seafood
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The Seafood Chain That Turned Batter-Dipped Fish Into a 500-Store Habit
Fifty years after a Nashville KFC franchisee couldn't grow his burger territory, the seafood concept he built as a Plan B runs 500 restaurants and keeps trading hands between private equity firms who like the numbers.
What Chefs Want!
A one-van produce hustle in Louisville turned into a 16,000-restaurant food-distribution machine by doing the one thing the national giants would not: picking up the phone and asking the chef.
Firebirds Wood Fired Grill
Firebirds found a durable gap between the neighborhood grill and the expense-account steakhouse. Now, with 71 restaurants, a paid loyalty tier and private-equity backing, it is trying to scale the feeling of dinner around a real fire.
Aruna
Aruna is Indonesia's largest integrated fisheries commerce platform, connecting small-scale coastal fishermen directly to domestic and global seafood buyers through a digital supply chain. Founded in 2016 by three Telkom University students, it removes layers of middlemen, uses local agents and mobile tools to onboard fishers, and pairs commerce with traceability, cold chain, and sustainability programs. The company operates across most of Indonesia's coastline and exports to dozens of countries under a 'People, Profit, Planet' mission.
DELOS
DELOS is an Indonesian aquaculture technology company that treats shrimp farming as an engineering problem rather than a matter of instinct. Founded in Jakarta in 2021 by Guntur Mallarangeng, Aris Noerhadi, Alexander Farthing and Bobby Indra Gunawan Wibisono, it built AquaHero - a farm operating system combining software, a cloud data model fed by dozens of pond variables, and standardised operating procedures - and then went further than most software companies would, taking operational responsibility for the ponds themselves. Its AquaLink arm consolidates harvest, cold chain and export, sending traceable vannamei shrimp to Japan, the United States and, since 2026, UK retail under the consumer brand The Naughty Prawn Co. DELOS says its managed ponds yield several times the Indonesian average, has raised roughly USD 13.75 million from Monk's Hill Ventures, Alpha JWC, Centauri Fund and Arise, and topped LinkedIn's Top Startups Indonesia list in 2023.
Manettas Seafood Market
Manettas Seafood Market is a Sydney-based online seafood market that delivers market-fresh fish, shellfish and gourmet groceries to homes and businesses across Australia. Founded in 2016 by third-generation fishmonger Peter Manettas, the company pairs a consumer-facing (B2C/D2C) online fish market with ShoreTrade, a B2B digital trading platform that connects fishers and wholesalers along the seafood supply chain. It sources traceable seafood from producers around the country and offers next-day delivery, chef recipes and specialist cold-chain packaging.
Crowd Cow
Crowd Cow is a Seattle-based online meat marketplace that connects independent farms, ranches, and fisheries directly with home cooks. Founded in 2015 as a 'cow-sharing' crowdfunding experiment, it grew into one of the best-known direct-to-consumer protein brands in the U.S., known for radical transparency about where each cut comes from, hard-to-find products like Japanese A5 and Olive Wagyu, and a mission to give consumers an alternative to the anonymous, commodity grocery-store meat case.
Wildtype
Wildtype is a San Francisco-based cultivated seafood company that grows real salmon from fish cells in stainless steel bioreactors - no fishing, no farming, no ocean required. Founded in 2016 by a cardiologist-turned-food-scientist and a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, the company received FDA clearance in May 2025, making it the first cultivated seafood product approved for sale in the United States. With $123.5M raised and backing from Jeff Bezos, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Cargill, Wildtype is betting that the future of seafood is grown, not caught.