(long) Bloomberg / Lab-Grown Chicken / lots of exaggeration and lies, as of now .............................
Bloomberg
Businessweek
December 14, 2023
The Biggest Problem With Lab-Grown Chicken Is Growing the Chicken
Venture-backed startups such as Upside Foods have promised cultivated chicken as the solution to the meat problem. If only the solution made sense.
By Deena Shanker and Priya Anand
Ten years ago at a press event in London, a Dutch scientist, a Chicago-based food writer and an Austrian researcher shared a single $330,000 beef patty. The burger was the world’s most serious attempt at lab-grown meat, made by taking cells from a cow and cultivating them in the lab. (There had previously been a goldfish-filets-for-astronauts experiment and frog steaks as “bioart.”) It had taken six weeks for Mark Post, the Dutch scientist and professor, to grow 20,000 muscle fibers in trays and vials. Once complete, these tiny ropes of muscle tissue were removed by hand and pressed into a single hamburger.
Onstage, Post unveiled the disk of pink flesh. A well-known chef seared the 5-ounce patty as an audience of journalists watched. The aroma was “subtle but unmistakably meaty,” according to the Washington Post. The taste “wasn’t unpleasant,” Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food, later told NBC News, noting in another interview that the mouthfeel was beef-like. “It did have that kind of density that was familiar.”
Post said he expected to see cultivated meat in supermarkets in about a decade, in no small part bolstered by Mosa Meat BV, the company he would co-found three years later. (Today, despite having raised about $105 million, Mosa is still only inching closer to serving at tasting events in the Netherlands, where it’s based.) This wouldn’t be the first industry to grow animal cells in a laboratory -- biopharma companies have been doing it for decades to make vaccines and other biological products -- but this marked the start of a new way to make food. Silicon Valley, as it does, ran with the idea. It was as ambitious as it was outlandish: Most of the world’s 8 billion people eat meat, but it’s bad for the environment and obviously for animals. Rather than persuade carnivores to give up their favorite meal, why not just grow it in a lab?
In the years since, Upside Foods Inc. has become the industry’s biggest player. The year after opening as Memphis Meats in 2015, the self-described world’s first cultivated-meat company ran an Indiegogo campaign to raise $100,000. “Our process is simple,” the pitch video explains: Take some cells from an animal (a cartoon shows a living cow), identify the “self-renewing cells” so they’ll reproduce more, feed them in brewery tanks, and “Voilà! Delicious protein-packed meat.” In a video featured on Business Insider, the startup’s vegan cardiac-surgeon co-founder and chief executive officer, Uma Valeti, presented a lab-grown meatball and diagrammed the process on a whiteboard, showing how cells from a “Happy Pig!” could eventually become bacon. “The greenhouse gas emissions from our process is 90% less than what traditional animal agriculture would cause,” he said, referring to an industry responsible for 14.5% of all human-made climate-changing pollution, with beef as the worst offender. The startup showed a slide forecasting an uninterrupted path to mass market: It would get to Whole Foods by 2020 and Costco by 2021. It blew past its fundraising goal.
Nothing hit the shelves, but the promises did get bolder. In 2017, Valeti introduced his company’s lab-grown chicken strip and said it had made duck, too. Even without commercial-grade products or obvious consumer demand, investor money rolled into the sector. There were 27 cultivated-meat companies in 2018, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank for alternative proteins. It tallied 156 companies by the end of 2022 and said the industry had raised $2.78 billion. Startups said they would make everything from shrimp and pork to the Asian delicacy of a fish swim bladder, tiger meat, even breast milk. Upside’s biggest rival, vegan egg startup Eat Just Inc., said it was working on wagyu beef and foie gras. Earlier this year the Australian company Vow created a woolly mammoth meatball in a stunt to get out its message that cultured meat could help solve the climate crisis. “Let’s eat ourselves out of extinction,” the website says. Investors in cell-based meats now include major meat companies Tyson Foods and Cargill; tech billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos; actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher; and state-owned investors such as the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings.
