Vegan Seafood Startup Plantish Rebrands as Oshi As It Eyes Global Market

Plantish, the innovative Israeli company acclaimed for its cutting-edge plant-based salmon produced via unique, patent-pending additive manufacturing technology, has announced a rebrand to Oshi.

Oshi says the renaming event symbolizes a substantial evolution for the brand as it embraces its transition towards becoming a global food entity, readying itself for a U.S. product debut later this year.

To this point, Oshi has raised $14.5 million in funding. Among the notable investors are Unovis, renowned for its financial backing of industry players like Beyond Meat and Oatly. Additional backers includes Pitango, TechAviv Founder Partners, SOMV, SmartAgro, E2JDJ, Alumni Ventures, HackSummit, and OurCrowd.

The company, established in March 2021, boasts a roster of notable collaborators, encompassing Michelin-starred chefs, famed cookbook writer Adeena Sussman, and content producer Nuseir Yassin from Nas Daily.

‘A transformative journey’

“By rebranding to Oshi, we are embarking on a transformative journey to position ourselves as a leading global seafood company,” Ofek Ron, Co-Founder and CEO of Oshi, said in a statement. “Our new name, which stems from the word ‘Ocean,’ represents our values and our commitment to delivering exceptional seafood products that resonate with consumers worldwide. We are dedicated to offering a sustainable and delicious alternative to conventional seafood while promoting a healthier and more environmentally friendly food system.”

With the vast majority of global fish intake (more than 70 percent) being attributed to whole-cut styles like entire fish or fillets, Oshi has a strategic goal to instigate a sea-change in the alternative seafood domain through its introduction of whole-cut, plant-based salmon.

In the past, the technical hurdles of creating whole-cut alternatives resulted in a lack of options in the alternative seafood industry, which has predominantly been confined to products like fish fingers and fried fish. Oshi’s pioneering additive manufacturing technology has surmounted these limitations, laying the groundwork for a new, sustainable methodology in plant-based seafood creation.

Global vegan seafood market

Oshi is targeting a launch into the U.S. restaurant industry by the conclusion of this year, with ongoing chef collaborations to fine-tune product offerings ahead of the much-anticipated launch. Concurrently, the company has solidified a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Coop for distribution collaboration on Oshi’s salmon fillets in 2025. Coop Group, one of Europe’s leading retail giants with more than 7,000 outlets, seeks to provide its customers with a sustainable, superior alternative to traditional salmon through this partnership.

Oshi’s U.S. and European debuts will see it join an emergent seafood successors category led predominantly by the Wicked Kitchen empire that boasts the U.S.-based Good Catch and the recently acquired Current Foods.

Elsewhere, global seafood leader Thai Union has stepped up its vegan seafood offerings as well as led an investment into French algae startup Algama. And in Canada, Toronto’s New School Foods debuted its first product earlier this year: a plant-based whole-cut “raw” salmon filet that works and tastes just like conventional.