She was living in San Diego when a friend introduced her to Michelle Wolf, a materials scientist with a degree from Carnegie Mellon. They hit it off instantly and talked about their shared dream of making seafood more sustainable. They thought up an unusual way to do it: By making it out of plants and algae, in a lab.

Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters

This past September, they were accepted to IndieBio, an accelerator in San Francisco dedicated to synthetic biology startups. Now, they say they are about eight months away from launching their first product, a popcorn “shrimp” that never touches an ocean.

Though Barnes and Wolf did use beakers and other lab equipment to perfect their shrimp, Barnes cautions that it’s not the same as lab-cultured beef, another synthetic protein that made a splash recently. Instead, they are breaking down red algae, a food prawns eat to give them their pinkish color, and combining it with plant-based protein powder. The faux-shrimp, Barnes says, looks and tastes like the real thing, down to the elasticity and fishy tang.

“We’re not reproducing shrimp cells,” Barnes said. “We use a process that's similar to baking a loaf of bread.”

It’s also not the same as crab stick, or fake crab meat, which Barnes calls “fish baloney.” New Wave won’t use other shrimp parts for its shrimp.

Its first product will be a small shrimp that’s disguised in breading, but they ultimately hope to create a “naked” shrimp that can be used for shrimp cocktails and expand to other types of fish as well.

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The odds are good for New Wave and the other fake-meat startups that have stirred up investor interest recently. Fake meat has gone mainstream, with 42 percent of consumers eating things like tofu and veggie burgers occasionally, according to research by Technomic.

“When consumers are given two options, and the options are price competitive, equally convenient, and similarly tasty, but one of them has no sustainability or slave-labor issues, and one is made from animals in a way that is environmentally problematic and that supports a human-slave-trade, people are going to choose the plant-based alternative,” said Bruce Friedrich, the director of the Good Food Institute, which invests in and promotes meat alternatives.

Still, with the exception of quinoa, plant-based proteins aren’t seeing significant uptake on restaurant menus, according to Technomic analyst Lizzy Freier.

Barnes anticipates it will be tough to sell Americans on the idea that algae can be palatable, “even though you find it in ice cream and yogurt.”

Freier felt similarly, saying “I can’t imagine consumers would be very open and willing to try algae-based ‘shrimp’ in a grocer setting, or anywhere for that matter. Though consumers are increasingly willing to try new foods … there are some lines most consumers will not cross.”