Insiders Reveal Major Problems at Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Upside Foods

In an interview with AgFunderNews printed in June, Upside chief working officer Amy Chen confirmed that its whole-cut rooster product was nonetheless being made in 2-liter roller bottles. Upside’s website—which includes a page dedicated to explaining the manufacturing of its rooster—makes no level out of roller bottles.

“We’re already producing whole cuts, whole tissue merchandise. Comparatively than producing cells in a suspension or in a slurry, we’re producing whole tissues straight out of the cultivator,” former senior vice chairman of operations Steve Myrick instructed Meat+Poultry magazine in April 2021. When Upside opened its pilot manufacturing facility in Emeryville in November 2021, CEO Uma Valeti moreover touted its means to make all varieties of meat. “Proper right here, you presumably can produce any sort of meat, poultry, or seafood conceivable. Along with every ground and whole cuts of meat,” he acknowledged on the opening ceremony, in a video livestreamed from the power.

Nonetheless former and current staff say that these claims exaggerate Upside’s technical capabilities. Internally, staff would joke that the startup is likely to be the next Theranos—the blood testing startup that imploded spectacularly, ending with its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, being convicted of fraud. “It was a working joke: ‘Are we the next Theranos?’” says one former employee. “I don’t suppose it basically signifies that they’re the next Theranos,” the earlier employee gives. “No person is dying. Individuals are being lied to, nonetheless no person goes to die. Ideally.” One different former employee confirmed that staffers on the agency would make jokes evaluating Upside to Theranos.

Now, Upside seems to be putting its whole-cut fillets on the once more burner. On September 14, Upside launched plans to assemble a 187,000-square-foot facility in Glenview, Illinois, that will initially be devoted to creating nugget-like ground-chicken merchandise—a course of for which Upside has however to acquire a inexperienced delicate from regulators. Asserting the model new facility, Upside acknowledged that, as quickly as full, it couldn’t produce the “whole-textured” rooster it’s been serving, though the company targets to take motion “ultimately.”

Most of the people tasting at Bar Crenn was imagined to signal that the interval of lab-grown meat had lastly arrived. Instead, sources declare, Upside has struggled with technical setbacks, whereas projecting an image of getting solved the essential factor scientific drawback of scaling up the manufacturing of whole cuts of meat. The revelations improve questions on exactly how so much cultured meat corporations, after nearly $3 billion in funding over the earlier seven years, have accomplished—and whether or not or undecided kinds of cultivated meat merchandise can ever be commercially viable.

Meaty Claims

For a nascent commerce, the cultured-meat startup scene is crowded. Every agency has its private spin on the experience—a choice to set itself apart from opponents. Some are opting to duplicate high-end merchandise like sushi-grade salmon. Others are going further distinctive, with uncommon riffs on mammoth meat. California-based SciFi Meals is leaning into the weirdness of it all, experimenting with beef burgers which have as little as 5 p.c animal cells mixed with plant-based substances.

Upside’s means to produce whole cuts of meat is a few extent of distinction from its opponents—an apparent technological head start that has given Upside an edge within the case of elevating funds. The startup has raised higher than $600 million in funding since 2016—attracting higher than a fifth of all the capital raised by cultured meat corporations as a lot because the tip of 2022, based mostly on data from PitchBook and the Good Food Institute. Its itemizing of consumers incorporates SoftBank, Cargill, Richard Branson, and the Abu Dhabi Progress Fund.

There are, roughly speaking, two strategies of turning animal cells proper right into a cultivated meat product. The most effective and least costly is to develop cells in suspension, which suggests mixing free-floating cells in a bioreactor with liquid feed and prepared until these cells have divided and matured. These suspension cells can then be harvested as a meat slurry and processed into ground-meat merchandise like scorching canines and rooster nuggets. Together with plant-based substances and processing the following mixture could assist mimic the texture of whole-cut meats, nonetheless to basically nail that mouthfeel, corporations will most certainly must transcend suspension cells, says David Kaplan, head of the cell agriculture lab at Tufts School in Boston.

The alternative selection is to find a choice to make cells knit collectively and sort sheets of tissue as they develop. Stacking and pressing these sheets collectively could find yourself in a texture that’s nearer to a rooster breast than a rooster nugget.