Shinkei

Thrilled to share the Seremoni leadership expansion with a front page feature from SeafoodSource! We’ve built a team with incredible talent density and are excited share more over the following months. Since working closely together from January, Lesia Dallimore has only impressed me as our new VP of Brand and Marketing. Bringing her exceptional experience from Oishii, Erewhon, and lululemon, she’s sharpened the Seremoni story to expand our reach. Seremoni is equally proud to welcome three outstanding seafood industry leaders: Sonia, having previously worked side by side with Michael Fabbro to build Ora King, adds a unique passion to the team. I joined Chris on the road pitching chefs over the weekend and continue to be impressed with the focus and organization he brings to the cause. Angelina’s experience building out procurement strategies is the much needed foundation for our scaling over the next few months. Stoked to have them join Michael, Andrew, Cody and Gloria to accelerate Seremoni Grade fish from Michelin quality to an everyday experience. Thank you Christopher Chase for interviewing us!

🛠️ 🚢 🐠 Come join our team as a Field Engineer! This role is open to new grads and presents the opportunity to be EXTREMELY HANDS ON with building, testing, and repairing custom linear actuators, electric motors, PCBs, harnessing, fluid systems, manifolds, structural joints, and more. Field Engineering spans inhouse Manufacturing, Hardware Integration, Test, and Field Repair for our robotics fleet deployed on commercial fishing vessels. If you love hands on engineering and being out in the field, this role is for you. 🛠️ 🚢 🐠 Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gZyDQXyQ

Feeling very grateful for the kind words that Simon Mainwaring shared in the Seremoni Forbes feature today. “By profit-sharing with producers, the price that chefs and consumers pay is proportional to the price fishers receive, incentivizing delicate quality and care.” Shinkei brings a new generation of technology to seafood, jumping across a technology gap behind terrestrial agriculture that spans many decades. Seremoni is just our first brushstroke! Slowing processes down in “an industry that operates on hours and minutes: If you can turn that to days, sometimes even weeks, ideally, then it goes a long way towards being more sustainable.” https://lnkd.in/deHd_H7m Thank you Simon for highlighting the team's hard work!

Great to see Seremoni featured in Progressive Grocer shortly after our launch. "At a time when the global seafood industry deals with increasing environmental pressures, Seremoni is elevating expectations by adopting a boat to plate obsession with quality." It was a pleasure writing about the benefits of longer shelf-life to retailers in my related article in April. We're excited to release a new paradigm in seafood for grocery operations. Huge thank you to PG and the rest of our passionate partners who share in our vision for a sustainable future. You can pick up our retail packs in New York at Happier Grocery or online at YAMA SEAFOOD, INC. or E-Fish, Co - with more coming soon! https://lnkd.in/dPwevvAj

It is with great pleasure that we can share publicly Michael Fabbro has joined Seremoni as our new CEO. Michael joins us with a strong background in scaling B2B seafood brands, having been the executive behind Ora King Salmon’s founding team in the US through to a scaled wholesale business. I first met Michael almost 2 years ago through our partnership with LocalCoho where he was CEO — I could tell from our first dinner together that he was an amazing human and I wanted to spend as much time together with him as possible. His skills building category-defining leaders will help Seremoni leapfrog through our next stage of growth. Michael, I look forward to building the future together! If you’re interested in joining Seremoni and Shinkei, we are hiring (esp. for a Head of Finance and Head of Procurement — link in comments). Please reach out! https://lnkd.in/dvaTYXvB

