By Elizabeth Flood
In time for major breakthroughs in the industry, the company has named a new chief scientific officer and tapped a former Twitter executive as its chief legal officer.
With regulatory approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Upside Foods is entering a new chapter as they are now “officially a food company,” said COO Amy Chen.
“We are selling cultivated meat to real consumers, and we are certainly in the next chapter of scale up and commercialization.”
This new chapter brings the need for a new team, according to Chen, to not only scale the company but also the industry — which started with a few players and is now an industry which includes about 150 organizations.
New era means new challenges
“There’s a few opportunities and challenges that we as a company, and as an industry need to think about.” The first being technical scale up, Chen said.
“How do you take what’s working at a couple of 1000 liters and scale it up to being able to produce millions of pounds, and how does the science translate at scale?” she added.
With the promotion of Kevin Kayser to chief scientific officer, it will be his responsibility to sort through these issues.
Kayser was previously the senior vice president of research and development before being promoted, and has a rich history which includes three decades in the biotech industry, at companies like SAFC, MilliporeSigma and Gas Technology Institute. At Upside, Kayser’s experience in the cultivated meat space started by leading strategy on how to feed the cells, when to feed them, and how to do that in a way that would create a delicious result, according to Chen, “this is still an ongoing process.”
However, now, Kayser’s focus will be how to create a meaningful impact throughout the entire category, and how to do that at scale.
“We know that we played a pioneering role in creating an industry, but we also realize the magnitude of the opportunity of really creating an industry that is operating at a scale and that has meaningful impact is going to take not only one company, but often will take an entire ecosystem of academic and industry partners to really move the needle,” said Chen.
Along with Kayser’s work, Upside’s new chief legal officer, Sean Edgett, will be responsible for tackling another industry wide challenge: regulatory headaches.
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