For consumers, lab-grown meat also offered something Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods burgers couldn’t: actual meat. Upside said its products could also be genetically edited, with fewer bad fats and more healthy ones. Such innovation could save “billions of human lives,” Valeti said on a 2021 podcast.
Yet after eight years of toiling away in labs, raising more than $600 million and getting US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Agriculture signoffs to sell its first product, Upside has little to show for itself. The company said its current plant would make more than 50,000 pounds of product each year and has recently announced plans to build a 187,000-square-foot commercial meat plant. But at the moment it’s selling only a pound of chicken a month -- meat that would underwhelm the average diner lining up for a roast bird at Zuni Café in San Francisco or a Nashville hot chicken joint. The company, in a letter from its attorney to Bloomberg Businessweek, says plans for scaling up have been an evolution saddled with “realities and complexities of doing something that has never been done before. Innovation rarely happens in a straight and continuous line.”
The dream is moist, meaty flesh self-multiplying ad infinitum in high-tech, stainless steel cell-growing chambers. But according to internal company documentation and eight former employees, most of whom requested anonymity because they don’t have permission to discuss confidential information, Upside at the moment is actually growing just minuscule numbers of chicken skin-type cells in small plastic bottles, then scraping them out gram by gram to compress and mold them into a single forkful of flesh. This labor-intensive chicken has higher levels of cholesterol and lead than the real thing, publicly available company documentation shows. Even if that sounds remotely desirable, some scientists say the whole energy-intensive endeavor may actually be worse for the environment, especially with chicken, which has the smallest carbon footprint of anything at the local butcher. All of which points to this question: Why exactly are we chasing lab-grown chicken?
For Valeti, cultured meat was always about saving the animals. A 2020 Jane Goodall-narrated documentary on Upside, produced by vegan DJ Moby and Upside board member Kyle Vogt (the now former CEO of embattled self-driving car company Cruise LLC), follows Valeti to his hometown of Vijayawada in southeast India. When he was 12, he attended a party with dancing and eating in the front of the house, but the meat was coming from a slaughter in the back. “There was a birthday on one side, and there was a death day on the other side,” Valeti said. He later moved to the US, eventually becoming a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic and then director of the cardiovascular imaging department at the University of Minnesota Medical Center.
At work, Valeti was injecting stem cells into patients’ hearts to help regrow muscles after heart attacks, and he began to wonder whether cells could also be used to grow animal tissue to turn into meat. He reasoned that he could probably save only about 3,000 lives over 30 years as a heart surgeon, but with cultivated meat he could save more humans and trillions of animals killed for food. In 2015 he and two partners, stem cell biologist Nicholas Genovese and restaurateur Will Clem, started a company to give cultivated meat a try. (Clem left shortly thereafter.)
Upside’s promises for its cultivated meat have always been among the most ambitious. Other startups realized early how technically challenging and expensive it would be to make a 100% cultivated center-of-plate slab of meat, so they were developing hybrids made of cell-based meat and plant-based filler. Valeti, however, wanted to “do the hardest things first,” as he recently wrote on his company’s blog. In 2019, SCiFi Foods set out to make ground beef and burgers made from 10% to 20% cultivated meat, but SCiFi co-founder and CEO Joshua March says his company kept hitting fundraising walls as venture capitalists got swept up by the pitches of whole cuts. “We were like, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ But investors were being sold the dream,” March says.
Upside often touted the breakthroughs it was on the verge of making. In 2016 it told the Wall Street Journal it was already discussing its product with some of the country’s biggest food distributors. It wasn’t until 2019 that the FDA and USDA agreed to joint regulatory authority over cultivated meat. The FDA would reign over the process of growing cells into meat, and then, at the point of harvest, jurisdiction would move to the USDA. Upside had hired former FDA regulator Eric Schulze and put him in charge of regulatory affairs, the person who would submit the company’s dossier for clearance. Bringing him on board was “as close as possible to an ace in the hole,” Valeti told Fast Company earlier this year.
