Changing the Way Meat is Made: An Interview with Amy Chen, COO of UPSIDE Foods

By Georgia Kossoff

Imagine (real) meat without animal farming. That’s what UPSIDE Foods did when they created the first FDA-approved cultivated meat product - meat grown directly from animal cells. We were thrilled to hear from Amy Chen, UPSIDE’s COO, to learn more about how this company could transform one of our highest-emission industries. 

About UPSIDE Foods and Cultivated Meat

Gigaton readers are familiar with the dire climate problems posed by the animal-based food industry - GHG emissions (~15% of our annual footprint!), deforestation, and water consumption. Not to mention the slaughter of ~70B+ animals annually and the human health risks posed by meat production.

Cultivated meat solves all 3 problems - environmental impact, animal welfare, and human health risks. It’s real meat (not plant-based, vegan, or vegetarian) grown in a facility from real animal cells, eliminating the need to raise and kill billions of animals for food.

Since we first featured UPSIDE in our plant-rich diets article, they became the first to receive the FDA greenlight for a cultivated meat product.  

Key takeaways

• The current meat system cannot scale to meet future demand, which is projected to double by 2050. At its current size, meat and ag represents 14-15% of GHG emissions and ⅓ of arable land and water. 

• Cultivated meat would solve for 3 of the major problems facing the industry: environmental impact, animal welfare, and human health from foodborne illnesses. 

• Cultivated meat could solve for consumers that want / need to continue eating meat. For many, changing dietary habits is hard. Cultivated meat would take the burden off the consumer, making it possible to eat meat without the same environmental impact. Transparency and education will be key to converting consumers.  

• UPSIDE receiving the FDA green light for cultivated meat was a watershed moment for the industry at large - and a tremendous signal to consumers on the safety of cultivated products. The next regulatory hurdle will be completing the process with USDA and creating a framework for future cultivated products both in the US and globally.

• UPSIDE is focused on technical scale-up and supply chain buildout to move down the cost curve and keep pace with the rapid trajectory of demand for meat. 

• A portfolio approach is needed to sufficiently reduce the environmental impact of our meat system. Vegetarian / flexitarian diets, plant-based alternatives, better-produced conventional meat, and cultivated products all have a role to play.

What we learned

[Interview responses condensed / paraphrased]

What inspired you to focus your career on climate? Why was UPSIDE the right company through which to tackle climate change?

I’ve always been passionate about impact through business - this notion of doing well by doing good. Impact-focused business captures its true creative potential - to not only generate sustainable growth over time but to be an engine for social impact. I was fascinated by that idea and looked throughout my career for ways to implement it.

When my career began, there weren’t well-defined paths to impact-driven business. I knew you could start a social enterprise or work for a nonprofit, but I took a non-traditional route by joining a large company - PepsiCo. The PepsiCo CEO at the time - Indra Nooyi - talked about performance with purpose - how you could create impact while driving the bottom line at the same time. I was inspired by the idea that an organization of that scale could do that - and also fascinated by the challenge of making it happen within the confines of a publicly traded company. 

My leap to UPSIDE from PepsiCo came at a perfect time. I wasn’t looking for a new role, but I had spent time during COVID reflecting on the impact I wanted to create in the world. Being in the food industry, I was very aware of the impact of food on climate, but it wasn’t until I really started digging into UPSIDE that I fully grasped the footprint conventional meat has on our food system.

It was a pretty risky move to jump from a Fortune 50 company to a pre-revenue startup. But I realized the bigger risk would be not jumping - not taking the opportunity to work on something that could be truly world-changing. Very few things about the meat industry wouldn’t be solved if cultivated meat became successful. How could I not want to wake up every day of my career trying to make the world a better place with this group of like-minded people?

A goal of The Gigaton is to shed light on carbon quantification, to help students understand which solutions will move the needle most. How do you think about quantifying the carbon reduction potential of UPSIDE and cultivated meat?

Zooming out, the impact of cultivated meat falls into 3 buckets: environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and human health. 

Starting with environmental - if you look at conventional meat today, there are two key issues: first, the amount of resources required to sustain the current system and second, the projected demand for meat in the future. By 2050, estimates indicate we will double the demand for meat - and it’s already an unbelievably massive industry, one that the planet is straining to support. We can’t double it, the math doesn’t add up. Meat and ag is ⅓ of arable land and water and 14-15% of all GHG emissions. 

Plus there’s the animal welfare impact - 70B land animals per year slaughtered for meat. And the human health impact - the millions of Americans and many, many morefold globally who get sick every year from foodborne illnesses like E. coli and salmonella. With cultivated meat, we have a much better handle on these microbes. 

So stepping back, it’s clear that the current, conventional meat system cannot scale with the same intensity of resources required today to meet the demand that is coming.

