UPSIDE Foods' lab-cultivated chicken among the first to receive USDA approval

Will chicken meat grown in a lab still taste like chicken? UPSIDE Foods COO Amy Chen joins Yahoo Finance Live to explain the food innovator's path to scale and sustainability in developing lab-cultivated chicken meat.

Video Transcript

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- Soon you will be able to eat chicken that didn't hatch from an egg. A lab-grown meat could be coming to a restaurant near you, after companies, Upside Foods and Good Meat received grants of approval from the USDA to produce and sell their lab-cultivated chicken products in the United States. Joining us now, we want to bring in Amy Chen, Upside Foods COO.

Amy, it's great to see you. Before we get into this and what this means for your business going forward, I think a lot of people are asking themselves, what exactly is lab-grown chicken? What is it and how do you make it?

AMY CHEN: Right. Thanks, Shawna. It's good to be with you today. We call it cultivated chicken. So it's essentially the meat that you have always known but made in a new way. So it's literally grown from animal cells.

So we start with a sample of cells, we feed them nutrients, vitamins, et cetera, in what we call a cultivator. And after anywhere from one to three weeks, they produce meat that we can then harvest and formulate into any delicious product that you love.

- Where do the animal cells come from?

AMY CHEN: So the animal cells can come from a variety of places. They come from the animal species, so a chicken. In our case, we started with a fertilized egg.

- What about costs? Because that has been a huge issue when it comes to lab-grown meat, how costly it is to produce it. What does that look like? How does it stack up against, what, I guess, most people would call traditional meat?

AMY CHEN: Like any new innovation, whether it's electric vehicles, or cell phones, or anything in that era or in that genre, it will start at a price premium. So we will be launching in select restaurants with limited partners, and over time we will continuing to work on both scale and cost. So expect to pay a premium at the outset.

- But what does that mean in terms of a premium, if you compare it to sort of a standard chicken dish? I realize these are going to be in restaurants, premium restaurants. But what kind of price tag are we talking about?

AMY CHEN: So at a restaurant, think about an organic or a free-range chicken. We'll be in the range of what you would expect to pay for an entree at the restaurants where we launch.

- Amy, how much of this can you make? There's, I believe right now, you are you're able to make small volumes of this, but scaling it to make larger volumes. Was does the timeline look like for that and the cost of that?

AMY CHEN: It's a great question. So right now, we're operating out of EPIC, which is our engineering production and Innovation Center. And out of that facility, we can produce anywhere from 50,000 pounds, in its current configuration, up to about 400,000 if we expand. And we're simultaneously working on a commercial plant that will be able to produce millions of pounds.

So the real vision and the impact is that everything we are doing is working towards scale, because that's what will ultimately allow us to have the impact that we want on the environment, on animal welfare, on human health.

- So let's talk about that impact to the environment. I mean, what does the carbon footprint look like for cultivated meat? There's certainly been some criticism about just how energy intensive it can be to grow it in a lab, unless you use a 100% renewable energy. Is that what Upside Foods is doing?

AMY CHEN: Our current facility is powered by 100% renewable energy. But let me, Akiko, take a step back. So conventional animal agriculture is responsible for 15% of all greenhouse gases. It's a third of arable land and water. And we slaughter 70 billion plus land animals a year. So the impact and the scale is absolutely staggering.

There have been a number of third-party peer reviewed studies that have said, at scale, expect with cultivated meat to reduce that footprint by as much as 90%. So it is a very meaningful impact.

- And finally, there's a lot of viewers who are watching this who aren't going to be near these restaurants where the initial tests will be carried out. How long until consumers will be able to find these meats in grocery stores?

AMY CHEN: I expect it to be a few years before its grocery stores. Although we're running a contest now, so consumers all across the country can actually, until midnight tonight, sign up to be amongst the first to try it in our restaurant launch at Bar Crenn. But we'll be debuting in restaurants, starting in San Francisco, and expanding from there.

- Amy, there's a lot to be excited about. But I think many people out there are a little hesitant, they don't know exactly what this is going to taste like. How do you get those people on board? What's your message to those that are saying, hey, I don't think it's going to taste anything like traditional meat.

AMY CHEN: I will tell you first, I'm a Texan. So I love my meat, I love my barbecue, and it's something that's very precious to me. I will share my own experience. When I first put this bite of cultivated chicken in my mouth, I thought, this is the most amazing, remarkable thing I've ever eaten. It didn't require an animal to be slaughtered. It could literally change the world. And then I chewed and I thought, it tastes just like chicken.

And that's exactly what we hope for. That the future tastes as delicious as consumers expect their current meats to be but in a way, and made in a way that people can feel really great about.