Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

https://www.wired.com/story/upside-foods-lab-grown-chicken/

by dtagames • 3 years ago

88 134 3 years ago

Another former employee confirmed that staffers at the company would make jokes comparing Upside to Theranos.

that's taking it a little far... their goal is providing an ethical food source, not revolutionizing human diagnoses

can't wait for meat-less meat tech to get through its paces and take the time to mature. humans took hundreds of years to figure out how to herd cattle; what's another few years to make it in a lab?

catgary• 3 years ago

Honestly, the roller bottle approach seems pretty reasonable when they’re making sure that the process is making good chicken. They’ve at least reduced the problem to making giant sheets of chicken-paper.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

Yeah, I agree.

Honestly, as long as the product isn't contaminated, the consumer doesn't care if it made in roller bottles or futuristic machines. At worse they are misleading investors, but are not endangering the health of consumers.

Theranos on the other hand, actually hurt not just investors but the end consumer by promising them blood tests that did not actually work.

brightlancer2• 3 years ago

At worse they are misleading investors, but are not endangering the health of consumers.
Theranos on the other hand, actually hurt not just investors but the end consumer by promising them blood tests that did not actually work.

Elizabeth Holmes was _acquitted_ of defrauding patients; her convictions were only for defrauding investors.

This looks a lot like Theranos.

flangola7• 3 years ago

It's a time sensitive issue unfortunately

crooked-v• 3 years ago

Also, there's a significant difference between "the process works on a small scale, and would work at a large scale if we can solve the reliability/consistency issues" versus Theranos' "the process literally isn't physically possible at any scale and we've been outright lying about it the whole time".

civilitty2• 3 years ago

I think lab grown meat is closer to a Theranos type scam than most people realize. The problem with Theranos wasn’t that their tech didn’t work at any scale; it’s that blood drawn from finger capillaries is useless for most diagnostic tests that they claimed to do. It’s a very subtle problem that only investors with proper scientific advisors with diagnostic experience caught onto (aka all the biotech VCs, who stayed far away). “If only” Theranos took regular blood samples from the arm instead of a few droplets from a finger prick, it could have worked but then it’d be just another unsexy competitor in onsite diagnostics.

Lab grown meat is full of those kinds of caveats and while no company has committed as egregious a fraud as Theranos, they’re all going to eventually find themselves in the position where they either have to lie to keep getting investments or admit that it’s not feasible and fold.

Personally, my bet is that without advanced bioengineering that can design entire artificial immune systems that protect the growing tissue, bioreactors will just be too expensive to scale up and compete with animals. IMO the only way it’ll work is if we have giant (semi-)open vats like salt evaporation pools that convert solar energy directly into protein and fat, with an engineered biome that responds to contamination like an immune system. And that's probably decades if not centuries ahead of us.

smegsicle2• 3 years ago

i suppose "we're getting the cell growing procedure worked out so that we're ready for when we can make our own stem cells" is a bit more believable than "we're getting the blood pinprick transport device worked out for when we have the sensor technology to do anything with it"

datavirtue• 3 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I find myself having zero patience for introductions that set me up with a story. I just glanced over the first two paragraphs, rolled my eyes, and started reading at the third.

PlunderBunny• 3 years ago

When I read a Wired article on Ars Technica, I can tell (without looking at the byline) that it’s a Wired article simply because of this.

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

On September 34th, Johnny decided to get up from his chair, head outside for some fresh air after sitting in his pajamas at home “working” all day, and do some Satvic Yoga.

That’s when a key line of code triggered on an errant latest-generation DJI Mavic Pro. This drone, manufactured by a “private” Chinese company, then descended 90 feet in only 4.2 seconds, and subsequently crashed. Directly into Johnny’s ass.

sshine4• 3 years ago

Why not just grow mushrooms? Their cells are meaty, super high in protein, and they already exist / the “tech” has already been developed! There is an extremely large selection, some with additional health benefits.

malfist• 3 years ago

2-3 percent of the population has a mushroom allergy, myself included

smegsicle2• 3 years ago

that's too bad, they taste great with beef

maybe better than worcestershire

kaycebasques• 3 years ago

I think I looked into the protein amounts back in my vegan days and was disappointed to discover that the amounts are fairly low. Maybe it depends on the type. Lots of other reasons for us to cultivate more mushrooms though. Mycelium Running outlines a lot of cool ideas.

