This is a 3D printed 'fish fillet' and its creators assure its just as flaky as the real thing

• Israel's Steakholder Foods and Singapore's Umami Meats teamed up to create grouper fish fillets in a lab.
• The process involves adding fish and plant cells to "bio-ink" for a unique 3D printer to create the fillets, Reuters reports.
• Steakholder Foods CEO said the fillets mimic the flakiness of real sea-caught fish.

As the food technology industry makes strides in developing alternative nutrition sources, it's unveiling its latest invention — 3D printed fish fillets.

Israel's Steakholder Foods and Singapore-based Umami Meats joined forces to create fillets of grouper made from cells of the fish that are cultivated and then transferred to special 3D printers, Reuters reported.

"The flakiness is something that is much more easier to mimic," Steakholder Foods CEO Arik Kaufman told Reuters. "With our patent-protected printing capabilities, we know to 3D print exactly the same texture and flakiness of a real fish."

Kaufman described the process as "clean" and "antibiotics-free." Both companies expect to officially launch its first products in 2024 starting in Singapore, and, one day, the US, per Reuters.

But don't expect to find the fish fillets at your local grocery store anytime soon. At the moment, the process — which involves diluting a "bio-ink" solution with plant-based ingredients — is expensive, and research on fish stem cells is much less extensive than beef and chicken cells, according to Reuters.

Although lab-grown meat could be the answer to curbing the negative environmental effects of farming, the process is still too pricey to mass-produce enough food to replace real animals, Kaufman said. 

"As time goes by, the complexity and level of these products will be higher, and the prices linked to producing them will decrease," Kaufman said.