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MS. OSAKA: Hi, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Shannon Osaka, and I’m the climate zeitgeist reporter for The Washington Post. And today I’m joined by Uma Valeti, founder and CEO of Upside Foods, which is one of the first companies to receive regulatory approval to sell lab-based, lab-grown chicken in the United States. They also like to call it “cultivated meat.”

Uma, thank you so much for joining us.

DR. VALETI: Shannon, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

MS. OSAKA: So I want to just start from the very basics. I mean, we have a lot of viewers who aren't very familiar with cultivated meat. Can you talk about what it is, to what extent animals are involved, and what kind of technology goes into making it?

DR. VALETI: Yes. Cultivated meat is, simply put, meat grown from real animal cells; for instance, meat grown from cells taken from a cow, a chicken, or a pig. The only difference is the product is still animal-based, animal cell-based, but we don't have to raise and slaughter animals. We just need high-quality animal cells that are grown outside the animal in a clean environment, like the one I'm sitting in now, and after two to three weeks of growing them, we have delicious meat that can be made into any of the meats that we love eating.

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MS. OSAKA: It's really cool to see those bioreactors behind you where you're really growing this meat. Can you talk about how long that cultivation process takes? I mean, what is the duration of that process?

DR. VALETI: Yeah. The cultivation process starts with acquiring the best possible cells from animals. For instance, if we take a small amount of cells, like a droplet of cells, a single drop of cells from an animal, there are tens of millions of cells in there that are capable of growing and doubling every day. So we start off with just a thimble full of cells, and we grow them in a clean environment, what we call "cultivators" that are similar to the tanks that are right behind me, and we provide them with nutrients that are nutrients that an animal needs to eat to grow, the same thing that an animal cell will do, and that includes a combination of sugars, fats, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and oxygen. And we do this for a period of approximately two weeks or less, and we're done. At the end of two weeks, we have chicken or beef or pork.

MS. OSAKA: Wow. That's pretty fast. I mean, faster than growing a chicken, probably.

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And, in the introductory video, we saw that you now have regulatory approval to sell this product to consumers. Where can people find this cultivated chicken today?

DR. VALETI: We--yes. It's a great, great question. So we just got regulatory approval, and we launched cultivated meat for the first time in the United States on July 1st, 2023, so just about a month ago. And it's available in San Francisco in a restaurant called Bar Crenn, and the reservations are online. And we are in limited supply at the moment; therefore, reservations get booked within a few minutes of opening these slots. But if you have to eat cultivated meat in the United States, you've got to come to San Francisco at the moment.

MS. OSAKA: And how does Chef Dominique Crenn prepare the chicken, and what kind of price point are we talking about, given that it's just, you know, this one restaurant in this one location?

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DR. VALETI: Yeah. So Chef Dominique Crenn got very interested in cultivated meat during covid. She came and visited us, and she said, "I've taken meat off my menu in 2018 because it was really hard to get behind how it's coming to the plate and the challenges it poses to our environment and animal welfare." So she saw that with cultivated meat, we could grow meat that we love and have upsides to meat production and not have the downsides we face, and she said, "I would love to launch it in my restaurant." So that's how the relationship started.

And she came and tasted chicken, Upside chicken, and we cooked it on a grill outdoors. And when she tasted the first chicken breast, she was completely, almost in tears. She said, "This is the kind of meat I grew up eating in France, and it reminds me of a flavor of a chicken called "La Belle Rouge," which is one of the most expensive and exquisite experience for chicken lovers. She said, "I've not had this type of flavor or texture in the United States from the chicken I buy from the supermarket," and she said, "This is the one I want to put back on my menu." So that's how the relationship started.

When she decided how to make the meat, she said, "I want this to be a global fusion of what meat represents to us," and she wanted to bring in three traditions. So she brought the tradition from Mexico. She made a dish called "Recado Negro," and she coated this chicken breast that we gave her in a dark recado negro sauce with chili that gives us the Mexican fusion. Then she did this in the form of a tempura batter, so the Japanese traditions, and fried chicken, which is the favorite one in the United States, so it fused Japanese, Mexican, and American cultures. And she has this dish that just blows you away when you taste it with the texture and the taste.

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MS. OSAKA: One of the things that I was going to ask is I've tried cultivated pork before. I've never tried cultivated chicken. And so it sounds like, you know, if I were to taste the chicken, would I be able to tell any difference whatsoever?