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

Because mushrooms are NOT "super high in protein".

A comparable serving of beef has about 12x the amount of protein as mushrooms.

xnx2• 3 years ago

12x? Isn't beef approximately 2/3 protein and mushrooms 1/2 protein?

sshine4• 3 years ago

When you compare mushroom dry weight, it is more like 10-25% protein. This is without any industrial processing.

pxmpxm• 3 years ago

This. Beans, lentils and friends if you're after vegetable protein.

Loughla6• 3 years ago

Meat tastes good. Mushrooms taste good, but in a different way.

You can want a perfect world, but it will never exist.

Like it or don't, solving meat consumption and its effects on the planet is something we'll have to do. That probably involves a meaty substitute for meat.

pjot• 3 years ago

Does meat actually taste good though? When has anyone ordered unseasoned chicken?

Salt and spices taste good.

ETH_start2• 3 years ago

The only reasons to find ways to end consumption of natural meat are 1. to increase efficiency and 2. ethical concerns relating raising animals in confinement to slaughter and eat them.

The effects on the planet can be completely eliminated with massive expansion of nuclear and/or space-based electricity generation to power vertical farms that a) don't displace natural habitats and b) capture and recycle livestock's methane emissions along with other waste products.

howlin• 3 years ago

Fungi make up one of three primary kingdoms of multicellular life. Mushrooms and other fungus have a variety of flavors already, and some of them are quite meat-like. Given fungus cells are more similar to animal than they are plant, it is possible that they can be selectively bred or engineered to taste more meat-like.

I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.

xnx2• 3 years ago

There are startups doing this: https://www.naturesfynd.com/fy-protein

rcme• 3 years ago

And heme iron?

doctorhandshake• 3 years ago

Not mushrooms but Quorn has been making meat substitute products (some quite tasty) out of vat-grown mycelium since ‘85: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorn

pcthrowaway2• 3 years ago

Quorn has for the most part been making meat substitutes out of vat-grown mycelium and eggs

I love mushrooms, and am mostly vegan, but the skeptic in me suspects it's not as economically viable (with their current processes) to make meat-like products out of just their "mycoprotein" or they'd be doing more of it.

I realize they have released a few vegan products, but I've never seen them in stores and can't see why they wouldn't be as widely available as their other products if there weren't some texture/flavor issues without the eggs.

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Livestock eats food that tastes good: grains, grasses, corn, protein-rich insects. You can discern a well-nourished animal by the way its meat tastes.

What do you feed to mushrooms?

Klonoar3• 3 years ago

Meati is literally this.

ggm• 3 years ago

Some kind of partial surface rotation inside a horizontal or near horizontal drum Reactor? Combine the best bits of a single surface grow and a large production run with a helical feed surface emitting sheets of the stuff?

radar1310• 3 years ago

Another scam, imagine that.

fbdab103• 3 years ago

I only skimmed it, but nothing in the article said scam? More just that they are facing enormous problems scaling production. Both at producing macroscopic quantities of chicken (vs thin chicken sheets) and how to productionize the process so it could produce the mega tons required to be a commercial product.

Animats3• 3 years ago

I only skimmed it, but nothing in the article said scam?

Employee: "the startup could be the next Theranos".

raylad2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure about chicken cells but my experience with growing human cells (WI-38 fibroblasts)[1] is that they want to grow in a monolayer.

The way we grew them normally was in those roller bottles [2]: you have some tissue culture medium in the bottle (containing fetal calf serum, which is still required to grow mammalian cells AFAIK, another reason most of these companies can't do what they say) and other components. Then the bottles are put on their sides on a roller mechanism, in an incubator with a controlled CO2 concentration.

The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.

So these guys are trying to grow tissue and what they seem to be doing instead is growing monolayers just like this on the inside of roller bottles, scraping them off, then putting them together again.

One thing that disturbed me was that they need to coat the bottles with porcine gelatin. In that case, a lot of those "chicken" cutlets are actually pork!

[1] WI-38 cells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WI-38

[2] Tissue culture in roller bottles (yes, the medium is red at least for mammalian cells): https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-hgsfepq18i/images/stencil/12...

papertigerau• 3 years ago

Your experience matches with what I've seen.

If you give the cells something spherical [1] to adhere to then you can achieve a higher yield, but still only a monolayer.

