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.
WIRED 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 WIRED, 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. In the email Valeti announced that the company was making “selective role eliminations” and “other changes” that would impact 16 people across the organization. Employees affected by the announcement were informed of the changes to their role on the morning of February 12.
“These hard choices and decisions are being made with the sole focus of supporting and preparing us to write the next chapter together,” Valeti wrote in the email to staff members. He also told employees that Upside still planned to build a full-scale facility after the company had “delivered key proof points” through its Emeryville factory.
The Illinois factory was supposed to be a major step towards the commercialization of cultivated meat, with a potential capacity of over 30 million pounds per year. As part of its commitment to the project, Upside said it planned to invest more than $140 million in the midwest region and create 75 new jobs associated with the factory. In April 2022 Upside closed a $400 million Series C funding round, the largest in the industry to date, which brought the company to a self-claimed valuation of more than $1 billion.
But since 2022 there has been a pronounced downturn in the amount of new venture capital money flowing towards the cultivated meat industry. According to preliminary data from food-tech venture capital firm Agfunder, total investment in the space dropped by 78 percent from 2022 to 2023, from $807 million to $177 million.
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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.
“In the process of planning for Rubicon, we identified a more efficient and cost-effective way to achieve a similar capacity and timeline of the initial phase of Rubicon by significantly expanding our operations at EPIC,” said Upside interim head of communications Melissa Musker in a statement. “This approach will allow us to scale and commercialize our next generation platform and products, currently under regulatory review, while extending our runway and resources for the critical work ahead. We still plan to move forward with building out our full-scale commercial facility in the future.”
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