Shiok Meats lost 50% of team over last six months, CEO says

Shiok Meats founders Sandhya Sriram (left) and Ling Ka Yi / Photo credit: Shiok Meats

Shiok Meats, an alternative meat player in Singapore focused on cell-based crustacean products, has lost about half of its team in the last six months. This resulted from two rounds of layoffs as well as employees leaving the firm over doubts on the company’s future, its group CEO and co-founder Sandhya Sriram said.

The exec wrote in a LinkedIn post that its troubles came after the funding market turned sour amid a looming recession. Sriram also shared that Shiok Meats had hired the “wrong people,” with the company struggling with team culture and structure especially through the Covid-19 pandemic.

“From being a company that was envied to having almost no turnover to a high percentage of turnover is what has happened in the last one year,” she wrote.

Through this, Sriram said Shiok Meats had realized that it “cannot commercialize or scale up crustaceans as fast as we thought we would.” She highlighted the difficulty in research and development for seafood cellular agriculture as a major hindrance for the firm.

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The exec also shared that the company’s management team underwent a restructuring process in April to better reflect its renewed priority on red meat, moving away temporarily from seafood.

The shift in focus came after Shiok Meats’ acquisition of Gaia Foods in 2021. “We did it for opportunistic and strategic reasons, but also with the thought in mind that red meat is well-studied so their tech will be slightly better to do than crustaceans, which is extremely novel,” Sriram wrote.

Founded in 2018, Shiok Meats says that it is the first cell-based meat company in Southeast Asia. Its most recent fundraise was a bridge round in 2021 joined by South Korean food delivery major Woowa Brothers, among others.