Legendary Vish is a start-up whose mission is to commercialise vegan alternatives to salmon and tuna. Their method? Utilizing 3D Printing to produce plant proteins and binders in structured forms.
Three students are behind the concept of this new start-up: Robin Sisma, Theresa Rothenbücher and Hakan Gürbüz.
The whole project started in 2017 but they recently developed a solution of an extrusion-based 3D printing process for fabricating salmon.
A project driven by sustainability
Industrial fishery presents a number of side effects that are often neglected: overfishing, greenhouse gas emission, destruction of the oceans. According to WHO, human consumption of fish has increased by 3.6% since the 1960s, a period that marked the introduction of new fishing techniques.
An alternative to this revolution brought by Legendary Vish is a plant-based seafood production, which “requires less energy, emits less greenhouse gases and does not need antibiotics”.
To address these challenges, the trio has developed an extrusion-based 3D printing method using Felix 3D Printers. As a reminder, the Dutch manufacturer unveiled at the beginning of the year a bio 3D printer. Equipped with strong motors that can extrude a range of different viscosity of materials, it is suitable for all types of bio-printing research.
In an interview with our colleagues from Food Navigator, Sisma explained: “We have a 3D printing process which allows the extrusion of different plant-based ingredients – our ‘food inks’ – through different print heads. With this special process, we achieve the complex appearance of our salmon fillets, which show the realistic distribution of orange/red meat tissue and white connective tissue.”
The founders’ goal is to recreate finest, realistic structures of salmon fillets but also taste and nutritional value. Their products can already be 3D printed using mushroom, pea proteins, starch, and agar-agar gelling nuts. In the long-run, they would like to integrate avocado seeds and omega-3 into future iterations.
The road towards alternatives to food products?
Legendary Vish is not the first start-up to develop a solution based on plants. Redefine Meat also ambitions to widely commercialize its Alt-Steak plant-based products produced using 3D Printing.
Be it to address a medical issue, an aesthetic need or an environmental issue, food alternatives are gaining momentum and so far, all of them require the use of 3D Printing.
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