UPSIDE Foods CEO details lab-made meat ‘grown from real chicken cells’
UPSIDE Foods Founder & CEO Uma Valeti joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the significance of the FDA's green light for scaling lab-grown meat as well as the outlook for pricing, retail distribution, and the cultivated meat industry.
Video Transcript
- 'Tis the season for eating. And when it comes to protein, the US consumes a lot of it. Americans now eat more than 220 pounds of meat per person per year compared to 193 pounds a year in the early 1980s. Well our next guest founded a company that's looking to disrupt the industry after just getting the green light from the FDA for its cultivated meat product.
Let's bring in UPSIDE Foods founder and CEO Uma Valeti. Also with us is Yahoo Finance's Brooke DiPalma. So welcome to you both. So obviously, I'm sure you're doing a victory lap at this point. How significant is this when it comes to the future of lab created needs?
UMA VALETI: First of all, it's great to be back here again. It's the biggest and the most exciting news that Upside has had since we founded the industry seven years ago. And it's also the one that's opening the door for the future of innovation and preserving the choice of eating real meat and not giving up what we've allowed for generations or thousands of years.
BROOKE DIPALMA: And right now, inflation is certainly taking a toll on American's wallets. Many flocking to pork and chicken with the cheaper prices there. I know that you're not quite at retail yet. But in this environment, how are you thinking about pricing and what price are you gauging here?
UMA VALETI: It's a great question. I mean, every big innovation or a bold initiative is going to take time to get to the ultimate goal. Our aspirational goal at the moment is to beat the conventional prices. But initially, we're going to start out with premium pricing when we come into the market, which we hope is really soon. And that's because we are on a small scale. Our labor force is really very highly educated and requires a lot of time to put together the product that we put on the market. But in time, we expect our products to be at parity with conventional meat but that's going to be 5 to 15 years away.
- And so with that said, the name of the game right now is really looking at restaurants then you're looking at retail. But when you get into retail, what supermarkets are you eyeing? Are you eyeing whole foods perhaps one of your backers? And when you think about the placement of these products, is it going to be next to impossible foods and beyond meat?
UMA VALETI: Oh, it's a great question. This is probably a good time to clarify to the audience that UPSIDE chicken or cultivated chicken is chicken grown from real animal cells. The only thing that's missing is raising and slaughtering an animal. But this is chicken cells that are growing into meat. So we expect it to be positioned in a supermarket or a grocery aisle right where meat products are sold whether it's frozen aisles or refrigerated or fresh. Not next to vegetarian products because this is not vegetarian.
- Uma, I've got a personal question here because I will admit that I like meat but I'm also very aware of the toll it takes on the environment. Whether it is the amount of water that's used for talking strictly beef, what it takes to grow all these chickens too. And I keep wondering, why not cut some of that out? I mean, lab grown meat, how are you want to define it? Why do we need to be growing meat out of animal cells? And what does that tell you about the demand? What that customer base is that people just can't give up those habits.
UMA VALETI: Yeah. Great question, Brooke. I mean, let me clarify that up front. Cultivated chicken at the scale we are at is not lab grown anymore. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was done in small labs but now, it's done at industrial scale as you can see behind me. These are industrial scale cultivators growing meat. And to answer the question of why eat meat at all. I think it's just part of us being deeply human.
Being human is equated for thousands of years with eating the most delicious most desired food in the center of it and that's meat. And that meat's always come from an animal-based source. And taking that away, I think has much more than logical implications. It's so deeply ingrained into our DNA in all our senses that it's unreasonable for us to expect that people will say they're willing to if given a choice give up the product they've loved for thousands of years and it's part of a tradition for families.
I think there will be a small group having said that will be convinced because of the environmental impact or animal welfare impact. That's going to be low single digit persons that will say they'll swear themselves off meat because they can't get behind how it's produced but not the vast majority of the world.
- Uma, following up on that. In terms of the mindset around cultivated meat. I mean, we know that Richard Branson is an investor. He's a Fed. Jimmy Fallon though, had some choice words when they set out. He called it disgusting. He hadn't tried it yet though at this point to be fair and you challenged him to try it. How do you get people over this mindset about cultivated meat when they already have cheaper alternatives that are already out there?
UMA VALETI: No, this is really why we're so excited about the FDA green light. The magical moment for anyone happens when they taste it. I think our senses are so well attuned to recognizing meat that once someone tastes it, they smell it, they see it being seared in front of them in the pan, they pull it apart with their own hands and see the texture and feel that aroma seeping into that. That's an undeniable magical moment. And that's really what I think Jimmy Fallon needs to experience as well as everybody else in the world who thinks, Oh, is this new? There could be an ick factor associated with it.
But ultimately, let's think about how the current food is coming to the table. No one one's opening their production facilities. We have glass doors in our facility. You could come and see how meat is made. And there is a significant ick factor if you actually look and see how meat comes to the table now. And I think with time and consumer education and really the magical moment of tasting, they're going to get over that hurdle.
- And just very quickly here. Right now, you have that facility. Right now, you're producing about 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat products per year. Give us a timeline here. Can we expect another facility to open up next year? And when can we see this on shelves?
UMA VALETI: It's a great question. So what we have here is called EPIC, Engineering Production and Innovation Center. It's got the capacity to produce up to 50,000 pounds but we are not producing it at that level because we've been waiting for the FDA greenlight to start production processes. But we're doing a lot of learning and continue to update our technology and it's moving at such a pace that we need an innovation center like this to continuously update not only the hardware and how the meat is made, but also the feed that we feed our animal cells.
And what we used in 2019 for equipment is already outdated. We're building new equipment. So that's what's happening here. And we're now in the process of looking for the right location to build a production facility that is about 50 times larger than EPIC and is capable of producing something in the range of 10 plus to 20 pounds million of product every year. And we are looking for it actively. And we hope that states will reach out to us to put our facility in their region.
- Well we look forward to following all of the progress there. UPSIDE Foods founder CEO Uma Valeti. Good to talk to you. And our thanks to Brooke DiPalma as well.
