Upside Foods, a Berkeley, California-based cell-cultivated meat company racing to the public market, is boosting its product portfolio with the acquisition of a Wisconsin startup that makes cell-cultivated lobster, scallops and other crustaceans.
Cultured Decadence, based in Madison, launched in 2020 and has nine employees, all of whom will join Upside and assume the parent company’s branding as its facilities become Upside’s Midwest hub. Upside, formerly known as Memphis Meats, declined to share financial details of the acquisition.
Upside’s recently unveiled $50 million Emeryville, California, production plant, which it claims to be the most advanced in the world, will be able to produce Cultured Decadence’s products, the company said, in addition to its existing meat, poultry and seafood products. The Berkeley startup is quickly scaling production infrastructure along with other local cell-cultivated competitors such as Eat Just and Wildtype in anticipation of federal regulatory approval to begin selling to consumers, perhaps as early as this year.
Upside has raised more than $200 million in outside funding, including a $186 million Series B round in early 2020, giving it some of the deepest pockets among the ongoing funding bonanza for alternative protein. Major investors include John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, SoftBank Group and conventional meat giant Tyson Foods, the world's second largest processor of chicken, beef and pork.
Cultured Decadence has announced $1.6 million in funding to date, including from the state of Wisconsin (the first state-level funds directed to cellular agriculture) and other investors such as Bluestein Ventures and Madison's own gener8tor accelerator. The company's product uses the cells of shellfish to grow animal-free flesh that's also sans shell and organs.
Upside Foods CEO Uma Valeti described the acquired company's technology as “very promising” in a statement and also praised its employees as “passionate, smart individuals who want to make our favorite food a force for good.”
The Wisconsin company's co-founders, CEO John Pattison and chief scientific officer Ian Johnson, met in 2019 in San Francisco while working for Berkeley-based New Age Meats and Emeryville’s Finless Foods, respectively.
Pattison told Bloomberg in April “long-term, we want to make something that doesn’t exist…a 10-pound lobster tail that already has the butter infused into it,” and that it was aiming to have production capacity for public taste testing by spring 2022. The technology is still years away from the kind of scalability that the founders hope will make a dent in the global industry and end humans' over-reliance on depleted wild lobster fisheries.
As any adult will tell you between bites, lobster prices only grow more outrageously skyward as the years go on, the consequence of overfishing and human-propelled climate change, including warming oceans and acidification, leading to the new normal of the $34 lobster roll. An intriguing aspect of cell-cultivated lobster is that the already-accepted high prices could present a shorter path to price parity with the conventional product, in comparison with more relatively expensive cellular meat and poultry.
Upside Foods created the world’s first cell-cultured meatball in 2016 and first chicken and duck in 2017. Upside plans to go to market first with chicken — including a partnership with Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn, to put meat back on the menu at her world-famous French restaurant, Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco.
