Yeah, googling around, it looks like there are a bunch of regional variations to shrimp paste, and different brands are popular in different countries? E.g. belacan looks very different from Thai kapi (more of a red paste consistency) vs Korean saeu-jeot (shrimp fermented whole, and maybe slightly larger shrimp used? seems very hard to emulate).
It sounds like the right way to start on this might be to pick one particular regional variant (or maybe even start with one very popular dish which traditionally uses shrimp paste?) and try to generate a market competitive alternative.
Although, as Michael says below, interfering with wild animal welfare can often lead to unintended side effects, so I’m not really sure a plant based product right now would be useful. But developing a PB alternative could be useful to have on hand if e.g. in the future these shrimp start to be framed, and maybe those benefits are large enough for someone to start production now?
Super interesting, thank you for your thoughts!!
Yeah, googling around, it looks like there are a bunch of regional variations to shrimp paste, and different brands are popular in different countries? E.g. belacan looks very different from Thai kapi (more of a red paste consistency) vs Korean saeu-jeot (shrimp fermented whole, and maybe slightly larger shrimp used? seems very hard to emulate).
It sounds like the right way to start on this might be to pick one particular regional variant (or maybe even start with one very popular dish which traditionally uses shrimp paste?) and try to generate a market competitive alternative.
Although, as Michael says below, interfering with wild animal welfare can often lead to unintended side effects, so I’m not really sure a plant based product right now would be useful. But developing a PB alternative could be useful to have on hand if e.g. in the future these shrimp start to be framed, and maybe those benefits are large enough for someone to start production now?