Upside Foods, the US cell-based poultry business, has confirmed its interest in acquiring the manufacturing facility of defunct peer Believer Meats.
Believer Meats, previously trading as Future Meat Technologies, threw in the towel in December after struggling to secure new funds.
The sale of its assets, including a newly completed production plant for cultivated chicken in Wilson, North Carolina, is being managed by BDO Consulting Group.
According to AgFunderNews, BDO has earmarked Berkeley, California-based Upside Foods as the preferred buyer of the factory but the administrator was said to be leaving the door open to other interested parties ahead of a 20 July deadline.
While BDO did not respond to Just Food’s request for comment on the status of the Believer Meats proceedings, Upside Foods acknowledged its intent to purchase the site.
“We've made significant strides in scaling our cultivated-meat production over the past several years,” Upside Foods responded with a brief statement.
“This North Carolina facility would accelerate the expansion of our production capacity and help us meet growing demand for Upside chicken much sooner.”
Upside Foods and cultivated-meat peer Good Meat are the only US companies to so far gain regulatory approval for their products by the US Department of Agriculture, which was granted in June 2023.
Restaurants have been Upside Foods' route to commercialisation. Just Food has pressed the business this week for an update on what foodservice customers it supplies and whether its products have yet been launched in retail.
Two years ago, Upside Foods confirmed it was ending a foodservice contract with the Bar Crenn restaurant in San Francisco, California.
The company’s cell-based chicken had been served at the fine-dining venue since July 2023 via “monthly dinner services”.
Asked in July 2024 for confirmation of when Upside Foods was likely to win regulatory approval for full commercialisation at the retail level, a spokesperson said: “We’re currently going through the process”.
Those comments came as the company clarified it was cutting staff, although it would not disclose the numbers at the time.
“Upside is focused on our next chapter of scale and commercialisation. To stay agile in the face of an uncertain macroenvironment, we made adjustments to certain programmes and reduced some positions,” Upside Foods said.
Meanwhile, in February of that year, Upside Foods announced it was putting a plan for a new factory in the US on hold.
A commercial 87,000 square-foot facility in Illinois was to be the company’s first “large scale” factory, with the capacity to produce “millions of pounds of cultivated-meat products per year and the potential to expand to over 30m pounds”.
More generally, cultivated meat companies have struggled to gain regulatory approvals, posing a barrier to commercialisation.
Aleph Farms, which like Believer Meats is headquartered in Israel, confirmed with Just Food last year that the business had yet to make a profit.
However, co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia said Aleph Farms was hoping to reach that milestone by the end of 2028 in terms of EBITDA profitability.
