When cardiologist Uma Valeti left a job as a medical school professor to launch a startup attempting to grow meat from cells in bioreactors in 2015, it was the biggest risk of his professional life. “Nearly everyone I spoke to said, Don’t do this,” he says. Most people who were paying attention thought that the idea wasn’t feasible; many skeptics still think so. But his company, first called Memphis Meats, and now Upside Foods, says that it sees a clear path to making affordable meat that’s real–but animal-free.
Like others in the burgeoning space, the company has made samples of foods such as chicken breast grown from chicken cells. But it also just opened a large new production facility in the Bay Area city of Emeryville that will eventually make hundreds of thousands of pounds of products a year. “What we’re doing here is trying to start showing industrial scale,” says Valeti, the startup’s CEO.
If it can succeed, “cultivated” meat can make a difference on…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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