In September 2023, Upside Foods announced its plans to open a large cultivated meat plant in Glenview, Illinois. The 187,000-square-foot plant was slated to have an initial capacity of millions of pounds of bioreactor-brewed meat per year, which would make it one of the largest planned factories in the nascent cultivated meat industry. The company nicknamed the facility Rubicon, signifying “a point of no return” for cultivated meat production.
can reveal that Upside’s plans to build Rubicon have been put on hold and the company will instead focus on doubling its investment in its established facility in Emeryville before it continues work in Glenview. In an email seen by , Upside CEO Uma Valeti told employees that expanding operations at its Emeryville facility would cost “substantially less” than building the first phase of Rubicon, and that the company had been streamlining the way it operates and stopping non-critical work. The shift also means that roles of those who were focused specifically on the Illinois factory have been eliminated, and those employees received severance.
protects the confidentiality of its sources. Upside’s shift away from the Illinois plant is a “fairly natural response to what remains a pretty challenging funding environment,” says Anthony Chow, cofounder at cellular agriculture investment firm Agronomics, which is not an investor in Upside. With less funding available, startups will have to prove that they can generate meaningful revenues without laying out huge sums for new factories, he says.
investigation revealed that Upside’s textured chicken filets, which until recently it served at a series of monthly dinners at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, were not made in the large bioreactors within EPIC but instead were produced at a very small scale in two-liter roller bottles. While the funding climate for cultivated meat companies is still precarious, there are some signs that the industry is inching forward.