"Go into the room," the voice said.
"It may seem like a weird room, but that's all right
because it is a weird room.
Don't be afraid," the voice said.
"Sit down in the chair. Drink some water.
Wait for the hand and take what the hand gives you.
This," the voice said, "is your meat.
Look at it and be thankful.
Be thankful because this meat did not come from an animal.
No, this meat was grown in a vat."
If this drone was hovering over a slaughterhouse,
you would probably turn away
before watching what comes next.
We like our tasty burgers.
We just don't wanna think about what went into making them.
Medium rare with American cheese,
but please hold the misery.
This meat factory, though, is different.
It's your friendly neighborhood abattoir,
and it belongs to UPSIDE Foods.
Meat is fundamentally the most delicious,
most desired food across all cultures.
And it's the center of plate
for nearly everything you can imagine.
People love eating meat,
and we wanna be able to keep eating meat
for thousands of years coming up.
But the challenge we are facing at the moment
is there's just not enough meat to be able to produce
for a growing population
that wants to get more and more of it.
The person in charge of UPSIDE
is this fella, Uma Valeti.
He's not really into killing floors of death.
There's no slaughter here.
And we're talking about real meat,
not plant-based proteins or meat alternatives.
We're going real meat using animal cells,
but not having to raise and slaughter animals.
This is the UPSIDE Foods production facility
and innovation center.
What we're doing at UPSIDE foods really is finding a way
to grow real meat directly from animal cells
into the meat we love.
If you look around the facility,
you'll have small, medium, large cultivators all around us.
They're meant to sell one single purpose,
which is to grow real meat from any animal
and be able to grow that in a matter of 10 to 12 days.
Put simply, UPSIDE grows meat in these vats.
It takes animal cells, feeds them nutrients,
waits a couple of weeks, and then digs into the vats
and harvests out some pork chops or chicken breasts.
If you look at this place, I mean, it looks like a brewery,
and that's essentially what it is, right?
Right, this should be very familiar to people.
When you walk to a brewery, you see very large steel tanks.
When you walk into a future meat production facility,
you should be able to see very clean tanks
that are there growing meat of any species we love to eat.
These are words that make sense
when put together,
although the concept itself takes some getting used to.
So we'll take cells from a cow,
we'll take cells from a pig or cells from a chicken,
and we'll grow them outside the animal.
And we provide them with clean and nutritious ingredients
in a clean environment,
and we'll let them grow for a couple of weeks.
At the end of the couple of weeks, we'll harvest meat,
which is essentially the raw meat
that you would get when an animal is slaughtered.
And ultimately,
you'll cook it just like you always cooked meat.
What's the largest piece of meat you've ever eaten?
Just some giant steak.
40 ounces? Yeah,
I think I've probably gotten
to the 40 range, yeah. 40 ounces, okay.
You had to grow a 2000-pound steer.
Yeah.
And then cut it back down to 40 ounces.
Now imagine what happens in the reverse.
We're building that same meat from the building blocks
of cells much faster than what it takes a beef cattle
to grow, which takes two years.
That's really why the resource use for cultivated meat
is 10 times lower for water use.
Our greenhouse gas emissions compared
to growing an entire animal for two years,
and then cutting it back down to this 40-ounce steak.
UPSIDE has raised more than $200 million
from the likes of Bill Gates, Richard Branson,
and food giants, like Tyson and Cargill.
They're all betting that the company will crack the code
on making lots of meat without needing
to do any slaughtering.
That sound you hear is pigs and chickens and cows rejoicing.
Uma has graciously allowed me passage into his meat palace,
where we shall find out how UPSIDE makes its meat.
Okay, so the feed starts here?
Yup, so if we're looking at two tanks.
This is a smaller tank
and this is a larger tank that is holding the feed.
So we're looking at ingredients
that are being mixed in here in a particular recipe.
See this little fanlike thing?
Yeah.
That's the agitator in there-
Okay. That kind of mixes slowly,
mixes so the ingredients are nicely dissolved,
and that becomes easier for the cells to absorb it.
And the feeds coming more from like a farm
or like a chemical?
It comes from agricultural plants.
It could be corn. It could be soy.
It could be other plants that people are just processing
to make into powders like flour mills.
So we have a milling area where we mill some of the powders.
Okay.
So that it can easily mix into the water,
then the cells can start absorbing the nutrients.
Here, we are coming over to the first
of our seed cultivators.
We have multiple of them, but let's use one as an example.
So this is a seed cultivator.
You grow the thimble of cells into like a flask.
