Alternative protein startup Current Foods set a Guinness World Record on Wednesday by creating the world’s largest helping of plant-based ceviche — a publicity stunt to draw attention to the 3-year-old company and its lines of plant-based tuna and salmon.
The San Francisco company held an event in Brisbane, about four miles south of its manufacturing facility in the Bayview district, where it piled up 589 pounds of its flagship tuna product before mixing in pitchers full of lime juice. A representative from Guinness World Records certified the total weight.
Current Foods Sets Guinness World Record
Current Foods — founded in 2019 by CEO Jacek Prus, CTO Ron Shigeta and chief scientific officer Sonia Hurtado — is forging its own path even within the alternative protein market. While most other startups in the category are focused on mimicking poultry and livestock, the company is developing seafood alternatives that Prus thinks will be even better than the real thing.
"We wanted to go where other people weren't, Prus told me. “So we weren't seeing really any good products for raw tuna or smoked salmon and that's why we chose those formats."
Prus started learning about the link between the environment and meat production while in college. He attended the University of Texas where he studied philosophy and then went on to study business administration at the Acton School of Business, according to LinkedIn.
In 2018, he started an accelerator in Germany for startups working on all things related to alternative proteins from plant-based to cell-cultured to fungi that can potentially be used to replace traditional meat and dairy.
Hurtado, his co-founder, is a food scientist and studied biotechnology and food engineering at Finland's Häme University of Applied Sciences, according to LinkedIn.
The company's first consumer product —tuna cubes and pre-sliced smoked salmon— will launch later this month via direct-to-consumer commerce. Half-pound packs will sell in bundles of three for $40 or four for $50, the company told me.
That price works about to about $25/pound. Sushi-grade wild king salmon can reach upward of $30/pound depending on the season based on my own experience in San Francisco. And Good Eggs currently offers wild Pacific Ahi tuna for $20 to $30/pound.
The products contain ingredients like pea protein, bamboo fiber and algae to give it a similar texture and flavor to seafood without trying to be an exact carbon copy. It was modeled after tuna saku, a Japanese-style block of tuna used for preparing sushi.
"We could make it incredibly fishy if we wanted. We just increase the algae oil. If you had tried our previous product iterations, they were quite fishy and we toned it down because we were receiving feedback that it was too fish," Prus told me. "We can control the metric. How fishy do we want it? How red do we want it? What nutritionals do we want to take in or take out? So though we create a similar experience, I also think we're creating a better one."
After the Guinness event ended, the 500-plus pounds of tuna were packed up to be distributed to homeless shelters around the Bay Area by San Francisco-based Food Runners.
Current Foods hasn't disclosed its funding yet, but Prus said the company has 18 employees mostly based in San Francisco, with a few in Los Angeles.
They also have about 20 to 30 restaurant partners serving the product in approximately 80 locations. The company will be expanding to several hundred more locations and adding retail locations this year, Prus told me.
Several other Bay Area startups are developing plant-based or cell-cultured proteins of all sorts from poultry to livestock, as well as alternative fats.
In the alternative seafood category, San Francisco-based Wildtype is developing cell-cultured, sushi-grade salmon, while Emeryville-based Finless Foods is working on a cell-cultured bluefin tuna as well as a plant-based version.
And in January, Berkeley-based Upside Foods announced it was acquiring a Wisconsin startup called Cultured Decadence that's focused on producing cell-cultivated shellfish like lobster and scallops.
The plant-based foods market in the U.S. was worth $7 billion in 2020, up from nearly $5 billion in 2018, according to the Good Food Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit that describes itself as "building a world where alternative proteins are the default choice."
