UPSIDE Foods is going all in on a new facility for producing cultivated meat.
What’s happening:
- UPSIDE Foods is one of only two United States based cultivated meat companies to achieve FDA and USDA approval for their cell cultivated chicken
- They are now investing $140M into a state of the art facility based in Illinois for scaling up their production methods
- The new facility, dubbed ‘Rubicon’, is over 187,000 square feet and has the potential to produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat
Why it matters:
- Scaling challenges have been persistent in cultivated meat which is one of the issues that has prevented many startups from being able to achieve price parity with traditional meat
- UPSIDE Foods recently raised $400M in a Series C round and is now clearly accelerating towards commercialization
Going deeper:
- Now that UPSIDE Foods' meat is officially available for US consumers, the company is in a position to be a first mover for adoption of cell based meat in the United States
- Very few companies in the cellular agriculture space will be able to invest this deeply into their own infrastructure, so UPSIDE Foods may become one of the first companies in the world to be able to successfully scale the production of cultivated meat in a way that would make legacy food companies and agriculture incumbents take notice