Once it gets to a reasonable-sized flask,
we have a sterile connection from that flask
into this cultivator.
Okay.
And we'll pump the cells in there
and then feed comes in and it starts mixing.
So there's literally a chicken pipeline
that's ferrying stuff from one of these vats to the next.
Yeah, and the cells are naturally programmed to double,
like I said, every 18, 24, 36 hours.
And they're doubling and doubling and doubling and doubling,
and pretty quickly, in 10, 20, 30 doublings,
you're gonna get really highly dense cells in here
that become, say if it's chicken,
that's chicken growing in there.
When you harvest it out,
it's going to be like a really dense liquid.
What you do then is you separate out the water from it.
And it just starts becoming like the raw meat
that you're used to seeing,
but it doesn't have the marbling
or so when it comes out of here.
Yeah, like what color? It's pinkish or?
It's pinkish, yeah.
It's pinkish, okay. It's pinkish
because the cells naturally have a little bit of a pink hue.
Once you take it out,
you take it into the formulations area in the kitchen
and you start making sausages, burgers,
and hot dogs, and nuggets.
That's crazy.
So that's the step.
So these are the big, big daddy cultivators.
Yeah, you can say these are the big daddy cultivators
for all cut meats.
These are the largest of their kind in the world
in any field.
And what they do is be able to produce the textures
and the cuts you love from cold cut meats.
I get more confused on the properties.
Like when you cut into a chicken breast,
it's kinda like fibrous.
And I still can't picture in my head
how you guys get the when you start combining things.
Is it just there's machines
that like sort of mush this stuff together
in certain recipes, and then?
There's certainly a role for machines,
but the majority of the work that we've done at UPSIDE
is actually having the cells figure out
how to make the tissues.
Between here and actually getting in front of a consumer,
it'll get into the shape of the breast.
That forming and shaping of it happens after it
from the solid meat that we get.
Okay, and that's just done with like a machine
that shapes it? That's how it's done.
That's a machine that shapes it.
But otherwise, it's coming out of this vat,
more or less. Yes.
Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.
And we have all kinds of cells.
We have what we call fibroblast. We have myoblasts.
And there's other cells that accumulate a lot of fat.
And we're trying to play with the taste
and the textures of each of those cells
when you put it into a format of a meat.
We're trying to build it
from the most fundamental building blocks.
UPSIDE started in 2015
and used to go by the name Memphis Meats.
Over the years, it's been joined by dozens
of startups also trying to grow meat
in big metal containers.
Uma's big flex is that UPSIDE
has moved past the laboratory R&D phase,
and is well on its way
to opening a huge synthetic meat factory.
This building near Berkeley, California was just finished
and will soon pump out engineered protein
at unprecedented volumes.
What we're targeting is making 50,000 pounds a year.
Okay.
With the capacity to go all the way up
to almost half a million pounds, like 400,000 pounds plus.
But this is basically the one
that shows them all how meat production can be done.
From there, we use that as a blueprint to start saying,
okay, now let's build a production facility
that's purely focused on only production.
We don't need to do innovation there.
That's the one we start targeting this 10
to 20 million pounds.
That's our next production facility that we wanna build.
Okay. This is crazy.
So if a number of you guys are successful at this,
there's gonna be competitions over just who could
make the most delicious
meat, right, with their process, and-
Yeah, I long for that day of saying I'm actually competing
with another company in this space.
It's gonna be like Coke versus Pepsi but with like steaks.
Uma's assortment of meat receptacles
and slurry pipelines was impressive.
But by God, I'd signed a waiver
and given UPSIDE power of attorney over my bowels.
I wanted to taste some DIY chicken.
How many tastings...
You must've...
Do you eat this at home
with the kids and? Yes.
My kids, my wife, our dog.
Yeah. So we are the first family
in the world to eat cultivated meat.
And can the dog tell?
Oh, I mean, he'll come running towards it,
right? Yeah.
He just like...
And you guys picked chicken, I would presume,
'cause a lot of people eat it,
and this would be the biggest early market.
You would have to do chicken or pork, pretty much, right?
Chicken is something that everybody knows how it tastes.
It's one of the most desirable meats in the world
and number one in the world and number one in the US.
So we're like, we're gonna put that on the table.
I mean, that's the funny thing is whenever you eat some
of the vegetarian stuff, it's always like,
oh, how does this compare to meat?
I mean, this is just meat.
Yeah, this is just meat, yeah.
I mean, growing up, I grew up eating a lot of meat.
My dad's a veterinarian.
I went to his work and was always around cattle or sheep
and kind of learned the love for animals from that.