In November 2022, Upside finally got to bask in the euphoria of a regulatory clearance. It became the first cultivated-meat company to receive a “no questions letter” from the FDA, meaning the agency accepted Upside’s conclusion that its product was safe. Eat Just received its FDA clearance a few months later, and both companies got over the final hurdle, USDA approval, on the same day in June. They each had their first restaurant deals already lined up: Eat Just at Chef José Andrés’ China Chilcano in Washington, DC, and Upside at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn, next door to three-Michelin-star Atelier Crenn, where every month 16 people could eat about 70 calories’ worth of Upside’s chicken as part of a $150 tasting menu. (Reviews agreed, it tasted like chicken.) Upon receipt of the landmark FDA letter, Valeti told Bloomberg News that Upside was set to go commercial. “We have a process that is ready to scale.”
But Upside was running into problems. The gleaming row of patented 500-liter bioreactors affectionately nicknamed “Elvis,” which Valeti loved to parade visitors by, were not actually making the filets, as the Wall Street Journal first reported in April. The machines, the key to Upside’s plans to grow meat cells at scale, were a contamination nightmare, former employees told Bloomberg. They were too complex to clean adequately between experimental batches, eventually leading the company to abandon them entirely -- though they were still shown to visitors as making meat, including to CBS in July. In an Instagram post that same month of a tour for contest winners before the first serving at Bar Crenn, Harvard University bioethicist and vegan influencer Erin Sharoni shows the cultivators and says, “Those are actually the bioreactors where the cells are grown. Everything is stainless steel.” (Upside told Businessweek that the bioreactors weren’t too hard to clean and could run successfully, but “the realities of operating these cultivators at scale did not meet our productivity and cost targets.”)
Samir Qurashi, dreaming of chicken-growing bioreactors in every home, joined Upside in January 2021 after 10 years of working in drug lab research. When he interviewed at the company to become a scientific researcher, he says he was told there would be a fully functional pilot plant. Under the startup’s co-founder and lead scientist, Genovese, Qurashi had the extremely challenging task of procuring cells from live crustaceans -- a job that always led to their untimely demise, costing two or three animals their life each week. “Literally, people cried when they saw me,” Qurashi says of his colleagues.
But the anguish was worth it. Until it wasn’t: Less than three months after Qurashi joined, Genovese was fired on April Fools’ Day at a Starbucks. (Genovese’s “role at the company has changed to better align with his personal career goals and our longer-term business needs,” Upside said to the food news website the Counter in a statement at the time. Genovese declined to comment.) A disillusioned Qurashi followed his boss out the door.
So more than 18 months later, when Qurashi heard Upside had passed the FDA hurdle, he wasn’t exactly rooting for it. (Upon his departure, the company accused him of stealing proprietary information based on security camera footage. Qurashi denies any theft and says he was throwing away boxes that had housed dead crabs.) Still, he was a scientist, and reading through the now public dossier, he was in disbelief. “The first thing that stuck out to me was the date, October 2021,” he told Businessweek. Qurashi didn’t work on the chicken, but based on what he understood when he left that April, the descriptions in the FDA submission of its capabilities were highly unlikely. “You can’t reinvent the wheel in six months.”
Qurashi soon found himself in a two-hour Zoom meeting with representatives from the FDA and USDA; four months later he lodged a 257-page written complaint to the former. The dossier the FDA had signed off on, Qurashi wrote them, was “the most embarrassing ‘scientific’ manuscript in the history of modern technological innovation.”
Take the description of the cell lines, a foundation of any cultivated-meat company’s work. There are basically three kinds of animal cells that cultivated-meat companies try to work with: fibroblasts, adipocytes and myoblasts. Fibroblasts grow easily, making them popular in biopharma as well as the labs of cellular meat companies. But when it comes to food, they’re not what most people would consider delectable. They can develop into fat and other cells, but they’re most known for their role in making connective tissue, like cartilage or what’s found in skin. Adipocytes are the fat, so some companies are homing in on these alone, to mix with plant proteins. But carnivores want muscle meat, and to get that, companies need myoblasts, which are the trickiest to immortalize and grow.
