At a glance, 2021 is going to be a good year for Upside Foods – one of the best-funded farm-raised meat companies among dozens of startups vying to incubate real meat inside a bioreactor instead of farming and growing it. animal slaughter. In May, their company – which Investors include Softbank, Tyson Foods, Whole Foods and Bill Gates — rebranded from old name, Memphis Meats. In November, it opened a 53,000-square-foot pilot production facility in Emeryville, California, becoming one of the few competitors to take a significant step in scale.
But behind the scenes not everything goes so smoothly. Legal documents filed in California’s Northern District Court show Upside is filing a lawsuit alleging a former employee stole thousands of confidential company files, including trade secrets. . The court documents, which have not been publicly reported, focus on a small group within the Upside working on some of the company’s most secretive and futuristic projects, which were revealed later. the passing of company co-founder Nicholas Genovese.
On April 1, 2021, Genovese was asked to participate in a performance review meeting with the company’s senior management at a Starbucks store. According to Genovese and another person familiar with the matter, the co-founder was told he had been fired from the company and asked to return the key card that gave him access to the offices of the company. Upside. “There was a lot of tension before that point,” said Genovese, who co-founded the company in 2015 with current CEOs Uma Valeti and Will Clem. Upside Foods confirmed that Genovese’s daily engagement with Upside ended in April. “His role at the company has changed to better align with our personal career goals and long-term business needs. Jaci Kassmeier, vice president of human resources at Upside Foods, said we are unable to comment further because of the confidentiality of personnel matters. Genovese signed a non-disclosure agreement with the startup as part of his departure, and he stressed that his comments were not intended to criticize or disparage the company.
Before leaving, Genovese was the manager of a small but seemingly very important group in the Upside. Dubbed Blue Sky — the team motto is “The sky is the limit” — the three-man skaters are responsible for an important task: to develop a process that can grow meat-based cells with higher productivity and at a lower cost than the company’s existing technology. According to legal documents, Blue Sky’s work is going well. “There is a lot of potential and we are making amazing progress,” said Genovese.
Not long before Genovese left, the team broke an internal record for biomass conversion efficiency: cost-effectively growing meat from nutrients. Generate costs for lab-grown meat hundreds or thousands of times than conventional meat, so figuring out how to culture cells cheaply and quickly is a key challenge for companies trying to bring products to market. To protect the valuable intellectual property the company is developing, Blue Sky’s work is a closely guarded secret even within the company. A physical barrier in the lab prevented other Upside employees from seeing what the team was doing, and the data generated by Blue Sky was kept separate from other company data.
After Genovese’s departure, Blue Sky began to crumble. In early April, a Blue Sky employee who had worked at Upside since January 2021 left the company, leaving only one member of the team: senior research associate Napat Tandikul. She joined the company in December 2019 as a research associate and since November 2020 she has been working exclusively on the design of a new type of cultivator: a device, and called bioreactors, are used to culture animal cells that eventually become the main ingredient of farmed meat products.