DR. VALETI: Well, the only way to find out is come and taste it. So you have an open door, and you can come and dine with us and at Bar Crenn.

We don't think so. I mean, we have had thousands of people come and taste it, and the universal reaction is that it's a magical experience. They would not have known, if we had not told them that, hey, this is chicken, yet we didn't have to raise and slaughter a chicken. And that's the remarkable piece of the experience, and the tasting part of it is, in some ways, unremarkable because people who have eaten meat all their life immediately recognize the taste of good, high-quality meat, and that's what we see all the time.

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MS. OSAKA: I think a lot of people are just very curious about this product and want to know when it will be more accessible, and this is obviously a long timeline. But when could we expect to see this type of cultivated meat in a grocery store?

DR. VALETI: Look, I am really glad we're having this conversation today because everybody would have laughed us out of this room just seven years ago when Upside was founded as the first company in this field, and the questions then were, if this is ever going to be happening, if it ever is going to taste like meat, if it's ever going to get regulatory approval, if we can ever build a clean, self-contained industrial process. So let me just say I am really glad the question is when, because I think we moved past the point of viability and proving that it's viable. We've shown the scientific and technical methods of making meat that is essentially animal-based meat. The next step is scalability, and that's what we are laser focused on. And the questions are very similar, just like seven years ago. Can you ever do it? Will this ever happen? And I'd say the journey is challenging, but I know it's inevitable because we are in the arena. We are making this meet every single day, every second of every day of every week of every year, and we know that it takes a certain set of circumstances, a certain set of conditions and people to come together to make this product, and we know how to scale it. It's got to be done and proven, and I can't prove that, because it's like a chicken and egg problem. Unless you build it, you won't believe it. So that's just what we're going to do.

We just built a production facility in California during covid in 13 months, and people said you will never be able to even remodel your home in 13 months. We built an entire facility, 53,000 square-foot facility, and opened it for the first time ever. And we live streamed it to let people see it.

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Now we have the designs of the next facility. That will be 10 to 20 times larger than this that will be built. We're going to build it. We're going to invite people to come and see it, because that's very similar to tasting, another magical experience, because people have to taste it and have to see how it's made to really understand that this is a transformative technology that is going to continue to grow and scale and with time is going to be an incredible option on the table along with the options we have currently.

MS. OSAKA: I think--and I'm glad that you're talking about that next facility and that next step, because I think one of the big questions about cultivated meat right now is scale up and the economics of it. I mean, is it going to be possible to bring the cost of cultivated meat down anywhere close to what we have with sort of traditional meat? How much does it cost to produce a pound of cultivated chicken right now, and what are the steps that need to happen to get that cost down?

DR. VALETI: Yes. Look, I think there's three things we are laser-focused on. One is the taste. The tasting experience has to be magical. It's not going to pass the sniff test and get to the next stage if you don't clear that. There is ample evidence, ample proof of that, that people just fall in love with the taste of the products we're making. That's the first step.

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The second one is cost. Cost is the absolute marker of making it have the impact we are here to have. It's going to take time. We're going to start off with premium pricing because it is expensive to make it at the moment, but we think about this as pricing just above organic because it represents all of the goodness that we think about, when I think about products that are friendly to the world, raised humanely. And we're doing that without having to have slaughter and also have the ability to continue to improve the product, to make it better for us, the planet, and the animal. So there's going to be a premium as we get all of the things right.

With time, I believe it's inevitable that we'll get to parity to conventional meat and lower than that, and that's for two reasons. One is the current animal industry has had fifty, hundred years to be able to perfect their methods of manufacturing. They're so vertically integrated. They've found so many efficiencies. They've learned a lot from lots of mistakes, and they've had the luxury of doing it. So they are unquestionably the incumbents with lots of advantages. We are the people that are coming and saying we want to sit alongside the table with you. We have a technology and a method with incredible promise that will preserve the choice of eating what we love and also that protects the life and the environment we care about.