Immortalization, Upside wrote in its dossier, is key. A regular cell extracted from an animal, known as a primary cell, won’t replicate forever. Eventually it stops, entering a phase known as senescence. If a company wants to grow significant amounts of meat and doesn’t want to have to keep taking cells from live animals or embryos, it needs to turn primary cells into immortal ones. Those were likely the “self-renewing cells” Upside had originally touted, and they’re usually obtained either through genetic modification or a more difficult process of natural selection, which essentially requires growing cells until you find some that have mutated into immortality on their own.
In its FDA dossier, which was meant to lay out the safety of the product the company would go to market with, Upside said it had used genetically engineered immortalized fibroblasts and a naturally immortalized myoblast cell line, the stuff that would grow into real muscle meat. Qurashi knew about the immortalized fibroblasts, but he seriously doubted that in the six months since he left, the company had successfully created a naturally immortalized myoblast cell line to be used in production -- and generated the data. “It’s next to near impossible,” he says, figuring that Upside must have been using the fibroblasts alone. He also noticed the drawing in the submission showing the cultivation process with two possible final steps: plastic bottles or steel bioreactors. Qurashi knew from his short time there that the steel vessels didn’t work reliably for the product in the dossier, even for the fibroblasts; only the one-time-use bottles did. Other former employees who spoke to Businessweek agree with Qurashi’s descriptions. (In a statement to Businessweek, Upside says that Qurashi worked at the company for only 71 days, didn’t have direct access to commercialization work and had a “clear bias.” It says the dossier was written solely as a safety assessment and “should not be used to evaluate the state of our manufacturing capabilities.” Upside also says it has “many myoblast lines” and that the cultivators “were in use at the time of the dossier submission process.”)
Turns out Qurashi -- who says he wants the industry to succeed -- was right, at least as far as how Upside is making its chicken at Bar Crenn, the only place where the company’s meat is available. The morsels of chicken being served there aren’t made inside steel bioreactors. They don’t contain myoblasts, or muscle cells, either, the company said in response to questions from Businessweek, noting that it selected the fibroblasts to deliver a “safe, high-quality cultivated meat product” with “the best sensory, taste and compositional profile.” The company is growing them in small, single-use plastic bottles, in amounts so piddling that a single night at Bar Crenn, a “certified plastic-free” establishment, according to its website, could require the use of more than a hundred such bottles, says Qurashi and others familiar with the process. The chicken doesn’t even include immortalized cells; it’s made of primary fibroblast cells that at some point will stop replicating and at best grow only into connective tissue. This means that to make more chicken, scientists will eventually have to go back to an embryo and remove more cells, a process that, even when it works, also kills the embryo. (Bar Crenn didn’t provide comment.)
It’s an admission that has left experts both confused and amused. “I scratch my head,” says David Kaplan, director of the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture. “Why would you ever use primary cells?”
Upside’s now former regulatory head, Schulze, says the company outlined both small and large-scale production in its dossier and was therefore upfront that this was one of its processes. But in the document, even Schulze describes primary cells as “not conducive to large-scale culture,” emphasizing that “immortalization must be induced.” Biotech veteran Paul Wood says the method Upside is using is hardly sophisticated science. “They’re doing the easiest thing you can do in a cell culture -- a cell line that grows very well, technology like roller bottles that has been around for decades and a media that is pretty standard,” he says. “A reasonably trained technician could do it.” (Upside says that it’s doing more than “simply growing cells.”) Huw Hughes, whose firm works with companies in vaccine research and development, is perplexed by the inefficiency of Upside’s approach, especially considering all it’s making is chicken -- the cheapest of meats. “I can’t see how this method could ever be economic,” Hughes says. “You might as well just let the chicken embryo grow and get real chicken meat.”