As someone who loves food (including meat) and grew up in the food industry, one of the most compelling aspects of cultivated meat is that we don’t have to ask people to make fundamental changes in their lives. We’ve seen a massive discrepancy where people indicate they will pay more, do things differently, revise their lifestyle - but ultimately, humans are creatures of habit. Thinking purely logically, the simplest solve would be to tell people to eat less meat. We’ve tried that - and that’s part of the solution - but it won’t get us where we need to go. The entire portfolio of eat less meat, plant-based alternatives, cultivated meat, and better conventional approaches to raising livestock is needed. It’s an ecosystem approach that will get us there as opposed to any one silver bullet. 

Since we wrote The Gigaton's article on plant-rich diets, UPSIDE became the first company to receive the FDA green light for cultivated meat. What does this mean for UPSIDE and the cultivated industry at large?

This is a watershed moment for the future of food. Skeptics thought cultivated meat would always be considered science fiction, that it would never get the green light, it would never scale. My sense is that this November 2022 announcement from the FDA dispelled a lot of those concerns. This is becoming real. What’s widely considered to be one of the most rigorous agencies in the world has taken a deep, multi-year, thoughtful look at our processes, our approach, our ingredients from tip to toe and agreed with our assessment that this is safe. It was a critical gate to allowing our industry to become a real industry. We know that when approaching innovations, consumers want to know first and foremost - is this safe? That’s why we’ve invested so much energy into transparency and collaborated with the FDA and USDA to ensure there’s publicly available information on how we bring cultivated meat to the table. 

What risks / challenges / roadblocks still remain for cultivated meat?

We think about the challenges facing the industry as falling into 3 areas. 

The first is regulation - we have this amazing green light from the FDA, but it’s just the first step. We need to complete the rest of the regulatory process for USDA and then ensure that this is both setting up a framework more broadly for future cultivated meat and seafood in the US and globally creating an environment where regulators are comfortable and can move forward.  

The second is consumer - I love consumers, but they’re an enigma. All the right pre-cursors are there. There’s broad awareness around climate change and the impact our individual choices can have on the planet - so much more now than 10, 20, 30 years ago. And there’s also a lot more openness to innovation. If you think about digitally native generations, they grew up with phones in their pocket and had technology seamlessly woven into their lives. The idea that science and technology could be part of solving some of our biggest problems, including food, is not a shocking, foreign concept. Even so, there’s demand for transparency, visibility, and understanding. So our challenge with consumers is explaining how and why you should care about cultivated meat. We have to demystify and normalize it and allow consumers to organically understand how a choice as simple as what kind of meat they buy can be part of a revolution that changes the world. There’s a process there that starts with explaining how we make cultivated meat. We have our EPIC (Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center) here in the Bay Area that is full of glass windows, which is very unusual for a food processing facility. The premise is that consumers want to know. I love the irony that no slaughterhouse would open up their doors and frame it with glass, but at UPSIDE we love for people to see the future of food. 

And the third challenge is technical. We have made tremendous progress in the last 8 years, doing proof-of-concept and scientific development that people thought was not possible. Can you actually grow cells into meat and does it taste good? Can you do that at a scale that makes sense commercially? Our answer is yes to all of those in terms of the fundamental proof-of-concept questions, but we still have to scale up the ecosystem. We need to work with partners to develop the right supply chain and infrastructure to scale with us - and ultimately, to scale with the demand for meat. Our current facility is operating at thousands of liters, which is fantastic. But what does it take to get to hundreds of thousands of liters, tens of millions of pounds - and to price points that are compelling? That broad journey of technical scale-up, buildout of the supply chain ecosystem, and continuing to move down the cost curve is something we are laser-focused on.

So if you think about those 3 categories of challenges, it’s a lot, but it’s also something we are fully and deeply committed to. And there’s nothing in there that I look at and say, “that’s not possible”. It will be a tremendous amount of hard work but we have a team that’s incredibly talented and passionate about making it happen.

Is UPSIDE recruiting? What kind of talent would be most valuable?

Yes! We have many open roles for both internships and full-time on our careers page. 

And finally, the question we ask in every interview: what gives you hope in the climate crisis?

I’m excited about how much awareness and passion there is for solving climate change issues. We have moved as a civilization beyond head-in-the-sand towards a sense of the real urgency of the problem. That is always a good recipe for human ingenuity and innovation. When people recognize that there’s a crisis, it always takes us a little longer than it should to get there, but when we do I have full faith and confidence in our ability to create solutions. 

Consumers are now understanding the connection between the very mundane, ordinary choices that we make on a daily basis and how that ties into these massive, world-changing issues like climate change. I’m excited that with cultivated meat and other evolving solutions, we’re able to give consumers an easy choice. Whether it’s electric vehicles or cultivated meat - we allow people to fundamentally meet their needs while joining a revolution to change the world. When we can make the right choice the easy choice, I have full faith people will make the right and the easy choice. 

When things are aligned for that flywheel to work, magic will happen. It won’t be overnight, but consumers are excited, innovators and entrepreneurs are dedicating their lives to it, and increasingly there are investors who can fuel that initial innovation capital. So we have a pretty magic recipe coming together that I think will drive a tremendous amount of impact and change.