Now, it takes time because, just like raising a child, you have to go through multiple steps, and what we think about with respect to cost is initially the production cost will be expensive. So we'll price it at a premium. It might be break-even prices for us, but what we want to show is this is feasible, this is scalable. And in the next 5 to 15 years, we're going to be targeting conventional meat-price parity or beating it, and I give you that range for the simple reason: no transformative technology in the world has ever reached its full potential without having public-private partnerships, government involvement, helping the regulatory field, let a lot of people in the ecosystem come forward, as well as providing the loans and the subsidies and things that are needed to manufacture and build it in the country that people are going to be eating. That's the incredible opportunity for cultivated meat where it is an American-born invention that has gone out into the world and excited a lot of people, so much so that there's 150 companies in this space in a short span of five to seven years, and nearly every major food and ag university program has an undergrad or PhD program in this region specifically, and every major government is doing research funding in this area. That's never happened in the history of food or any manufacturing industry at this pace and considering half of our lifetime has also been during covid.

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So I'm incredibly optimistic that we're going to be having a premium price initially, and for instance, if people go to San Francisco, they'll pay a premium to go into the Bar Crenn restaurant. But we are thinking about pricing it about 30 to 50 percent above organic at the moment.

MS. OSAKA: Yeah, absolutely. There has been just, you know, a huge growth of investment and interest in this technology. I'm curious what you see as sort of the ultimate goal for you as sort of founder and CEO. I mean, is this ultimately sort of a business proposition? Is it trying to solve the climate crisis? Is it ethics? I mean, what are the things that are driving you?

DR. VALETI: Okay. The thing that is driving me and everybody on our team--and I think I can broadly speak also for the industry--is there is an absolutely phenomenal opportunity in front of us to be able to preserve the choice of eating the most delicious product that we ever had--and that is the center of play for nearly every major culture--and be able to preserve it for generations to come at the same time as preserving life. We've never had this choice ever before where we can protect the choice of what we allow and as well as protect the life of animals and the planet, and if that's the purpose, that's the North Star that's leading us, all of the hurdles in the way are noise, because we know it's inevitable. It's going to require a herculean effort to get there, but so is every transformative change that's happened in the world. And that's why we're going after this, to show that we can preserve a product we love, but we don't have to get behind a process that nearly everybody does not love or even hates.

I mean, I have not met a person that has walked out of a slaughterhouse without being scarred for the rest of their life. If we provide an opportunity with time to say, look, we love eating meat, so we're not taking anything away, but let's be at the table, provide a choice, and with time, we can fill the delta of the difference in the demand for meat that we're facing in the next 30 years, because despite all of the challenges in how meat comes to the table, we love the product. And meat consumption has steadily gone up every decade in the face of animal welfare crises, in the face of ethical crises, climate crises, and health crises. It is going up, and it's going to double in the next 30 years. So there's a huge delta to fill. Cultivated meat can fill that delta. So people can have the current livelihoods and the way that they're making meat, but we don't have to double the resources we are making, putting into meat production right now to fill that delta. We can do it with cultivated meat, and that's the business proposition.

The ethical proposition is enormous. We've never had this choice as humans to be able to say we don't have to live at the same time as the need to kill, right? If we don't have to kill 80 billion animals every year, eventually, and not give up the product--

MS. OSAKA: Yeah, yeah.

DR. VALETI: --I think the proposition is very clear.

MS. OSAKA: It's interesting because I think there are so many sort of ethical opportunities, and we know that meat has such a huge impact on the environment with, you know, releases of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas. At the same time, you know, I think for a lot of people, it's just a strange idea, and I want to go to an audience question. This is from Mary Colleen Baker from Idaho, and she says, "I am just your average retired woman who likes red meat aka beef. My question is, why should I give up what is a natural food source for a food that is grown in a lab? Look at where preservatives have gotten us. Please make this make sense to me and millions of others. Thank you." What would you say to Mary about some of her concerns?

DR. VALETI: Mary--I want to talk directly to Mary. Mary, we are hearing you, and that is exactly why we are putting cultivated meat as an option, as a choice. We are asking people to preserve the choice of eating meat that they love, but when we look at the demand for meat doubling in the next 30 years, our kids, our grandkids may end up in a situation where the price of meat is going to go incredibly high, because there's just not enough we can make, or it's going to be rationed and say, hey, you can afford it, then you can buy it. But what we want to do with cultivated meat is to be able to say, "We want to be at the table. If you're not ready for it, totally acceptable. Maybe your friends are going to be ready for it, your family is going to be ready for it, your kids or grandkids may be ready for it." But all I'm asking for is we need to give this technology a chance because we've never had this before, and when we compare this with things that just seemed just as weird as what cultivated meat might seem like in the current situation, let me give an example that humanizes this.

