From petri dish to plate: meet the company hoping to bring lab-grown fish to the table

People want more seafood than the oceans can sustainably supply, so a German firm aims to plug that gap with cultivated fish - but are consumers ready to buy it?

The redbrick offices, just north of Hamburg's River Elbe and a few floors below Carlsberg's German headquarters, are an unexpectedly low-key setting for a food team gearing up to produce Europe's first tonne of lab-grown fish.

But inside Bluu Seafood, past the slick open-plan coffee and cake bar, the rooms are dominated by gleaming white tiles, people bustling about in lab coats, rows of broad-bottomed beakers and pieces of equipment more at home in a science-fiction thriller. A 50-litre tank (a bioreactor) is filled with what looks like a cherry-coloured energy drink. The liquid, known as growth medium", is rich with sugars, minerals, amino acids and proteins designed to give the fish cells that are added to it the boost they need to multiply by the million.