Then there’s the growth media. Just like cells inside a body, cells outside a body need to be fed to grow. In cultivated meat, when the goal is growing cells into food that competes with a cheap commodity, the growth media takes on even more importance. The first choice, fetal bovine serum, is both astronomically expensive and, because of its source, ethically dubious for an industry built on the premise of removing animals from the food system. (It’s made from blood extracted from the beating hearts of calf fetuses still in the womb of cows headed for slaughter. The fetuses do not survive.) When that first cultivated burger appeared a decade ago, part of the reason it was so expensive was because of the media: It used fetal bovine serum. By now a number of established companies say they have replaced that with non-animal-derived components and are finally able to claim their processes are “slaughter-free.” In December 2021, Upside announced it had developed a “breakthrough cell feed that is free of animal components” for some of its products. But for its Bar Crenn chicken, it’s using adult bovine serum instead of fetal. The company is also using chicken serum to supply other nutrients, and in another part of the process outside of the media, it uses gelatin, which comes from pigs.
All of this is adding up to a very unappetizing piece of meat. For its FDA submission, Upside also tested its products for lead and other heavy metals, as well as for its nutritional profile. Some samples had as much as 20 times more lead than conventional ground chicken and about 8 times as much cholesterol as conventional chicken. Experts were split over the lead levels: Some said they were far too low to be of concern; others emphasized that there are no safe levels of lead. “Seems strange and contrary to their presumed goal of protecting consumer health,” says Dwayne Holmes, director of responsible research and innovation in Europe at cultivated-meat nonprofit New Harvest, of the FDA’s allowance. The FDA, which had recently introduced a campaign to reduce the presence of contaminants such as lead in food, told Businessweek that it expected the company would lower the lead levels. “The FDA remains committed to supporting innovation in food technologies while always maintaining as our first priority the safety of the foods available to US consumers,” an FDA spokesperson says. In October, Upside sent the agency a letter to note that it had reduced the lead levels to, on average, about five times as high as ground chicken, an amount, the company later wrote in a letter to Businessweek, that’s comparable to levels found in spinach and grape juice. Holmes was unconvinced by the follow-up, saying it didn’t provide enough information about the samples or the change.
Upside Chief Operating Officer Amy Chen says its chicken is safe and the lead is far below FDA guidelines. Cholesterol, she says, is “not a nutrient of concern,” and pointed out that total fat and saturated fat levels were lower than conventional counterparts. She also says that the existing cell line “can enable more than 30 years of production at current levels.” Using the methods being employed at Bar Crenn, over the next three decades, Upside can produce roughly 12 pounds of chicken a year. (Upside now says Chen wasn’t referring only to its Bar Crenn process but wouldn’t specify how much it could actually produce annually over the next three decades.)
“Chicken’s a strategically bad idea, and that’s why we didn’t do it”
In September more than 1,000 lab-grown meat believers, including founders, scientists, government officials and investors, gathered at the Good Food Institute conference in San Francisco. Their faith had been tested of late. New Age Eats, a cultivated-pork maker in California, had started building a pilot plant but shut down in March. Singapore’s Shiok Meats, which had set out to make cell-based crustaceans, laid off half its staff and shifted its focus away from seafood to red meat. Finless Foods raised $34 million to build a plant in late 2022, but then laid off workers earlier this year.
Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute, remained upbeat about the industry’s challenges, while noting that after collectively raising almost $3 billion, it still needs more cash to see if it’s “viable.” “Our hope,” he says, “is that we will be able to convince lots of governments to put lots of money into funding all of the critical technology.” Governments in Singapore and Israel have heeded that call, but so far, very little public money in the US has gone to cultivated meat. Companies have spent millions lobbying the federal government. Although the USDA is working on labeling rules, and there are grants and loans some companies may be eligible for, the agency isn’t interested in earmarking a lot of money for such a nascent industry. “We don’t do that kind of investment,” US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack told Businessweek.