About 45 years ago, Washington Post wrote an article on Louise Brown. She's the first baby ever conceived by in vitro fertilization. At that time, everybody called these people, these humans "test tube babies." Fast forward 45 years, we've got a previous first lady, singers, supermodels, our friends and family, and about 8- to 10 million people that are conceived by in vitro fertilization since then. It is an option we never had, and it should be on the table.

And that's why I'm saying, look, stay on the sidelines. Watch how this field is growing, and when you get a chance to taste it, taste it, or if you want to be in a room where it's cooked, just let it delight your senses. See how it grills. See how it sizzles. And, you know, watch a friend eat it or share the experience with you, and maybe with time, you'll be open to it. But we are hearing you. We want to educate people for the why we exist here, and we want to just get a chance.

MS. OSAKA: We've talked a lot about the environmental impact of meat and how significant it is and especially as we have population growth and we have more people eating more meat in other parts of the world. I mean, can you lay out for our audience a little bit about what is the promise of cultivated meat in terms of lowering those carbon emissions, and are you at a point now with the meat that you're making now that it does have lower emissions than perhaps a conventional chicken?

DR. VALETI: So, great question. The anchoring reasons and the purpose to go behind this is basically three things. One is this is a product we love. We want to preserve it. The second one is these incredible ethical dilemmas in putting a product we love on the table. People love the product, not as much the process. And the third one is the well-known, well-recognized environmental impact of raising this much meat, and when I say this much meat, 80 billion animals is about 750 billion pounds of meat every year. And that demand is doubling.

We use about 40 percent of all the freshwater we have right now to feed animals to feed us, about 40 percent of all the arable land to grow crops to feed animals to feed us. And consider for a moment, if that demand is doubling, we cannot afford to have 80 percent of our water and land be used to feed animals to feed us. There has to be a better solution, and that's what I think every country will need to recognize, that here is an opportunity to be able to do the same thing with a significantly lower environmental impact at scale of production, because here's the first principle.

We talked about it at the beginning of this conversation. It takes us two weeks to make meat of any species: beef, cow, pigs, chicken. Compare that with two years it takes to raise a cow, nine months it takes to raise a pig, and two months to raise a chicken. It's a significantly shorter duration to make meat, which means significantly shorter time to feed and significantly lower amount of water needed, land needed, because it's just a shorter time to do this. I think that's the first principle of all of it.

And the second thing is there is no methane production when we do cultivated meat production. It has very large, clean brewery-like setup just like the tanks behind me. It requires energy to run and energy emissions, which includes mostly carbon dioxide, but consider the fact that we are coming into the world at a time when renewable energy is moving at a pace where if our production facility is hooked to renewable energy, we dramatically decrease even the chance of carbon dioxide coming into the atmosphere. So every trend is in favor of cultivated meat production scaling because you cannot connect the power grid to an animal. It's still going to burp methane, and there is still going to be methane in the poop of pigs. We can't change that, but with cultivated meat, the minute I hook this to a renewable grid, it drops. The energy consumption drops significantly, and that's why we believe a short production time of two weeks and renewable grid is going to completely change the paradigm of how much greenhouse gas emissions meat is going to make.

MS. OSAKA: I'm really glad that you brought up, you know, the grid and the impact of renewables. I mean, what is your current setup in terms of using renewable energy to power your operations, and what are the plans for that going forward?

DR. VALETI: So the production facility we have in California, in Emeryville, it's completely powered by renewable energy. We wanted to put this production facility in the middle of a living, breathing, active neighborhood for one reason is to show that meat production of future can exist in communities.

For instance, in front of me are multiple coffee shops, a shopping area, a children's park, a dog park, lots of apartments, and we are 15 minutes away from San Francisco and 5 minutes away from Berkeley. That's what we want to show, that you should be able to have this in your neighborhood without having maybe a feedlot or a slaughterhouse at the outskirts, and nobody wants to be around that or have runoffs from that contaminating or produce that then causes, you know, epidemics with E. coli or something else that we need to recall. I think this has ripple effects on how our meat is produced.

And the one in California is proving just that, and the next one is going to be very similar. And, you know, I did not come to your question about, hey, are you actually environmentally producing less right now for a piece of chicken? The answer is no, because there is an enormous amount of research and development, innovation, engineering, and industrial process development that's happening. But what we've done is--using the data we have so far and what it takes to make meat, we've done projections internally inside the company, and they are very well aligned with all the peer-reviewed publications that have come up that said cultivated meat production at scale has a significantly lower carbon footprint, water footprint, land footprint than conventional meat.

