Huge State-Of-The-Art Cultivated Meat Factory Opens in the U.S.
UPSIDE Foods’ new, $50 million facility is capable of producing up to 50,000 pounds of meat per year.
Credit: UPSIDE Foods
The cultivated meat sector is booming. There are more than 70 companies working on developing cultivated meat inputs, services, or end products, according to Good Food Institute, and with $506 million invested so far this year into cultivated meat firms, the sector is already far surpassing previous years. Singapore became the first country to grant approval for the commercial sale of cultivated meat, with Qatar expected to follow. Meanwhile, in Europe and America, companies continue to work through regulatory processes.
Prepping for the moment when the red tape is finally cut, companies are ramping up production by opening state-of-the-art facilities. One of these companies is UPSIDE Foods, formerly Memphis Meats. This week, the Berkeley food tech company opened its new, $50 million, 53,000-square-foot facility, designed to produce hundreds of thousands of pounds of cultivated meat. This is the largest laboratory dedicated to the production of cultivated meat to date and represents a huge step forward in the mission to create slaughter-free meat from the cells of animals.
“When we founded UPSIDE in 2015, it was the only cultivated meat company in a world full of skeptics,” said Uma Valeti, PhD, founder and chief executive officer. “When we talked about our dream of scaling up production, it was just that — a dream. Today, that dream becomes a reality. The journey from tiny cells to EPIC has been an incredible one, and we are just getting started.”
Credit: UPSIDE Foods
The Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC for short) is based in Emeryville, California is capable of producing 50,000 pounds of meat per year, with future capacity to eventually expand to 400,000 pounds. It is designed to produce any species of meat, poultry, and seafood in ground or whole-cut formats directly from animal cells.
EPIC has areas for the milling and mixing of cell feed as well as areas to formulate, package and test products. It also has quality assurance facilities including an office for federal inspectors to oversee every process - a requirement in all meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S. Approximately 50 people will work in production, maintenance, quality and food safety, engineering, and plant management.
“EPIC demonstrates how much technology and innovation has advanced within the sector to allow the company to move beyond lab- and bench-scale to this phase of production, and will bring about a new level of transparency to our food system,” said Bruce Friedrich, founder and CEO of the Good Food Institute. “Upside Foods continues to be a trailblazer in the industry, and their groundbreaking facility means consumers are now closer than ever before to buying cultivated meat in stores.”
"Walking into EPIC showed me what it must have felt like to walk into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory,” commented Species Unite founder, Elizabeth Novogratz, who visited UPSIDE’s EPIC plant last week. “It felt miraculous and beyond exciting and, honestly, I felt like I was standing in the middle of the most hopeful place on Earth. UPSIDE Foods and its EPIC factory are the beginning of the end of factory farming and slaughterhouses.”
UPSIDE Foods will begin offering in-person tours at its Emeryville, California facilities in January 2022.
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The footage was reportedly recorded at Marshall BioResources in North Rose, New York, where up to 22,000 dogs - mostly beagles - are being bred for animal experimentation.