Upside Foods sues a former employee over meat technology cultivated in a secret laboratory

At first glance, 2021 is a good year for Upside Foods. It is one of the most well-funded meat-breeding companies among dozens of start-ups. They are vying to brew real meat in bioreactors instead of raising and slaughtering animals. May company-its Investors include Softbank, Tyson Foods, Whole Foods and Bill Gates-renamed from them Previous name, Memphis MeatIn November, it opened a 53,000-square-foot pilot production facility in Emeryville, California, making it one of the few competitors to take an important step toward scale.

But behind the scenes, not everything is going well. Legal documents filed with the District Court for the Northern District of California indicate that Upside is currently in a lawsuit claiming that a former employee had stolen thousands of confidential documents, including trade secrets, from the company. The court documents have not been publicly reported, focusing on a small team within Upside that is working on some of the company’s most secretive and forward-looking projects, which collapsed after the company’s co-founder Nicholas Genovese left.

On April 1, 2021, Genovese was asked to participate in a performance evaluation meeting with the company’s senior management at Starbucks. According to Genovese and another person familiar with the matter, the co-founder was told that he had been fired by the company and was asked to return the key card that allowed him to enter the Upside office. “It was very tense at that moment,” said Genovese, who founded the company in 2015 with current CEOs Uma Valeti and Will Clem. Upside Foods confirmed that Genovese’s daily participation in Upside ended in April. “His role in the company has changed to better align with his personal career goals and our long-term business needs. Given the confidentiality of personnel issues, we cannot comment further,” said Jaci Kassmeier, Vice President of Personnel at Upside Foods . As part of his departure, Genovese signed a non-disclosure agreement with the startup, and he emphasized that his comments were not intended to criticize or disparage the company.

Before he left, Genovese was the manager of a seemingly important but small team in Upside. Named Blue Sky-the team’s motto is “The sky is the limit”-the three-person skunk factory is responsible for a key task: to develop a technology that can produce higher output and lower cost than the company’s existing technology. The process of growing cell-based meat. According to legal documents, the work of Blue Sky is progressing smoothly. “The potential is huge and we have made incredible progress,” Genovese said.

Shortly before Genovese left, the team broke the internal record of biomass conversion efficiency: growing meat from nutrients in a cost-effective manner.Create the cost of laboratory-grown meat Hundreds or thousands of times There are more meats than traditional meat, so finding a cheap and fast way to grow cells is a major challenge for companies trying to bring products to market. In order to protect the valuable intellectual property rights that are being developed, Blue Sky’s work is a closely guarded secret even within the company. The physical barrier of the laboratory prevented other Upside employees from seeing what the team was doing, and the data generated by Blue Sky was separated from other company data.

After Genovese left, the blue sky began to fall apart. In early April, a Blue Sky employee who had been working at Upside since January 2021 left the company, leaving only one member of the team: Senior Research Assistant Napat Tandikul. She joined the company as a research assistant in December 2019. Since November 2020, she has been working on designing a new type of incubator: a device, also called a bioreactor, used to cultivate animal cells and eventually become aquaculture The main ingredient of meat products.