Wildtype Launches Kickstarter to Ship Cultivated Lox Directly to Consumers – The Spoon

Wildtype, the San Francisco-based startup specializing in cultivated salmon, announced today that it has launched a Kickstarter campaign for cell-cultured lox that will ship directly to consumers’ homes.

The Kickstarter campaign appears to be not only the first rewards-based Kickstarter campaign for a cultivated animal product, but also the first direct-to-consumer offering built around delivering a cultivated meat or seafood product to backers’ homes. Mosa Meat completed a successful equity crowdfunding campaign last year, but this is different: Wildtype is using Kickstarter to get an actual cultivated seafood product into the hands of consumers.

At a time when the food tech and alt-protein worlds have been somewhat down on the cultivated meat category, this is a hopeful sign that expands the product beyond the traditional high-end restaurants where most cultivated meat has been available. Wildtype’s salmon, which completed the FDA’s pre-market consultation process in 2025, has shown up on menus at restaurants such as Kann in Portland, The Walrus and the Carpenter in Seattle, and barmini by José Andrés in Washington, D.C., but most consumers aren’t going to make a reservation at a high-end restaurant just to try a small serving of cultivated meat.

The campaign is built around the company’s new cultivated lox, a ready-to-eat smoked salmon-style product made from Pacific salmon cells and plant-based ingredients. Wildtype says the lox is grown in clean tanks, is never exposed to ocean parasites, has no pin bones, and is third-party tested for heavy metals and other contaminants.

In addition to rolling out its new lox product, Wildtype is also introducing a slightly unexpected new product line: skincare. Wildtype says the same salmon cells used to produce its fish can make what it dubs a “marine cellular complex” (MCC), which it says is full of proteins, lipids, antioxidants, exosomes, collagen, elastin, and other bioactive molecules.

The move into cosmetics by Wildtype is in line with a broader push by alt-protein companies in the fermentation and cell-cultured space to diversify into skincare and cosmetics, a market that is less divisive and politically charged compared to food. With the introduction of its MCC product, Wildtype joins companies such as Geltor, which makes polypeptides for cosmetics, Melt & Marble, which makes microbial-derived specialty lipids for cosmetics, and others that have pushed into the space.

One interesting footnote around the launch is the disclaimer that the company cannot ship to backers in certain states where Republican governors and state legislatures have decided to ban cell-cultured meat. Interestingly, and perhaps another reason the company is diversifying into cosmetics, the company’s MCC skincare product is legal to ship to all fifty U.S. states.

With the first direct-to-consumer cultivated fish reward for a Kickstarter campaign, it will be interesting to watch how Wildtype’s crowdfunding campaign performs. Within a few hours of launch, the campaign had raised over $25 thousand from 88 backers as of this writing. The campaign’s goal is $75 thousand, which looks like it will be easily achieved given the early momentum.

You can visit the Wildtype campaign on Kickstarter here.