Plant-based seafood analog startup Hooked Foods seeking EUR 10 million in new funding round

Stockholm, Sweden-based Hooked Foods has begun its expansion of food production after its initial EUR 4.2 million (USD 4.3 million) and is aiming to raise an additional EUR 10 million (USD 10.1 million) in a Series A funding round to expand across Europe, The Vegan Review reported.

Hooked Foods is a plant-based seafood analog start-up company founded in 2019. The start-up company was able to receive a loan from the Swedish government-backed start-up platform before the company was able to get funding through the ProVeg 12-week incubator program in Berlin. Now the company works in collaboration with companies such as Good Catch, to develop seafood analog products.

Currently, it produces the "Toonish" and "Salmoonish" products and plant-based fish sticks, currently available for retail in more than 75 percent of Swedish locations.

“We are one of the very few plant-based seafood companies that has launched products on the wider market that actually has customer listing momentum with a proven good rotation out of store ones we get the distribution,” Hooked Foods co-founder and CEO Tom Johansson said.

Johansson created the start-up in 2019 when his sister became vegan, and felt as though she was missing out on seafood.

“As a family we all grew up eating fish and seafood, and when my sister decided to become a vegan, she found that it was one of the things she really missed," Johansson said. "She tried plant-based alternatives, but couldn’t find anything that matched up in terms of taste, texture, and especially nutrition, as many products were just starch- and water-based.” 

He then joined forced with a friend where they tried to create a shrimp seafood alternative. They became partners andcreated the plan of starting a company to launch plant-based seafod altneratives in Europe. Hooked Foods received asssements from the Netherlands ranking its products higher than others on the market taste and nutrition wise. 

“I am very happy to have seen the development we have had in Sweden … It is not easy to be the first-movers building a new category such as plant-based seafood, but we have experimented, dared to try, fail fast and found a way to activate our products and the category in an effective way with our customers,” Johansson said.

Photo courtesy of Hooked Foods