But loved the taste of meat, kept eating it.
We had chickens in our backyard.
And I had the experience of one day,
the chicken I liked disappeared.
And I'm like, "Where did it go?"
"We just ate it last night."
And I remember really crying that day.
Was hard to process, so here we are.
I mean, we can have the chicken and eat it, too.
It's golden-brown.
You expect the mild reaction that happening in a pan.
When you're in the room, you're starting to smell the meat.
Oh, yeah, 100%. It smells like grilled chicken.
Yes.
And then as you cut,
he's cutting against the bias of the fibers.
And you can see that knife is actually,
he had to work hard to cut it.
It just doesn't go to mush.
Yeah.
It's not like you're cutting tofu.
Based on everything I read about you guys,
everyone's said it actually tastes like meat,
so my expectations are high.
Okay, all right.
Yeah, I mean, this is...
I mean, it's meat.
That's all right.
I mean, it totally tastes like grilled chicken
that I would make at home.
Taste is totally there.
I feel like the texture is like super close,
a little different.
Is that fair?
It's more tender texture, tender fibers.
Yup.
So what we've done is different types of textures.
We can make thicker fibers,
but this one comes in a much more tender, more moist,
and tender fibers, so yeah.
That's delicious. Yeah, well done.
But you, otherwise, you were gonna be a doctor,
I mean, for rest of your life.
Yeah, I practiced as a cardiologist for 10 years.
I think the calling was always there from as a child.
I really wanted to be able to make a meaningful change
or a difference in the world.
And I couldn't think of a much better way
of using my skill sets to say if we can use science
and technology we're using to grow food,
that could save billions of humans and trillions of animals.
And I felt like I could continue practicing cardiology
for another 30 years and save two or 3,000 lives.
But if this works, my gosh,
like it just literally would be a giant leap for humanity.
And walking away from cardiology was not easy.
And my mom and dad had, my mom more than my dad,
had a reaction of like, "You can't walk away from that.
You worked so hard from it
and you're doing really well."
But they also saw from I was little
how much I cared about meat and how it came to the table
and running behind my dad and playing with all the animals.
They immediately got it.
And my dad was an incredibly supportive,
the kindest person that I've known.
The only shirt he would wear for the last five years
is a shirt that I sent him, said, hey,
we used to be called Memphis Meats,
and then he always used to wear that shirt.
Twist of fate with COVID,
my dad passed away last year. Oh, shit, yeah.
My dad was gonna be here for the opening.
Yeah.
So that's why it's emotional.
Yeah. Yeah, no, no, no, I understand.
Well, I mean,
it's about as impressive a thing as you can do, right,
to shake up something this dramatic.
UPSIDE's technology is admirable and impressive.
The company, though, still faces a couple of major tests.
First, the FDA has to approve this type of cell-based meat.
And second, consumers actually have to want it
when they walk down supermarket aisles.
Let's talk about the price for a moment.
When you guys started, I mean, I think-
We were at $18,000.
18,000 for how much?
For a pound.
For a pound of meat.
So what has been the curve down over time?
So I'd say we've lowered it by about three orders
of magnitude by about 1,000x.
Okay.
And so that brings us into the territory
of being able to say we can do premium meat pricing
as we start getting ready for producing meat at scale.
10, $20 a plate.
When you talk about just one chicken breast or so,
or a chicken tender, it's gonna be under a $5.
This is a lot of progress in five years,
five or six years.
But there is a camp of people
who think this just cannot be done economically.
So we're standing on a track record
of being able to question the impossible
and keep moving beyond that.
What I'm telling our own team
that's literally broken nearly every barrier
people said we couldn't do in the last five years, right,
every single one that we are talking about today
was a much higher barrier five years ago.
The investors that are coming in here recognize
that this is a long arc.
And in order to create the kind
of change you're talking about,
this is gonna take five years plus, 10 years plus.
We are set up at a very interesting moment in history
where the trends of consumers, the current generation,
are all asking questions about where's our food coming from
and we want to demand a much better way
of bringing food to the table.
The current meat production is 750 billion pounds.
That's about 70 billion animals.
Now that demand is approximately doubling.
Let's say by 2050, we need to have 150 billion animals
on the planet to produce meat enough
for everybody's demands.
And it's very clear.
There not enough space. There's not enough water.
And we cannot afford to have the level
of greenhouse gas emissions and runoffs
that come from that much amount of animals.
If we are successful and the field is successful,
it's just an enormous opportunity.
It's game over for many of the problems we're talking about.