Shiok Meats, a Singapore start-up cultivating shrimp meat in a lab, is only two years away from being able to sell its product, said one of its co-founders.

The Singapore-based company, which is backed by the owner of Quorn, believes that reproducing shrimp meat from stem cells will be easier to achieve than reproducing the meat of terrestrial animals, Sandhya Siriam, Shiok Meat’s biotechnologist and co-founder, said at the Good Food Conference in San Francisco last week.

“We are very confident in saying that we will be in market in two years,” Siriam said.

The idea of growing animal protein in a lab has gone from science fiction to reality in a short space of time, as Memphis Meats made a meatball in 2015 from stem cells. Cell-based meat has rapidly become a new darling of the venture capital world, along with makers of meat-like products from plant-based proteins.

Both areas were the focus of attention at a conference held by the Good Food Institute last week. A panel dedicated to seafood disruptors featured both Shiok Meats and BlueNalu, a San Diego-based company that plans to build an 8,000-ton facility to cultivate lab-grown finfish meat.

The cell-cultured meat movement is several years behind the plant-based protein industry, which has gone mainstream this year. Impossible Foods, which makes a lookalike burger, now sells its product in Burger King and plans to expand into China. Beyond Meat, another early mover in plant-based food, has a similar venture with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Impossible Foods and other plant-based start-ups have talked of seafood being their next frontier, with the opportunity to reduce pressure on declining wild stocks of fish. Other companies have taken aim at aquaculture. New Wave Foods, which plans a shrimp lookalike and recently received an investment from Tyson Foods, has highlighted bad shrimp farming practices in its marketing approach.

“The time is right to really disrupt this seafood supply chain,” said Evan Rapoport, the CEO of Oceankind, a non-profit organization that also attended the panel on seafood disruption.

There is space for alternative seafood as many consumers don’t even know what fish they are eating sometimes, said Maisie Ganzler, chief strategy and brand officer at the Bon Appetit Management Co., a Palo Alto, California-based catering company. Fish such as pangasius could easily be replaced by plant-based proteins because customers have little affinity with the species, she said.

“That’s a real opportunity for plant-based seafood because no one goes into the restaurant for a pangasius,” Ganzler said. “But they might really like a fish taco.”

Both the cell-based and plant-based protein movements will struggle to dislodge the distribution business in seafood, Ganzler said. Thinking through the distribution side of the business is often an “afterthought” for many of these start-ups, she said.

Probably close to $100 million has been raised to date in seafood alternatives, one expert said. Taking the movements from where it is now to scale engineering will take incredible amounts of capital, the person said.

Shiok has sampled its shrimp in shrimp dumplings, which are highly popular across Asia, said Siriam and her co-founder Ka Yi Ling. The company will also grow crabmeat, Ling said in a Youtube video. She also claimed in the video that the cell-based industry will be the future of food.