’ve always believed that the sum is greater than the total of the parts. When I founded BlueNalu over five years ago, and developed the business strategy that I felt would lead to long-term success, I again realized that having strategic alliances would be essential to accomplish our vision of bringing delicious cell-cultured seafood to the world.
During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to mentor and coach many founders and entrepreneurs, who I’ve challenged time and time again to “know what you don’t know” and to create a “unique value proposition” before beginning their business. With BlueNalu, we recognized prior to our founding, and during our earlier stealth mode, that there were so many unknowns in the category of cell-cultured seafood, for example: no stable cell lines had previously been developed among finfish species globally, no established pathway to scalable technology for viable large-scale manufacturing (meeting food industry volumes and profit margin targets) existed, no food grade supply chain was established for this industry, no regulatory pathway or process was in place anywhere in the world for these novel products, and, of course, no consumer had even heard about the concept of real seafood products that were made from fish cells. With such extraordinary challenges, I knew that it would be imperative to work with a variety of strategic partners to make the dream of cell-cultured seafood a reality, and to create a unique value proposition and superior product benefits that could truly resonate with our future customers. I knew that we would not be able to accomplish our mission alone!
BlueNalu is quite fortunate as we have publicly announced a total of nine strategic partners to date, including investments from these companies in several instances. These partners span across the globe and include multinational organizations in various nations throughout Asia (Pulmuone, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Thai Union, and Food & Life), the U.S. (Griffith Foods and Rich Products), and Europe (Nomad Foods and Nutreco). In fact, BlueNalu recently announced the extension and enhancement of our strategic collaborations with three of these international partners. We are continually developing new partnerships, and plan to announce more of these in the coming months and years.
Why has BlueNalu been so focused on collaboration, and what benefits do strategic partnerships provide? In this article, I share why I believe that partnerships are a really big deal! I'll break down BlueNalu’s approach to strategic partnerships, why we believe they are critical to cell-cultured industry success and what we hope to achieve through these unique relationships.
BlueNalu’s Partnership Approach
BlueNalu was founded on two key principles, which have been the foundation for the types of strategic partnerships that would add the most value during our commercialization journey:
A product-market fit for our cell-cultured seafood products, that would result in an extraordinary value proposition, and superior product benefits, to our target consumers and customers.
A scalable technology that would lead to high volume production at the least possible cost, and result in greatest potential profitability, even if our products were priced at parity with their conventional seafood counterparts.
With these two principles in mind, BlueNalu’s business strategy has prioritized working closely and collaboratively with strategic partners towards scalability and to ensure a global market fit for our innovative cell-cultured seafood products. BlueNalu’s species selection strategy targets finfish products that are primarily imported, difficult to farm-raise, and do not generally compete with local/national industry. This strategy allows us to thoughtfully explore mutually beneficial opportunities for partnership, with multinational food companies around the globe, to offer future consumers a new form of seafood that can alleviate the immense challenges faced by our current supply chain and enhance food security in each country in which we go to market.
As a result of these partnerships, we determined that our first product under development would be the high value toro portion of bluefin tuna, which is highly sought after both in Asia and worldwide but is available in very limited supply. In addition, this product has a considerable TAM (Total Addressable Market) and could result in very high profitability at the same time. This would result in a product that was absent of the environmental contaminants that may normally be found in seafood, while providing foodservice operators with consistency, accessibility, and security that is not available in today’s very restricted and highly variable supply chain.
The Growing Support for Cell-Cultured Seafood
One of my favorite math equations is 1+1=3. By collaborating with global strategic partners, and continually focusing on the principles of open innovation (a term initially coined by Henry Chesbrough, PhD), that have been core to my business approach throughout my career in the food industry, we can accelerate our knowledge, reduce costs, innovate more effectively, and bring new products to market faster than we could have ever accomplished by ourselves.
Considering the fragility of our global supply chain of seafood and its vulnerability to so many external factors, we are excited to see an increased focus by national governments across the globe towards the creation of a more sustainable, secure and accessible source of this critical component of our diet. I believe that the future is bright, as new and creative forms of strategic partnerships are likely to be developed in the coming months and years that will facilitate the large-scale commercialization of cell-cultured seafood.