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Lab-grown meat is closer to hitting shelves after the Department of Agriculture (USDA) granted approval to Berkeley, California-based startup Upside Foods’s cell-cultivated chicken this month.
The move comes after Upside was granted Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the product back in November, the first blessing of cultivated meat in the United States.
Bay Area startup Good Meat announced that it also secured USDA approval for its cultivated chicken, positioning it alongside Upside as one of the first two companies that could potentially sell cultivated meat in the United States.
It will be a while before cultivated meat is available on shelves. Both Good Meat and Upside have stated that their chicken will first be made available in restaurants before they arrive in supermarkets.
Although questions have been raised about the industry’s ability to scale long term, Upside already operates a 70,000-square-foot facility that can generate as much as 50,000 pounds of cultivated meat annually, but plans to eventually expand its production to 400,000 pounds per year, the Associated Press reported.
The alternative-protein industry isn’t limited to startups like Good Meat and Upside Foods. Legacy meat suppliers like Tyson, Perdue, Unilever, Nestlé, and Cargill also have made moves in the space, whether it’s developing their own alternative-protein divisions or investing in smaller startups.
For its part, Cargill was part of a $400 million Series C funding round in 2022 for Upside Foods, but also maintains an alternative-protein division led by Elizabeth Gutschenritter, who has been at the company for over 17 years. Gutschenritter, who serves as managing director of alternative-protein, told Tech Brew last year that Cargill’s status as a legacy player does not inhibit it from investing in emerging technologies as they spring up.
“Cargill is a big ship, and then there are little boats. How do we create little boats around new categories, emerging trends, new technology, and innovation? How can those smaller boats help drive the bigger ship?” Gutschenritter said at the time.