Senior Food Scientist

Company hosts "Freedom of Food" pop-up event featuring UPSIDE's cultivated chicken in Miami, FL before the statewide ban took effect on July 1, 2024BERKELEY, Calif., July 1, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, cultivated meat was officially banned in Florida. Days before this ban took effect, UPSIDE Foods, the leading cultivated meat company, hosted a "Freedom of Food" pop-up event on The Annex rooftop in Miami on June 27. The event celebrated and advocated for food freedom and innovation that can help build a better future. It also marked the first time cultivated meat was available for the public to taste free of charge.UPISDE Foods' CEO and Founder, Uma Valeti, speaking to the guests of the “Freedom of Food” pop-up event Chef Mika Leon cooking UPSIDE Foods' cultivated chickenAt UPSIDE Foods' "Freedom of Food" pop-up, guests enjoyed delicious cultivated chicken prepared and served by renowned Miami chef, restaurateur, and TV personality Mika Leon. Chef Mika Leon crafted delicious tostadas featuring UPSIDE cultivated chicken, prepared a la plancha con sazón, garnished with avocado, chipotle crema, beet sprouts, and fresh lime zest. This culinary experience was complemented by drinks from Miami mixologist Gio Gutierrez."We believe that cultivated meat is essential for the future of food, and people should have the right to choose what they eat," said Dr

Join UPSIDE Foods in Miami on Thursday, June 27 to taste cultivated chicken before it's banned in FloridaBERKELEY, Calif., June 20, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- With Florida's impending ban on cultivated meat set to take effect on July 1, 2024, UPSIDE Foods, the world's leading cultivated meat company, is hosting a one-night-only pop-up to celebrate the future of food and the importance of food freedom. The event will feature renowned Miami chef, restaurant owner and TV personality, Mika Leon, alongside mixologist Gio Gutierrez. It will be open to the public for free on a first-come, first-served basis, offering Floridians their first and last chance to taste cultivated meat before it's banned in the state.UPSIDE Foods was the first company to introduce a cultivated meat product to the US market following regulatory clearances from FDA and USDA. UPSIDE believes that cultivated meat is an important part of our food future in Miami, Florida, and beyond - and that Floridians should have the right to choose what meat they eat.Cultivated meat, grown directly from animal cells, has the potential to help meet the world's growing demand for meat in a way that's more safe, humane and sustainable than conventional methods. However, on May 1, 2024, Governor DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1084 into law, criminalizing the production and sale of cultivated meat in Florida.With the clock ticking on the ban, UPSIDE's "Freedom of Food" pop-up will give Floridians a chance to taste cultivated meat before the ban goes into effect on July 1. The event is being co-hosted with The Brick and Timber Collective, a leading real estate company with properties in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Miami.Delicious Details:When: Thursday, June 27, 2024 at 6:30 p.m

Singapore-based cultivated seafood startups UMAMI Bioworks and Shiok Meats are in talks about a proposed merger in which UMAMI will acquire assets from Shiok to accelerate its scaleup plans and broaden its product pipeline.The deal is likely the first of many in the nascent cultivated meat and seafood space given the challenging funding environment, said UMAMI founder and CEO Mihir Pershad, who will head up the newly unified company as CEO, with a board of directors that will include investors Hatch Blue and Aqua-Spark.He told AgFunderNews: “We’ve been party to discussions on a few different opportunities of this sort, so I think we’ll see more consolidation in the industry. In this case, this is a stock deal for us to acquire all of Shiok’s assets.“This made sense for us because UMAMI’s focus is on endangered species of fish that are not easily farmed sustainably [such as eel and grouper], so we saw a lot of strategic alignment with Shiok’s work on crustaceans such as shrimp, crab and lobster.“This is an opportunity to expand our portfolio and acquire assets that will help us scale up our novel process more rapidly to 200-liter technical demonstration scale this year, because Shiok has already built some of the hardware we would need.”He added: “I think Shiok [which has raised more than $30 million since 2018 from investors including Aqua-Spark] couldn’t see a clear path to raise the larger amount of capital that would be needed to hit the next phase, whereas our structure, because we’re b2b, is more asset light, and so that has given us a clearer path to move forward without needing that large raise everyone is struggling to get at the moment.”‘There’s going to need to be a lot more capital invested to really scale this industry’In general, said Pershad, “There’s going to need to be a lot more capital invested to really scale this industry, and you have to figure out where that’s coming from. From governments? From private equity? From traditional industry? For those players [big meat and seafood companies] there has to be a story that’s big enough, and offering a single product, single species, doesn’t fit the way most of them do business, so I think there’s opportunity here for us to build a broader platform spanning multiple species.”There are a few other players looking at cultivated crustaceans including US-based Cultured Decadence (acquired by UPSIDE Foods in early 2022) and Korea-based CellMEAT, noted Pershad, “But crustaceans are a tough nut to crack. From our point of view, we don’t expect these [crustacean cell lines acquired from Shiok] to turn into products tomorrow, but I think it’s hard to talk about sustainable production of endangered seafood species without talking about crustaceans.”Asked what assets UMAMI Bioworks will be acquiring, he said: “Some of the [Shiok] team is joining us so there’s a combination of know-how plus process IP around development of crustacean cell lines.”Asked whether Shiok Meats’ cofounder and CEO Dr. Sandhya Sriram would be staying on at the new company (which will still be called UMAMI Bioworks), Pershad said: “Right now, she and I are working together on the transition and then in terms of what the full management team will look like, we will announce that once the deal is formally closed.”Dr. Sriram—who penned a lengthy LinkedIn post last year outlining some of the challenges of running a startup in a completely new space—added: “I have always believed in consolidation to progress a novel industry like ours.”‘We have the tech, but we have to partner with food companies’Speaking to us in January after unveiling plans to build a cultivated meat facility in the Kulim Hi-Tech Park in Malaysia with Cell AgriTech, Pershad said: “I think a few years ago investors got caught up in the idea of a thing that seemed like it should exist, without necessarily building a philosophy about how it might come to exist in the world in a real way.“It led to a lot of investments before they started picking up on things that were probably obvious from the start around capex issues and exit scenarios,” added Pershad, who has a variety of backers from Japanese seafood giant Maruha Nichiro to early stage VC investors such as Better Bite Ventures, but has also secured $2m+ in non-dilutive funding including a SIIRD [Singapore Israel Industrial R&D Foundation] grant with Israeli cultivated meat startup Steakholder Foods.He added: “Our view is that startups cannot be in the capex business