Upside Foods

Upside Foods is a food technology company that aims to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded in 2015 by Uma Valeti, Nicholas Genovese and Will Clem.

History

2022: Obtaining approval from the FDA to market products

In mid-November 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the first approval to release lab-grown meat.

The first player in the market for meat products obtained without the need to kill animals was the California company Upside Foods. The success of Upside Foods is likely to pave the way for other meat and fish-cultivating start-ups. However, in addition to consumer confidence, producers of humane meat will have to solve the issue of reducing the cost of production. So far, cultivating meat in a test tube costs several times more than raising livestock on a farm. And in the coming years, the situation is unlikely to change, even despite investment. One option to reduce the price is to add vegetable protein to artificial meat.

In the United States approved the first meat grown in a test tube

{{quote 'The next stage for us and the entire industry is a demonstration of scalability! Our industry is similar to the early e-car industry in that it will take five, ten, fifteen years for most people in many parts of the world to scale up and access it. But this is the future! At the initial stage, we would like to convey this to people through chefs, "said Uma Valeti, CEO of Upside Foods. }} The green light given by the regulator means Upside Foods will now be able to sell chicken grown from cages in bioreactors rather than poultry farms. Until November 2022, startups working in this area could not obtain permission to sell their products despite the presence of factories and billions of dollars of investments invested in enterprises. And those who tasted meat from test tubes had to sign a paper that they understood that they were trying an experimental product. The FDA added that it is ready to approve the sale of other types of laboratory meat, including seafood grown from marine life cells.^[1]

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