12/1/2023 0 Comments Whole foods gluten chicken nuggetsAccording to former and current employees at Upside, this process happens in a laboratory that doesn’t feature in the factory tours Upside gives to journalists and members of the public.įaced with the considerable challenge of growing whole-cut meat at scale, most cultivated meat companies have decided to focus on the more modest goal of brewing cells using cheaper, more established bioreactor technology more suited to producing ground products like chicken nuggets and burgers. Insiders say that Upside’s meticulously crafted fillets are instead the result of a process that is more arduous and unwieldy than using bioreactors: Employees grow thin sheets of tissue in small plastic flasks called roller bottles and combine them to create a larger hunk of chicken, an approach that is expensive and requires many hours of labor to produce even a small amount of meat. The huge bioreactors, those sources claim, simply aren’t capable of reliably brewing the sheets of tissue needed to form whole cuts of meat such as chicken fillets. In fact, sources say, the company’s flagship product-the juicy whole cuts of chicken served at Bar Crenn-are brewed, almost by hand, in tiny bottles. “This is the opposite of very closely guarded food innovations.”īut former and current employees say the Emeryville plant tells a misleading story of how Upside’s chicken is made. “We’re starting to show, from day one, what this whole industry is about,” Upside Foods cofounder and CEO Uma Valeti said in May 2022. The facility, Upside says, demonstrates to the world exactly how this novel meat is made. This factory-which WIRED visited in May 2022-is where Upside says it brews its cultivated chicken. They looked at neat rows of gleaming steel bioreactors, each one surrounded by a web of pipework. “The taste and the texture was incredible.”īefore their meal at Bar Crenn, Merino and the rest of the group toured Upside’s production facility across the Bay in Emeryville. “I thought it was delicious,” says Oscar Merino, one of the diners. For a nominal price of $1, they tucked into two pieces of a cultivated chicken fillet made by the California startup Upside Foods, one of only two companies cleared to sell cultivated meat in the US. They had won a competition to become the first customers in the US to eat cultivated meat-real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of a living animal. On July 1, five diners sat down at the counter of the Michelin-starred Bar Crenn in San Francisco for an unusual meal.
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