Upside Foods facts for kids
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Formerly
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Memphis Meats |
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| Privately held company | |
| Industry | Food technology |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founders | Uma Valeti Nicholas Genovese Will Clem |
| Headquarters | |
Upside Foods (which used to be called Memphis Meats) is a company that uses food technology to create meat. It's based in Berkeley, California. Their main goal is to make sustainable meat that is grown from cells, not from animals. This is often called "cultured meat."
The company started in 2015. It was founded by Uma Valeti, Nicholas Genovese, and Will Clem. Uma Valeti, who is the CEO, used to be a heart doctor and a professor.
Upside Foods plans to make different kinds of meat products. They use biotechnology, which means they use living cells to make things. They take special cells called stem cells and help them grow into muscle tissue. This process happens in large containers called bioreactors.
Contents
How Upside Foods Started
Early Steps and First Products
In February 2016, the company, then called Memphis Meats, showed a video of a meatball they had grown from cells. A year later, in March 2017, they shared videos of cultured chicken and duck dishes.
Around that time, in February 2017, the company hoped to make their meat for about 60 euros per kilogram. They also aimed to start selling their products by the year 2020.
Getting Money to Grow
In August 2017, Memphis Meats announced they had raised $17 million in funding. This money came from investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and large food companies like Cargill. This money helped them continue their research and development.
At first, growing cultured beef was very expensive. It cost about $18,000 for one pound. Cultured poultry was also costly, around $9,000 per pound. But by June 2017, the company had worked hard to lower the cost. They got it down to less than $2,400 per pound. They believed the costs would keep dropping and that their products would be ready to sell by 2021.
In January 2020, Memphis Meats raised even more money, a huge $161 million. This funding round included new and old investors, such as Softbank Group, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Cargill, and Tyson Foods.
Changing Names and Opening a Big Plant
In May 2021, the company announced it was changing its name from Memphis Meats to Upside Foods. Later that year, in September 2021, one of the co-founders, Nicholas Genovese, left the company.
On November 4, 2021, Upside Foods opened its first large-scale production facility. They named it the "Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center," or EPIC for short. This big plant is in Emeryville, California. It's about 16,154 square meters (53,000 square feet) in size. The plant uses renewable energy to power its large vats and tubes. It's designed to produce 22,680 kilograms (50,000 pounds) of cultured meat each year for sale.
Getting Approval to Sell
On November 17, 2022, the FDA finished its review of Upside Foods' cultivated chicken. This meant the company could sell its chicken to the public. Upside Foods was the first company to get this kind of review completed. However, the FDA made it clear that this was not a full "approval" but a step showing it was safe.
In April 2023, Upside Foods shared news about new products. These products are made from chicken cells, plant protein, and seasonings. The company also found a way to grow cells more cheaply. In May, the company's Chief Operating Officer said their first commercial plants would likely open later in 2023.
In June 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) gave Upside Foods permission to use a label for its lab-grown chicken. This was another important step for selling their products in the United States. In September 2023, Upside Foods announced plans to build another facility in Glenview, Illinois. This new facility will be very large, about 187,000 square feet. It will be used to make chicken nugget-like products.
Challenges with Growing Technology
On September 15, 2023, a report from Wired magazine talked about some challenges with Upside Foods' technology for growing meat. The report suggested that the company was mostly using a less efficient method that required more work for smaller amounts of meat. This method also made it harder to grow full cuts of meat.
