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There’s a very tactile experience to eating a raw oyster: squeezing a slice of lemon over the plate, picking up the rough, textured shell, and tipping your head back to slurp it all down. Eating a plant-based oyster from Pearlita hits all those notes. 

It was North Carolina’s famous beaches that attracted Pearlita, the first cultivated company to work with oysters. Using both plant-based and cell-based technology, Pearlita aims to recreate the beloved taste and texture of the prized seafood delicacy, whose wild populations are heavily threatened by overharvesting and pollution.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – As a girl growing up on the coasts of Denmark and Sweden, Nikita Michelsen treasured delicious seafood dishes made in her grandmother’s kitchen. Today, however, many of those ocean delicacies are becoming scarce due to overfishing, habitat loss, pollution, disease, acidification and climate change.

New Yorkers are getting a taste of cultivated meat and other novel food tech products at the Vegan Women Summit coming to Brooklyn next month. The Future of Food showcase, taking place at the May 19th New York Vegan Women Summit (VWS), will give attendees an opportunity...

Berkeley, CA - November 08, 2022. Alt-seafood startup Pearlita announces the company recently held its first tasting of plant-based oysters. Taking place on Nov. 8 in the Bay Area, the tasting was part of a fundraising effort for Pearlita, which plans to launch its first alternative oyster into restaurants and retail in 2023. 

Winston-Salem, NC - September 09, 2022. Pearlita Foods, the world’s first alternative oyster company, showcased its vegan oyster products for the first time at the ConvergeSouth startup expo.

Americans love their oysters, but satisfying the coastal cities comes at a high price for the oceans’ delicate ecosystems. Currently, Americans eat approximately 2 billion oysters every year, and although plant-based diets continue to increase in popularity, danger to the depleted oyster reefs is urgent.

Cell-cultured seafood startup Pearlita has developed the first plant-based oyster prototype to save the oceans from overfishing. 

The first images of the Pearlita Foods alternative oyster prototype has been released. The team is currently working on scaling up production to bring their alternative oysters to tastings.

A Danish-born entrepreneur is developing what she claims are the world’s first cell-based oysters to allow more people to experience the delicacy’s unique taste and health benefits.

Pearlita Foods is the world’s first alternative mollusk company, with an emphasis on cultivating oysters. The alternative protein company’s roadmap also includes cultivating scallops and squid.

CULT Food Science is an innovative investment platform with an exclusive focus on cellular agriculture that is advancing the development of novel technologies to provide a sustainable, environmental, and ethical solution to the global factory farming and aquaculture crises, is pleased to announce that it has made an investment in Pearlita Foods.

Lab-grown fish, crustaceans, and mollusk products aren't in stores and restaurants yet, but several companies say they are getting closer to commercial sales.

A few days ago, a study revealed that global warming and rising temperatures in the United Kingdom were increasing the presence of a type of bacteria responsible for gastroenteritis in humans.

Burgers, chicken, foie gras... and now oysters. In the United States, a brand new laboratory aims to develop the very first oysters from stem cells

Are lab-grown oysters coming to a plate near you? That’s the hope for Nikita Michelsen and marine biologist Joey Peters, the co-founders behind the cultivated oyster meat seafood startup, Pearlita Foods.

Pearlita, the latest startup seeking to disrupt seafood, announces the opening of a new research lab in Raleigh, NC to grow oysters from cellular agriculture. 

The co-founders, Nikita Michelsen, CEO, and marine biologist Joey Peters, PhD. cand., Head of Science, are headed to Raleigh to build the future of seafood at Pearlita Foods, starting with Oysters.

While much of the world’s sea life is under duress to climate change and acidification, oysters have it particularly bad because of where they live. Because oysters live in coastal reefs, bays, and estuaries, acidification and other problems related to global warming are extremely difficult to solve for due to a highly varied and complicated environment.

Growing oysters in a lab, no dredging required. That's the mission of Pearlita Foods, a Raleigh-based startup armed with capital from Sustainable Food Ventures and Big Idea Ventures' New Protein Fund.