UPSIDE Foods opens the world’s most advanced cultivated meat production facility, and with it a new chapter for the company and the industry

We officially opened our state-of-the-art Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (we call it EPIC), a culmination of several major technical and commercial milestones that are unparalleled in our industry. It marks the end of a one-year journey to build our first production facility — and what a journey it has been! — and the beginning of the next chapter for the cultivated meat industry.

But before I tell you more about EPIC, I want to take a step back and share with you how we got here. Our team has been working for six years to bring cultivated meat to the table. I imagine a world where we have delicious, real meat that is made with care and respects the animals and the earth it comes from. It’s a dream that I’ve had since childhood. I grew up eating meat and loving it, but I didn’t like how it came to the table.

Early in my career, I trained at the Mayo Clinic as a cardiologist. While I was there, I realized that some of the technology that we were using to save people with heart attacks could also save our food system and our planet. That is when I realized that we could grow real meat directly from animal cells without having to raise animals. So I left a career that I loved to come and pursue this dream. It’s not a dream anymore. It’s UPSIDE now.