MS. OSAKA: It's interesting. I mean, when I've talked to food scientists who are kind of ranking the environmental impact of different types of meat, I mean, beef is pretty much on top, then pork. Chicken is on the lower end. I'm curious why you decided to start with chicken and whether that will impact how useful you can be in terms of cutting carbon emissions in the next 5, 10 years.

DR. VALETI: Great. Fantastic question. I love to answer this question, because we can intellectually talk for a very long time and say let's go after the one that makes the biggest environmental sense immediately, right, but we also know that's only one side of the equation. The other side is this is something that's got to be relatable that people love, and we said, what's the best combination of this? And the answer came out to be chicken, because chicken is the most consumed product in the entire world for meat. It is the number one meat consumed in the United States. It is the central part of many dishes, can be cooked in many cuisines. No matter what, chicken is eaten everywhere in the world. So we said let's pick the most familiar product.

And the second part of it that really motivates us is if we solve it for chicken, it's game over. It's every other species would also be able to follow the same thing. So we said we are picking a hard challenge. But let's pick a challenge that people fall in love with and it's very easy for them to recognize the strengths of this technology, and this technology is going to keep getting better and better and better. In order to make a perfect beefsteak, it's going to take time, but we can make a perfect chicken breast, we can make a perfect chicken sausage, a meatball right now. So we also have to look at how is the technology going to keep progressing and start building people that can get behind it, and that's what led us to chicken.

MS. OSAKA: And when you're saying that if we solve it for chicken, we've solved it for the other meats, is that because chicken has such low margins in terms of cost and also in terms of that environmental impact?

DR. VALETI: Part of it is that, but let me just say there is no meat in production for land animals or birds that is more efficient than vertical chicken farming, because there's--chicken production is so vertically integrated. It's so vertically integrated that there's so many chickens that are packed in such a small area. You just cannot pack any more. Now, because they're so intensely packed, there is also the risk that we have on a regular basis of avian flu, and every time we talk about avian flu, whether there's an egg shortage or a chicken shortage or millions of birds being culled, it's because we continue to love eating chicken. But the way it's produced, we are also continuing to play with fire, and that is a challenge. It's one of the most--it's an incredible story of efficiency. But at what cost? And we're just coming out of a pandemic. Zoonotic diseases are an incredible risk for our existence, and I want us to have an opportunity to offer our future generations an ability to eat what we love but not have that tremendous zoonotic risk that we are playing with. And I think that's--you know, I did not mention that in the past, but ethical concerns, environmental concerns, health concerns, and existential concerns, I think, are the best case for cultivated meat.

MS. OSAKA: We're running low on time, but I want to ask you one more question which is, you know, let's--if we set aside the logistical issues and we assume that we can really bring these costs down to conventional meat and the environmental impact down to conventional meat, which is a lot of ifs, but, I mean, do you think that consumers will buy in, and is this a better option than perhaps pushing people to reduce consumption of meat, which is, you know, I mean, a sort of easy adjustment for some people?

DR. VALETI: Look, I would never stop anybody from saying they'll make a personal choice to decrease consumption of meat or improve their impact or carbon footprint. Absolutely, go do it. I think we need many solutions on the table.

I think cultivated meat is an enormously promising and effective toolkit in the toolbox--tool in the toolbox because it offers advantages of preserving choice, like what you just said is people giving up what they love because of something else, maybe, let's say, greater good. What if we put the same choice and say, hey, look, you can still have it without compromising the greater good that made you give it up? I do think that's the appeal of cultivated meat, and we need to have it on the table. It's not an easy journey. There's lots of hurdles ahead. There's still problems that are unsolved, but so are problems with any major idea that's coming to the world.

And I'll offer this: if you can tell me about any transformative or remarkable innovation that we now take for granted that did not have challenges during the days it was being built, I'll stop doing what I'm doing and I'll go back and be a cardiologist.

MS. OSAKA: Thanks so much for that, Uma. This has been a fascinating conversation. Unfortunately, we're out of time, but it has been just great talking to you and hearing about this potential technology. So thank you so much for joining us, Uma.

DR. VALETI: Thank you, Shannon.

MS. OSAKA: And thanks to all of you for joining this conversation. To check out what future interviews we have, go to WashingtonPostLive.com for more information about upcoming programs.

Once again, I'm Shannon Osaka, and thank you for watching.

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