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A new meat-lab facility in the San Francisco Bay Area could soon be producing earth-friendly, cultivated meat for human use. Lawmakers, do your part.

Slaughterhouses are soon to become history, as UPSIDE Foods opens a major production facility for lab-grown meat.

The food startup choose Emeryville, California for their meat-lab, since the Bay Area is known as a vegan territory. 

According to InHabitat, UPSIDE’s Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center (EPIC) looks more like a brewery than a messy, smelly slaughterhouse. It’s a visitor-friendly facility that covers 53,000 square feet.

When we founded UPSIDE in 2015, it was the only cultivated meat company in a world full of skeptics. Today, that dream becomes a reality. The journey from tiny cells to EPIC has been an incredible one, and we are just getting started. 


Uma Valeti, UPSIDE CEO and founder

At the moment, EPIC can produce about 50,000 pounds of lab-grown meat a year, with plans to scale up the production to 400,000. 

Regulation is still a big hurdle. So far, Singapore is the only country in the world to approve cell-based meat. Qatar seems to be on the fence to become the next country to approve lab-grown meat. 

People from UPSIDE believe that their groundbreaking facility means that consumers could soon buy cultivated meat in stores. 

Lab-grown meat is much less harmful to the environment. 

Traditional livestock farming is currently a major source of greenhouse emissions and consumer of freshwater resources.

If we adopt lab-grown meat, large areas that are now farmed for animal feed could one day be used for growing human food. 

Nikola, an electrical engineer, simplifies intricate sustainability subjects for his audience. A staunch environmental conservationist, he embodies his beliefs daily through recycling and cultivating his own food.

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