Just look, 2021 was a good year for Upside Foods – one of the most lucrative companies to buy meat among many startups who want to make real meat within bioreactors instead of breeding and killing animals. In May the company-itself costs include Softbank, Tyson Foods, Whole Foods, and Bill Gates – also changed from their own Old name, Memphis Meats. In November it opened a 53,000-square-foot airstrip in Emeryville, California, to become one of the few competitors to take up the most important role.
But behind the scenes not everything has been going well. Legal documents filed in the Northern District Court in California show that Upside is still embroiled in a lawsuit alleging that a former employee stole company firm files, including trade secrets. Court documents, which have not been disclosed, refer to a small group within Upside who are engaged in other underground activities and who are looking forward to the company, which came to light after the departure of cofounder Nicholas Genovese.
On April 1, 2021, Genovese was invited to attend a workshop to review the performance of senior company executives at Starbucks. According to Genovese and another person familiar with the matter, the co-founder was told he had been fired from the company and asked to return the necessary cards that gave him access to Upside’s offices. “It was very difficult at the time,” said Genovese, who co-founded the company in 2015 with current CEO Uma Valeti and Will Clem. Upside Foods confirmed that Genovese and Upside’s daily exposure ended in April. “His responsibilities at the company have evolved to fit our ambitions and aspirations for our long-term business. We can no longer be held accountable for the confidentiality of employee matters,” said Jaci Kassmeier, vice president of Upside Foods. Genovese signed an undisclosed agreement with its origins as part of its departure, and emphasized that its comments were not anti-critical or offensive to the company.
Prior to his departure, Genovese was in charge of a small but seemingly complex group within Upside. The group’s Blue Sky-maxim was the “Heavenly Earth” – three skunkworks were responsible for a very important task: to create a system that could grow more processed meat and produce at a lower cost than the company’s modern technology. . According to legal documents, the work of Blue Sky is progressing well. Genovese states: “There were so many things he could do, and we were making so much progress.
Just before Genovese left, the team broke down the internal record of biomass conversion: growing animals from food in a cheaper way. Manufacture of laboratory-made animal wood hundreds or thousands than ordinary animals, so finding a way to grow cells cheaply and quickly is very difficult for companies trying to bring things to market. Protecting the precious assets it was making, Blue Sky’s work was a secure secret even within the company. A physical barrier in the laboratory prevented some Upside employees from seeing what the team was doing, and the data produced by Blue Sky was stored separately from other companies.
After Genovese left, Blue Sky began to break down. In early April, one Blue Sky employee who had lived at Upside since January 2021 left the company, leaving only one remaining member: fellow investigator Napat Tandikul. He joined the company in December 2019 as a research partner, and since November 2020 he has been working on developing a new type of farmer: a device, also known as a bioreactor, which is used to grow animal cells that eventually become farmers. a major component of traditional animals.