By Judy McGuire
The head of the cultivated meat company talks about what inspired him to walk away from his profession as a cardiologist to create a groundbreaking cultivated meat company.
This is part of a new series at Food Dive of Q&A’s with iconoclasts in the industry doing interesting things and challenging the status quo in the food industry.
Name: Uma Valeti
Where do you live: San Francisco, CA
Occupation: Founder & CEO, Upside Foods
Growing meat, poultry and seafood out of cells is no longer a pipedream, it’s a reality and Dr. Uma Valeti’s Upside Foods is leading the charge.
In the autumn of 2022 the company obtained FDA approval for its cultivated chicken—the company’s first rollout—and in June, the USDA gave its final approval, enabling Upside Foods (as well as Eat Just) to sell its cultivated chicken in the U.S. (Dominique Crenn is serving Upside Foods’ chicken at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, and José Andrés is serving Eat Just’s Good Meat chicken at China Chilcano in Washington, D.C.)
Fueled by billionaire investors including Richard Branson and Bill Gates, Upside Foods was founded by cardiologist Valeti in 2016 as Memphis Meats and was one of the first in the cultivated meat space. Moving from medicine to manufactured meat may not be an obvious career move, but Dr. Valeti sees it along the same continuum.
“I’m able to save many more lives than I would if I continued practicing as a cardiologist—like multiple magnitudes more,” he says. The opportunity, and the potential was really hard to ignore and kept thinking somebody else could do it or would do it—and I tried to encourage a lot of people to do it.”
FOOD DIVE: What was your first job?
DR. UMA VALETI: My parents come from a very humble background; we were a farming family. My mom was the first person in her family who went to college, to learn physics and graduate. We built our own home from the ground up—laying that foundation brick by brick.
I remember sitting next to the mason and laying bricks alongside him—building our own home. I didn’t get paid for it. But that was my first job. And then I helped build my mom’s sister’s house—but this is when I was eight or ten years old.
FOOD DIVE: What inspired you to focus on your current work?
VALETI: The core inspiration is that we can do better with how foods come to the table. I love being a physician, but to be able to provide an opportunity to have a lower impact on the environment and also be able to make foods healthier than they are right now.
There are three important reasons.One is kindness to fellow life.
Number two is the opportunity to decrease the enormous and unquestionable environmental impact from growing animals. It’s one of the most unaddressed impacts, because there’s also water pollution and air pollution. And there are significant challenges related to pandemic evolution and epidemics—[meat farming] is an existential threat to humanity with the way we raise animals.
And then the third one is what if we can make meat healthier? No one’s asked this question before. We kind of take it for granted that it’s the healthiest it can be, but we think it can be much healthier.
FOOD DIVE: What is the biggest change you have seen while working your current role?
VALETI: The most important thing I’ve seen over the last seven years is the opening of minds and opening of hearts.
Just a few years ago, people said you would never get regulatory approval in the United States and now we have. The two biggest agencies in the world have given regulatory approval for safety to move ahead.
Traveling from science fiction to reality happens very quickly.
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