Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast · Alex Shirazi

Mihir Pershad of Umami Bioworks

·33 min·2 clips

Umami’s view is that the food system needs roughly “a trillion” in capital to shift production.

1. Cultured Meat and Future Food Podcast features Alex Shirazi talking with Mihir Prashad about Umami Bioworks and cultivated seafood. 2. Mihir Prashad is Umami Bioworks’ founder and operator, and Alex Shirazi is the host who guides the discussion about company strategy and industry scale. 3. The episode asks why a cultivated-seafood company chose Singapore, B2B manufacturing, and consolidation as the core strategy. 4. Mihir says he grew up between Texas and North Carolina, studied biochemistry, and initially expected to become a physician. 5. He explains that time in an academic lab pushed him away from traditional biomedical careers because the pace and structure felt too slow for him. 6. He describes starting a nonprofit with friends in school, building a lending library for university equipment, and learning that a formal business structure was necessary to work with middle schools and high schools. 7. His earlier work at Early Charm Ventures focused on spinning out university technology and commercializing aquaculture tools for fish-farm disease management. 8. That work gave him direct exposure to farmers and producers and changed his view of seafood production’s sustainability. 9. He says disease outbreaks in aquaculture showed him how fragile seafood systems can be when one intervention goes wrong. 10. He moved from the United States to Singapore in early 2020 to build Umami closer to customers in Asia, where roughly 70% of seafood consumption and production is based. 11. He says Singapore’s early food-security strategy, government grants, and research base made it a practical place to build the company. 12. He also notes Singapore’s strengths in cell biology and food science, alongside its weakness in manufacturing process engineering. 13. Mihir says the company’s early months were difficult because COVID lockdowns began after he arrived, lab access was limited, and materials were delayed for months. 14. He describes Umami’s focus as making manufacturing systems that incumbents can adopt to cultivate seafood instead of farming or catching it. 15. He compares the company’s role to ASML, with standard modular production lines and delivery of factories on time, on budget, and to spec. 16. He says Umami and Shiok Meats explored a merger after realizing their species coverage and R&D approaches overlapped, especially for lobster and crab. 17. He argues that the industry is entering a period where revenue, not just technical milestones, matters, and says paid development contracts can support the funnel toward a commercial license or factory. 18. He estimates that seafood production today is roughly a 100 million ton market and says near-term output is still only at kiloton scale. 19. The conversation is analytical and founder-led, with Alex Shirazi asking direct follow-ups and Mihir answering in a measured, strategy-heavy style. 20. Listeners interested in cultivated seafood, food-tech financing, and Singapore’s role in the sector will get the most from it; listeners wanting a product demo or a consumer story may skip it.

As heard by us

A steady look at cultivated food, infrastructure, and the slow work of making scale real.

This episode centers on cultivated food, but the more lasting thread is how hard it is to change a tightly regulated system without pretending it can be rebuilt overnight.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the real bottlenecks behind cultivated meat, not the usual hype.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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