A Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Gets the FDA’s Stamp of Approval

Cultivated meat is available It was the first time that the United States granted permission for this company to be allowed to operate in the country. Upside Foods, a company based in California, will soon be allowed to sell chicken made from real animals cells instead of having to slaughter live animals.

The FDA’s positive response has been long considered the next big milestone in the cultivated meat industry. In the past few years, startups in the space have built small-scale production facilities and raised billions of dollars in venture capital funding but haven’t been able to sell their products to the public. The few people who were invited to taste cultivated meat had to sign waivers acknowledging their participation in experiments.

Only two more regulatory steps are required before cultivated meat is made available to the general public. Upside’s production facilities still require a grant of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture, and the food itself will need a mark of inspection before it can enter the US market. These two steps can be completed in much less time than the lengthy FDA premarket consulting process that led to the approval.

“It’s the moment we’ve been working toward for the past, almost seven years now,” says Uma Valeti, Upside’s CEO. “Opening up the US market is what every company in the world is trying to do.”

Different startups are focusing their efforts on a variety of cultivated meats including chicken, beef, salmon, and tuna. This announcement applies only to Upside Foods and its cultured chicken, although it’s likely that other declarations will follow soon. Through this premarket consultation process, food manufacturers provide the FDA with details of their production process and the product it creates, and once the FDA is satisfied that the process is safe, it then issues a “no further questions” letter.

The FDA decision means that cultivated meat products may soon be available to the public to try, although it’s likely that tastings will be limited to a very small number of exclusive restaurants. Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn has already announced that she will serve Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken at her restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.

Valeti states that he wants people to try Upside chicken in restaurants before they are able to buy it or cook it at home. “We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage,” says Valeti. “Getting chefs excited about this is a really big deal for us. We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better.”

Atelier Crenn won’t be the first restaurant to serve cultivated meat, however. In December 2020, Singaporean regulators gave the green light to cultivated chicken from the San Francisco–based startup Eat Just. The chicken nuggets, which were originally sold in an 1880 restaurant for members only, were later available for delivery.