Ep. 266 - [United States] Communicating the History of Cultivated Meat with David Kay, Director of Communications at Upside Foods

I’m so excited to have my good friend David Kay on the My Food Job Rocks podcast.

David is employee number 1 at Upside Foods, which used to be called Memphis Meats. You may know them as one of the leaders of the cultivated meat movement.

As we all know, bringing new technology to the world can be risky so you’ll learn a ton of the strategies David has used to what he says, derisks bringing cultivated meat to market

I got a tour of the Upside food facility, called EPIC. Before it was bought out 2 years ago, it used to be a grocery store in the heart of Emeryville. When you enter the building, you are greeted with an open kitchen and then David gave me a tour.

Upside Foods is working on a bunch of stuff. Though I heard a bunch about them when I was in California, it’s nice to see the visual progress. They’ve found a way to produce any type of meat by developing a robust process to generate cells. By the way, haven’t tasted Upsides’ stuff yet! Some day.

Upside Foods is valued at around $1 billion dollars and is one of the most well-funded contenders in the space. One could say they’ve always been the tip of the spear when it comes to this industry and it is actually quite interesting to compare Upside with the other global players I’ve interviewed.

The facility can produce 50,000-400,000 pounds of meat a year but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the meat industry. You’ll also learn the regulatory framework for cultivated meat and what still needs to get done for this to be commercialized!

There’s still a lot of work for cultivated meat to go mainstream. After all, it took 9 years for the concept to light a fire but progress is happening. If you’re in the weeds for this industry, it’s making progress. Most expect the outcome sooner, who doesn’t? but for me, the journey in how this technology has been developing has been amazing.

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