Bringing cell-grown meat to high-end restaurants
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A dish by San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn using Upside Food's cultivated chicken. Photo: Courtesy of Upside Foods
A food tech startup is partnering with an avant-garde San Francisco chef to serve the company's cultivated, cell-grown chicken at her restaurant.
Why it matters: Cultivated meat — animal products grown from cells, rather than processed from slaughtered animals — faces technical and economic challenges, but it also has to gain consumer acceptance.
- Placing the products in high-end restaurants could help speed that process.
What's happening: Cultivated chicken from the Oakland-based startup Upside Foods will be served in San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn's Atelier Crenn restaurant, Upside announced on Thursday — the first such partnership between a cultivated meat maker and a three-star Michelin chef.
- This will mark the first time Crenn has served meat since 2019.
- "She took meat away from her restaurants because she didn't like the impact it had on the environment," says Uma Valeti, a cardiologist-turned-founder and CEO of Upside Foods. "When she saw what we were doing, she said she had to get this stuff for her plates."
How it works: Like other cultivated meat startups, Upside grows chicken and beef products from cell lines grown in production facilities.
- The result is meat that tastes like meat without most of the environmental or animal welfare drawbacks of conventional production.
What to watch: Upside's cultivated chicken will be served in Atelier Crenn only after it passes regulatory review from the FDA and USDA, something Valeti says he is hoping for "in the near future."
- Studies indicate consumers are open to cultivated meat, but have some concerns about health and food safety.
- Regulation will likely help with that, but the long war over genetically modified crops shows that government approval isn't enough to gain full consumer acceptance.
The bottom line: Enlisting top chefs to make items with cultivated meat will help the industry mature, but to make a real difference, cell-grown meat needs to be cheap enough to be sold in supermarkets, not just three-star restaurants.
Go deeper: Your future sushi dinner could be cultivated, not caught
