US: Upside Foods appoints Shah as senior vice-president of supply chain and manufacturing
He will lead the development of the company’s supply chain and strategic sourcing for cell feed and other critical inputs
Cultivated meat, poultry and seafood company Upside Foods has appointed Sheetal Shah as senior vice-president of supply chain and manufacturing.
Shah will lead the development of the Berkeley, California-based company’s supply chain and strategic sourcing for cell feed and other critical inputs that will reduce costs and enable scale. Shah will also oversee Upside’s production facilities – including its engineering, production and innovation centre and future larger-scale commercial facilities – and quality functions.
Shah was previously senior vice-president of product and operations at Impossible Foods, and chief operations officer at electronic payments multinational Verifone. Before that, Shah was chief procurement officer at Google’s Motorola division, where he started his career at as a digital signal processing software engineer, holding multiple patents in the areas of speech recognition and audio processing.
Dr Uma Valeti, founder and chief executive of Upside Foods, said: “Sheetal has everything it takes to be an Upsider – a deep commitment to making our favourite foods a force for good, a proven track record of solving seemingly intractable challenges and a passion for human health, animal welfare and the environment. I am thrilled to welcome Sheetal to the team as we unlock some of the most critical opportunities for the cultivated meat industry.”
Shah commented: “Cultivated meat will transform our food system for the better, and Upside is the clear industry leader. Developing a reliable supply chain for making cultivated meat at scale is one of the greatest opportunities for the planet.”
Upside Foods recently closed a $400 million Series C funding round at a valuation of more than $1 billion. It is using the investment to build a commercial-scale facility, develop the supply chain for cell feed and other inputs and invest in consumer education. It will also be used to commercialise the company’s first product – real chicken, grown directly from animal cells – pending regulatory review.
Over the past year, the company rebranded from Memphis Meats to Upside Foods.
