Image Credit: Wildtype 
Lab-grown salmon is being served at a growing number of US restaurants after securing FDA approval.
Wildtype, which produces the product, is a San-Francisco-based company that’s received high-profile backing from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Leonardo Caprio and Robert Downey Jr.
Unlike other salmon alternatives, Wildtype’s salmon is grown in bioreactions using salmon cells.
As Hypefresh explains, “The process begins with cells extracted from living Pacific salmon. These cells are grown in large steel tanks similar to those used in brewing beer or kombucha. Fed a nutrient-rich mix of proteins, sugars, fats, salts, and essential minerals such as iron and zinc, the cells multiply under conditions that closely replicate a salmon’s natural environment. After harvesting, the salmon cells are blended with plant-based ingredients to form a sushi-grade ‘saku’ cut that is biologically indistinguishable from traditionally sourced salmon.”
Wildtype’s salmon product was first served at Kann, a restaurant in Portland, Oregon run by award-winning chef Gregory Gourdet, in May 2025.
It is now being served in three other restaurants in Texas, California and Washington.
Unlike lab-grown meats, which require FDA and USDA approval and regulation, lab-grown seafood falls exclusively under the jurisdiction of the FDA.
Wildtype’s cultivated salmon is said to offer all the benefits of eating wild salmon, without any of the known contaminants, such as heavy metals, associated with eating wild fish.
Wildtype is now the fourth US company to achieve FDA approval for lab-grown meat. Upside Foods and GOOD Meat gained approval for chicken products, and Mission Barns for a pork-fat product.
The company is now looking to expand to retail sales. It currently operates a pilot facility in San Francisco and has raised over $100 million to scale up its operations.
Seven states in the US have now banned lab-grown meat, starting with Florida.
At the end of June, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) signed Senate Bill 261, banning the manufacturing, processing, possession, distribution, and sale of “cell-cultured protein” products for human consumption.
The law goes into effect starting 1 September.
Indiana, Nebraska, Montana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida already passed similar laws.
In signing the Florida bill, Governor DeSantis said that his aim was to protect his state’s “vibrant agricultural industry” against globalist elites who want to blame traditional agriculture, especially livestock agriculture, for causing climate change.
“What we’re protecting here is the industry against acts of man, against an ideological agenda that wants to finger agriculture as the problem, that uses things like raising cattle as destroying our climate,” DeSantis said.
“This will be people who will lecture the rest of us about things like global warming, they will say you can’t drive an internal combustion vehicle, they will say agriculture is bad, meanwhile, they’re flying to Davos in their private jets.”
In February, a devastating New York Times guest essay called lab-grown meat “The Revolution That Died on Its Way to Dinner.”
“Interviews with almost 60 industry investors and insiders, including many who have been employed by or been part of the leadership teams of these companies, reveal a litany of squandered resources, broken promises and unproven science,” author Joe Fassler wrote.
“Founders, hemmed in by their own unrealistic proclamations, cut corners, such as using ingredients derived from slaughtered animals. Investors, swept up in the excitement of the moment, wrote check after check despite significant technological obstacles. Costs refused to enter the realm of plausible as launch targets came and went. All the while, nobody could achieve anything close to meaningful scale. And yet companies rushed to build expensive facilities and pushed scientists to exceed what was possible, creating the illusion of a thrilling race to market.”