[1] https://smartmcs.com.au/what-is-microcarrier/

nicoburns• 3 years ago

The cells want to grow in a one-cell-thick monolayer all over the inside of the bottle. What they won't do is to grow a double layer. This is because they have "contact inhibition" which is a major mechanism for preventing tumor-like growth: when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.

How does that work inside the human body, where presumably they do form 3D structures?

jojobas4• 3 years ago

Tumors grow when various inhibition mechanisms fail.

civilitty2• 3 years ago

It's incredibly complicated and every type of tissue has it's own specific mechanisms for forming it's 3D structure but the short answer is that there is an "extracellular matrix" that forms a network of macromolecules using collagen, elastin, fibronectin, and a bunch more signaling and structural proteins that organize cell growth.

The ECM starts developing in the fetus and figuring out how it grows from a few cells into a bunch of differentiated organs, muscles, bone, etc. is a core problem in embryology (biology in general, really). If we knew enough to make proper meat, we'd probably be steps away from a Jurassic park scenario.

Loughla6• 3 years ago

when cells are touching each other, they stop dividing.

I might be very stupid, but if this is a thing, how do we grow? Aren't, for example, bone cells always touching other cells?

xmcqdpt2• 3 years ago

AFAIK the specific patterning and asymmetry of surrounding cells is what convinced the cells to form organs. The inhibition stops random cells in media from forming a big randomly configured organ, ie a tumor. Here is a paper about it,

https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/febs.14...

jiggawatts2• 3 years ago

Surely they would be using immortal cancer cells? Those are used in human cell cultures because they conveniently have unbounded growth.

raylad2• 3 years ago

That would be a Bad Idea: if anyone ate raw cancer cells they could potentially form a tumor if they got into a cut and survived.

Animats3• 3 years ago

The real success in this area is the Impossible burger. It's made mostly from peas and soy, with heme added to produce the bloody meat texture. The heme is made in a fermentation process not much more complex than brewing. Impossible has no problems with volume production - they sell through Burger King and WalMart. Growth rate about 85%/year.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

As a long-time meat eater, I find Impossible to be a passable substitute for ground beef in a lot of dishes.

If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.

Animats3• 3 years ago

It seems more like they price it high because they can. The process isn't expensive. A 68,000 square foot plant makes a million pounds a month, says the company. It's not like lab-grown meat, which is a slow, expensive process.

Amusingly, Impossible's ground beef like product was getting rave reviews from prominent foodies at first. It first appeared only at expensive restaurants. Then they got Burger King to sell it. Only then was there criticism.

kjkjadksj• 3 years ago

Blame your restaurants. Burger king has figured out how to sell you two impossible kings for $7. The only reason why people still ask for another $4 to swap out the sysco patty on your $12 brewpub burger is because they can and you are used to it.

jahnu2• 3 years ago

If only we subsidised this as much as we subside meat production. Or perhaps subsidise nothing. Either way it’s not yet a level playing field.

0_____0• 3 years ago

Their sausage has already done this. It's almost a dollar cheaper than Jimmy Dean at my local, and the Impossible stuff is indistinguishable from pork sausage.

hristov• 3 years ago

And for some reason I cannot quite process it, even though I generally eat a lot of vegetables. The second most painful trip to the bathroom I have ever had was after an impossible burger. The first one was after a beyond meat burger.

workfromspace• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/UEn8h

zvmaz• 3 years ago

I really wish them to succeed. Imagine centuries from now, a future civilisation where human-inflicted cruelty towards billions and billions of sentient beings is ended...

dkarl2• 3 years ago

Not to mention the benefits for us: all the space dedicated to pasture could be dedicated to wildlife or outdoor recreation, and all the high-density facilities fouling air and waterways could be closed. If it works for fish, we could stop scouring the ocean like an Old Testament-style god angry with our creation.

Even the food snobs would be happy, since responsible wildlife management practices would yield a certain amount of expensive, hard-to-get wild meat that they could build a culinary mystique around.

jononomo3• 3 years ago

Space that is currently dedicated to pasture is already currently dedicated to wildlife. In fact, grazing cattle on land serves to rejuvenate the land, since the cattle's hoove's serve as little plows, and the cows walk around and poop and pee, which fertilizes the land and allows for insects and bugs to thrive, which helps the bird population, and the little rodents.

avalys• 3 years ago

Do you think animals in the wild are being cruel to each other when they eat them?

blargey• 3 years ago

Yes? What nonstandard non-dictionary definition of "cruel" do you use, that would not apply to eating something alive?

