BERKELEY, CALIF. — Upside Foods is tapping a veteran of the plant-based industry to lead its commercialization efforts. Sheetal Shah has been named senior vice president of supply chain and manufacturing at the Berkeley, Calif.-based cultivated meat company.
Shah will oversee the development of Upside’s supply chain and strategic sourcing for cell feed and other inputs that will reduce costs and enable scale, the company said. He also will oversee Upside’s production facilities, including its Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC) and future large-scale commercial facilities, as well as quality functions.
He joins the company from Impossible Foods, where he was senior vice president of product and operations, managing the supply chain throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that he was chief operations officer at Verifone and chief procurement officer at Google’s Motorola division. He began his career at Motorola as a DSP software engineer and holds several patents for speech recognition and audio processing technologies.
“Cultivated meat will transform our food system for the better, and Upside is the clear industry leader,” Shah said. “Developing a reliable supply chain for making cultivated meat at scale is one of the greatest opportunities for the planet.”
He joins Upside on the heels of its $400 million Series C fundraiser in April. The round was the largest to date for the cultivated meat industry and brought Upside’s total valuation to more than $1 billion, according to the company. Over the past year Upside has rebranded from Memphis Meats, announced chicken as its first consumer product, developed an animal-free cell feed, acquired cultured seafood company Cultured Decadence and opened its EPIC center.