Upside, however, says it’s using part of the $400 million it raised last year to fund Rubicon, its new factory outside of Chicago, which the company says will have immediate capacity to make “millions of pounds of cultivated meat products.” Instead of their original plan for a full-flesh chicken “filet,” the goal is now for part-cell, part-plant “ground meat” products, not unlike the ones smaller startups have been working on all along. This will require a different process and therefore a second FDA clearance on a dossier it says it’s already submitted; the Bar Crenn chicken will become just another showpiece, alongside the Elvis bioreactors. (An Upside spokesperson says the company led with its whole-textured chicken because it “laid the foundation for future products, and translated a transformative vision into a product that consumers could see, taste and be inspired by.” In an additional letter from a spokesperson after publication, the company said it “is proud to have established a high-watermark with our whole textured chicken product that’s being served today. We will continue to be pioneers addressing the challenge of sustainably feeding a growing global population while minimizing environmental impact, and remain steadfast in our goal of bringing delicious and safe cultivated meat to consumers.”)
Tanks meant for cultivating meat in Upside’s Emeryville, California, plant now sit idle.
Lisa Feria, managing partner and CEO at Stray Dog Capital, one of the earliest Upside investors, concedes that Upside is falling behind initial expectations “to serve people en masse.” In November another investor, Ryan Bethencourt of Sustainable Food Ventures -- which lists more than a dozen cell-based portfolio companies -- offered a harsher diagnosis, predicting that 70% to 90% of cultivated-meat companies would “fail over the next year.” Some argue that it’s not the category but the choice of poultry that was Upside’s original miscalculation. Cultivated seafood company Wildtype, for example, is focused on cultivated salmon, in part because it’s such an expensive protein that getting to a competitive price will be much easier. “Chicken’s a strategically bad idea, and that’s why we didn’t do it,” co-founder Justin Kolbeck says.
But Tom Mastrobuoni, chief investment officer at Big Idea Ventures, who was on the Tyson team that invested in Upside in 2018, says the issues are more fundamental. “I’m not sure they [Upside] know how to scale yet,” he says, noting that this isn’t just a problem for Upside but for all cultivated-meat startups. “None of these companies really have a grasp of how to do it.” (Upside calls the assessment “unfounded and inaccurate.”) Eat Just, for its part, has been selling its cultivated chicken through pop-ups in Singapore since 2020, but it’s moved less than 5,000 pounds each year in a country that consumes more than 455 million pounds of chicken annually. After briefly serving it at Andrés’ China Chilcano, the company now says it plans to “resume production shortly.”
But even if companies such as Upside could figure out how to produce significant amounts of the stuff, it’s not looking like much of an environmental plus, either. Although plant-based meats are unquestionably better for the environment, studies looking at potential climate benefits from cultivated meat are increasingly pointing in the other direction. The traditional chicken that Upside aims to upend is the source of many ills -- including embarrassingly high rates of E. coli and salmonella contamination, water pollution and worker injuries -- but a climate change problem it is not. If anything, chicken is often considered a climate solution. Meanwhile, even with abundant renewable energy, cultivated chicken would still have about the same carbon footprint as the regular kind, according to a 2023 report by environmental researcher CE Delft with GFI. Earlier this year a headline-grabbing pre-print study from the University of California at Davis claimed cultivated meat could be worse than beef, too. GFI’s principal scientist was quick to push back, saying the study relied on “compounding errors in assumptions.” Wood, the biotech veteran, says all these life cycle assessments are problematic because all are “built on assumptions that can’t currently be tested.” But all note the energy intensity, underscoring that “it is not a sustainable solution.”
The long slog to slaughter-free meat is beginning to look like an even bigger miscalculation than plant-based, which at least put products in the hands of millions of consumers. As more research trickles in, scientists have become increasingly aware of the challenges of the technology, says Hanna Tuomisto of the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. Tuomisto, a professor of agricultural science, wrote the 2011 paper that formed the basis of Valeti’s early claims that Upside could produce meat with 90% lower emissions. But that study was based on a “simplified hypothetical” process, she says. “In the later studies, when we have considered production processes that are closer to the current commonly used practices, the environmental impacts have been higher,” she says. Making large masses of cells for processed-type meats may be feasible, she says, but scaling whole cuts like Valeti has long promised is a different story. “I have been waiting now for 15 years,” she says. “I’m getting more pessimistic all the time.”
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