(And presumably also does not describe what happens in factory farming, which is the actual topic at hand, and which wildlife behavior has nothing to do with)

jcpst• 3 years ago

Yes- it’s pretty messed up seeing those wealthy carnivore animals systematically breed, cage and murder billions of the other animals just so it can be conveniently purchased on-demand at their animal grocery store.

Factory farming is pretty messed up. We like to paint a pretty picture of a pasture, and I actually do get to see that in the midwest US, but a lot of the meat people buy does come from horrible conditions.

xsmasher• 3 years ago

Yes; and we should strive to behave better than other animals.

kikokikokiko• 3 years ago

I don't think your definition of sentient is very accurate. Is a chicken sentient? Or a clam? Having a nervous system does not a sentient being make. By that definition a microcontroller with sensors for temperature would be sentient. All natural animal meat is delicious and a reaaaallly efficient way of getting practically all nutrients the human body needs to thrive. I'm always surprised by the level of personal guilty paople feel by simply living the way humans were designed to live.

callalex3• 3 years ago

Designed?

explaininjs4• 3 years ago

Beef cattle are almost always raised on open pastureland. They live a very normal, happy, life for all their years. Yes their last moments are perhaps bad, but then so are ours.

Would you rather not exist at all if it saved you from dying?

dundarious2• 3 years ago

Not true in the US, the market in question for TFA. Beef cattle are mostly raised on feed lots, fed by crops specifically grown as cattle feed, such as alfalfa. My understanding for US beef is that it's something like 80% from feed lot, 20% pasture.

diziet• 3 years ago

Key takeaway paragraphs for me:

"But roller bottles aren’t just problematic due to their miniscule output. They’re also expensive and wasteful, according to numerous biopharma and cultivated-meat industry sources. Each flask is made from sterile, single-use plastic, which must be discarded or recycled once it has generated its 2 to 3 grams of tissue. Given that an ordinary 2-liter plastic drink bottle can easily weigh 30 grams, Upside’s current production method likely produces plastic waste more than 10 times faster than it makes meat. “Can you imagine how much landfill waste you’re actually generating?” says one former employee, who was disturbed by the volume of single-use plastic being used at Upside.

Roller bottles also require a lot of tending by human beings, says David Humbird, an independent analyst and bioprocess scale-up expert and author of a comprehensive economic assessment of cultivated meat. Before it can produce its 2 to 3 grams of tissue, each bottle will need to be individually prepared, filled with cells, then periodically opened and filled with new media over the course of several days—a painstaking process that staffers must repeat under sterile conditions with hundreds of bottles before finished cell sheets can be carefully squeegeed out. It’s an approach that requires many hours of work by trained scientists to yield a tiny serving of food.

But the chicken served at Bar Crenn uses multiple animal-derived ingredients. The roller bottles in which the tissues are grown are coated with porcine gelatin to help the cells stick to the plastic surface. An FDA safety dossier submitted by Upside also confirms that it might use bovine serum to grow its cells. The current employee also said that bovine serum—derived from the blood of adult cattle—is being used in the roller bottle process for Bar Crenn."

s0rce3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure the plastic use is super relevant at lab scale, as someone who has worked in lab cell culture the amount of plastic waste is enormous from all the single use individually packed sterile equipment. However, I don't think anyone is planning to scale up plastic single use tissue culture equipment to make food, its just not going to make economic sense.

I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.

3np• 3 years ago

I can't comment on if they are claiming the current product is made in a scalable fashion or in a lab.

Seems pretty clear from TFA that unless WIRED are grossly misrepresenting facts, current product is made in a lab using roller bottles:

WIRED sent a detailed list of questions to Upside based on our reporting. In an emailed statement, Chen, the company’s chief operating officer, claimed that our reporting contained a number of factual inaccuracies but did not directly address any of the points raised. Chen went on to say that Upside’s current process for producing chicken fillets was not one the company intends “to scale in its current form.”
"All breakthrough innovations and transformative technologies, including scaling our cultivated meat products, will take time," Chen wrote in the emailed statement. "Cultivated meat is no exception. Not every research avenue, cultivator, or idea we explore will materialize exactly as we expected."

Insiders reveal problems at Upside Foods

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