New Facility Can Produce 400,000 Pounds of Lab-Grown Meat a Year

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.

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.