The fishing industry hasn’t really changed much since the invention of the fishing rod, the net, and the motor engine. In fact, the introduction of the motor engine in the 1890s was the last major hardware change to the “fishing stack”. The result is a litany of issues plaguing one of the largest agriculture sectors in the world: overfishing, pollution, bycatch, spoilage, and even slavery comprise a few of the most rampant problems here. These are massive issues, which is why we at Cantos are excited to partner with Shinkei Systems. Shinkei is rectifying problems plaguing the fishing industry, and doing so with an exciting blend of hardware and software. Shinkei is a vertically-integrated robotic fish processing company. They’re using robots to process fish more efficiently and humanely, which makes the fish taste better and last up to 3x as long. Saif Khawaja, Shinkei’s founder, is a third-generation hobbyist fisherman who grew up in the UAE before coming to the U.S. for college. Saif is without question, a quintessential example of a Cantos founder. Saif is utterly obsessed — this is his life’s work. He lives and breathes an industry that touches most of our lives, yet we rarely think about. This passion has helped him become an industry expert in record time. As importantly, he’s what we like to call a “Kool-Aid Man”. If you put a wall in front of him, there will be a Saif-shaped hole in it. I say this confidently because I've personally known Saif for over 2 years now. He's assembled a world-class team of mechanical, perception, and software engineers from heralded companies like SpaceX, Anduril, and Relativity, and has paired them with fishing industry insiders that come from Michelin Star restaurants and seafood distribution titans. Reed Ginsberg (CTO), Jennifer Isaza (Software Lead), and Waiman Meinhold, Ph.D (Mechanical Lead) are a few of the many all-stars materially contributing to the future of the company. Together, they've executed insanely fast. They successfully finalized their Poseidon robot and launched their brand Seremoni after only raising a seed round 9 months ago. We detail much more in our announcement post below. I'll close with this: In less than 2.5 years Saif went from an idea in his dorm room to robots fully deployed on boats, processing fish that are now served at Michelin Star restaurants. That’s the speed the Shinkei team operates at. The upside isn’t just better fish, it’s a fundamentally different food supply chain that’s far more efficient, humane, and affordable. We’re thrilled to be partnering with the full Shinkei team as they deliver this vision to the entire world. We’re excited for what this next canto unlocks. https://lnkd.in/eJa9fbJU

I’m stoked to launch Seremoni out of stealth today! Seremoni Fish is a new standard and philosophy for the very best fish. We’re building the supply chains of the future from the ground up. I left academia to start Shinkei and, looking back now, I compare my work over the past few years as very similar to a PhD. Isolation in exploration, lots of upfront learning (including getting caught in a few tropical storms), problem selection, and now implementation of first-principles ideas. Food took a wrong turn when we relied on institutional security for food bred (or, rather, designed) to fill but not to satiate. We deluded ourselves with roundabout social and scientific arguments on what life should be, disregarding patterns of intuition across millennia of vitality. To cross coast to coast, we’ve cultivated our food for speed and cost – not nutrition. In turn, incentives are misaligned. At Seremoni, we build food systems that reconnect us to the patterns of Mother Nature. In Japan, many parts of the food system remain traditional, with the focus to feed one person effectively and scale artisanal systems to everyone — bottoms up over top down systems. It’s not just a matter of taste or flavor. Perhaps that contributes to why the Japanese have the highest percentage of centenarians and 3rd highest life expectancy in the world. Our model’s been validated by the best chefs in the country — our fish is in many of the top restaurants across the country, including Atomix, Sushi Zo, Restaurant Daniel, and many more (viewable on our website). Through our distributors, we have a network of restaurants with over 40 Michelin Stars between them. Seremoni is lucky to be powered by a best-in-class team at Shinkei led by Reed Ginsberg, our CTO. We have many positions open across operations and engineering— please reach out! Thank you to Andrew Watman for telling this story and the many partners like Alexandra Hamile, Nobu Yamanashi and Jeffrey Tedmori who support the cause. I’m looking forward to defending this PhD thesis!

There is nothing like the high of great work driving real impact with a stellar team. It makes the day to day ever so satisfying when we watch the smiles on chefs faces at the unveiling of fish out of their boxes! Thank you Alexandra Owens for spending the time to feature us in Food & Wine. “Every additional step you do compounds the shelf life, compounds the flavor, and compounds the texture,” says Khawaja. “When fish suffocate, they produce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that make their muscles tense up. They’re flopping around, getting cuts and bruises. The muscles produce lactic acid, which makes the meat taste more acidic. Acidic meat is prime for bacteria growth, and blood provides nutrition for bacteria. It’s like the perfect petri dish.” https://lnkd.in/d6fKxYpG