Wildtype & Solaris, for a more sustainable world!

Thanks to the great opportunity to be part of the Galileo Festival of Science and Innovation, held in Padua from 14 to 16 October, and to present us in "The food of the future" talk, we had the significant chance to say more about what we do and our cooperation with partners.

We strongly support companies that leave their mark in the innovation of the way of eating, for healthy and sustainable purposes. 

The Galileo Festival is a program started by the Municipality of Padua and Italypost, consisting in talks, workshops and seminars (welcomes more than 150 speakers and 50 events) in important topics about the future of economy, artificial intelligence, robotics, medicine, health, energy and biotech.

Our Managing Director, Matteo Brognoli, participated in an interesting discussion together with Justin Kolbeck, co-founder and delegate of  Wildtype, important and valuable partner for Solaris.

Wildtype is an American biotech company, founded in 2016 by Aryé Elfenbein and Justin Kolbeck, that produces seafood grown from fish cells. Its main manufacturing facility is located in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Wildtype's primary goal is to produce Pacific salmon cultivated in a cheaper, healthier and more sustainable way than conventionally harvested fish.

The salmon produced by Wildtype is grown in the laboratory. As Justin explained at the Festival, the company starts "from the self-regenerating stem cells of the fish and grow them in a hyper-controlled environment, to make them believe that they are still inside the living organism from which they come" - continues - "later to complete the cellular structure of our salmon, we use the right mix of plant cells to achieve a final product that is healthier, with appearance, taste and nutritional properties practically identical to normal wild or farmed salmon".

The hyper-controlled environment mentioned by Justin during the talk is recreated inside the bioreactors.

Bioreactors are systems that allow control over a wide variety of parameters, which in turn maintain high production quality.
Wildtype has chosen the latest generation Solaris bioreactors for its large salmon production development project.

Cultured salmon is healthier because it is produced in laboratories and thanks to the controlled and sterile environment of the bioreactor it is not contaminated by mercury, antibiotics, microplastics or parasites, as Justin explained. Due to the pollution of the seas, some of the biggest problems that arise in the consumption of fish are precisely the presence of methylmercury in large fish, residues of antibiotics that are used to make the fish grow better and make it more resistant to diseases and microplastics that are now present almost everywhere, from the water we drink (both tap and bottled water) to the fish we eat.

As Wildtype explained on their website, "by growing seafood directly from cells, we now have the ability to cultivate genuine salmon and other seafood without relying on wild or farmed fish. What’s more, we have the opportunity to keep what we all love about seafood on our plates – the delicious protein and nutritious fats – without the things we’d rather leave out".

We at Solaris are delighted to take part in these great revolutionary initiatives which have an absolutely positive impact on our diet and ecosystem.

Our companies are born from the desire to help and be part of an improvement that can help the world. We feel compelled to do our part, to thank and preserve the nature and to celebrate the life of future generations.

We must make a difference and the first step is this aspirational process, fruit of a great intuition and representative of an immense generosity of man towards his peers and the nature of which we are a part and of which we should be constantly grateful.