Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken dish at Bar Crenn. Credit: Upside Foods

Cultivated-chicken producer Upside Foods announced it is ending a contract with the Bar Crenn restaurant in San Francisco, California.

The company had been serving its cell-based chicken at the fine dining venue since July last year via “monthly dinner services”.

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It had been working with the French chef, Dominique Crenn, who manages the restaurant, to develop dishes with the product.

The cultivated chicken had been sold as part of a $150 tasting menu.

Upside Foods received the green light to sell its product from the US Department of Agriculture in June 2023.

Commenting on the end to the contract with Bar Crenn, an Upside Foods spokesperson said: “We are proud to have partnered with Chef Dominique Crenn to make history, from the first-ever US sale of cultivated meat to a series of Upside dinners at Bar Crenn that delighted consumers with a delicious taste of the future.”

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The group now plans to serve the product “on the road through events” later this month.

“We’re also working hard on our next-generation, larger-scale products (which are pending regulatory approval)”.

Last September, Upside Foods announced it intended to build a new 187,000-square-foot production facility in Glenview, Illinois.

The first product to be made at the new plant will be its cultivated chicken, but the group “plans to expand to other species and whole-textured formats in the future”.

Initial capacity at the site is expected to sit around “millions of pounds of cultivated-meat products per year”, Upside Foods said in a statement. It added that the space would have “the potential to expand to over 30m pounds”.

Speaking to Just Food at the time, the company said it hoped to start production “soon”, and aimed to launch the first cell-based chicken products from the site in 2025.

Upside Foods is backed by meat majors Cargill and Tyson Foods, which have both invested in the company several times since 2017 and 2018, respectively.