'Building a pilot plant that becomes the blueprint' UPSIDE Foods Ceo talks lab-grown chicken hitting market

Uma Valeti, Founder & CEO of UPSIDE Foods joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss UPSIDE's first consumer product: lab-grown chicken made from stem cells.

Video transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, I want to ask everyone now if they would want to eat meat that was grown in a lab. I know it sounds a bit icky, but our next guest says that eating meat can be a force for good. We're joined now by Dr. Uma Valeti, cardiologist-turned founder and CEO of UPSIDE Foods. So doctor, I know I just said it sounds a little bit icky. It does, to be honest, at least to me. How do you get people to accept the idea that lab grown meat isn't gross?

UMA VALETI: Yeah, Kristin, thank you for having me here. It's great to be here on Yahoo Finance. And you're right. This is a totally new idea. Five years ago, it was living in the realm of science fiction, but the really best way to get over that is tasting it. It's magical. The moment when you taste meat that comes directly from an animal cell, which is from raising an animal and slaughtering it, that's really the experience a consumer needs to have. And this is a big moment for us because we've just launched our consumer facing brand, UPSIDE Foods.

And what we're trying to convey very powerfully is that we're trying to make our favorite foods a force for good. And by doing so, what we want to do is a promise that I made when we started the company that we all have meat that comes humanely and sustainably raised through the plates in 2021. And I'm really excited to be able to say we're ready to do that. And UPSIDE Foods, as a company, you know, the logo itself if you look at it, it's a heart. And that's really to say they're bringing meat to the table that is sustainable, but it's also good for you, the planet, and the animals.

And I think this is a really important story that the consumer will need to understand and which is why we started talking about it. And one thing I really want to say is, this is not made in a lab anymore. This is made in clean production facilities. And we're building the world's first pilot production facilities to show how meat can be produced directly from animals without having to raise animals or slaughter them.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: So talk to me about the cost of producing food in this way. We know it's not plant-based. It's not soy-based. It's none of that, right? You're actually taking cells from the animal and creating this meat in a laboratory type setting. But I would imagine that the costs are pretty big for something like this. And what does that do to your margins there at UPSIDE?

UMA VALETI: Yeah, great question. So when this meat comes to the market, it's going to be at prices that the consumer is really used to paying. So it will be high end chicken is what we'll bring to the market. And the consumer is going to be used to paying those prices. So we aren't asking the consumer to adjust their expectations. The real question here is, five years ago, it was called produced in a lab. We've come really far in those five years. Now it's produced in just a food production facility, just like all foods are. And that's really why economies of scale will add up.

And really, we are looking to bring meat to the table in a much scalable and also a cheaper way, eventually, to not just the people that can afford high end products immediately, but as we look at it in the next five years and 10 years, that countries that cannot afford to actually produce meat because of the expense, will actually be able to get food safety and food security on the plate.

So really, the name of the biggest challenge the industry has to take on directly is getting to scale. And that's really what we're going after, building a pilot plant that becomes the blueprint in how do you produce large amounts of meat, whether it's beef, whether chicken, whether it's fish, at scale in a zip code near you. So it actually is a production facility that will be in the community that you can go and walk through, you can visit, and you can see how meat is being made.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Are you at a place yet where you have suppliers? I mean, where can we find this cell-based chicken at the moment? What retailers are you doing business with? And also, can you give us an idea of how much we would be spending at the grocery store for this?

UMA VALETI: Absolutely. One thing to step back and say is we are not on the market yet. We are working with the regulatory agencies in the US, i.e. FDA and the USDA, to bring our products to market. So the first step that needs to happen is an approval by the agencies that we have a safe and well-established production process that is going to then bring the products to the market. And we're working with a number of retailers to bring our products to the shelves and also at the restaurants. I think these are the two areas that we're looking at when we bring it to the consumer.

And we are not able to announce which retailers yet because those conversations are still going on. But as soon as regulatory approval happens, we're looking to bring it to restaurants close to you and also select retailers immediately because we do have to scale up production. Initially, the supply of this meat is going to be limited. And there is probably 100-fold demand to how much we can produce right now. So there will be some limited distribution initially, but eventually, what we're looking to get to in the next 5 to 10 years is, you can walk into any grocery store near you or any restaurant, and you'll have UPSIDE chicken or UPSIDE beef on the menu.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right, well, I know a lot of the producers here are very interested in at least trying and doing a bit of a taste test of some of this UPSIDE meat. Dr. Uma Valeti, founder and CEO of UPSIDE Foods, thanks so much for joining us.