n December of last year, a handful of diners sat down to a futuristic meal at 1880, a members-only restaurant in Singapore. The star ingredient was “no kill” chicken – raised not on a farm but in a laboratory bioreactor. Attendees snacked on lab-grown nuggets paired with crispy maple waffles, bao buns, and black bean puree. For the California entrepreneur Josh Tetrick, it was a breakthrough. His company, Eat Just, had become the first in the world to sell the product after receiving approval from Singapore authorities. Headlines hailed a landmark step in the quest to end animal agriculture, upend the meat industry, and redefine our diets. Eat Just’s success comes as the alternative protein industry is booming. In 2020, a record $3.1bn was invested into companies developing alternatives to meat, eggs and dairy, according to a report by the Good Food Institute. But unlike widely popular plant-based products such as the Impossible Burger, no-kill meat, also known as “cultured” or “lab grown” meat, contains real meat grown from cells derived from living animals – a solution that proponents say will offer all the benefits of meat, without the ethical and environmental downsides. That promise has spurred a global frenzy, with at least 80 startups around the world betting on everything from cultured shrimp to lab-grown steaks, backed by millions of dollars in venture capital. Eat Just has emerged as a frontrunner in this race. The company’s goal of replacing your chicken dinners with lab-grown fillets in the near future recently saw it net $370m in investments, including wealth funds backed by Qatar and the estate of the Microsoft co-founder Paul G Allen. “The mission is to put food in our mouths – and to be able to sit down with our family and friends for any breakfast, lunch or dinner – without killing an animal; without tearing down a tree,” Tetrick told the Guardian during a recent interview. But behind the headlines is a startup whose business practices have come under scrutiny in the past, and that has already reinvented itself several times. Interviews with former Eat Just employees and industry paint a picture of a founder adept at generating publicity and securing investors, even if it means sometimes bending the truth. Meanwhile, scientific experts and analysts have raised concerns that Eat Just’s breakthroughs may be more hype than reality, and that its products – and those of the cultured meat industry at large – are still far from viable on a mass scale. Eat Just began life under the name Hampton Creek, selling a flagship vegan mayonnaise called Just Mayo. In 2016, Hampton Creek faced claims that it had attempted to inflate the sales figures for Just Mayo, sending scores of its workers into grocery stores to buy out entire shelves. Senior staff reportedly challenged Tetrick’s authority, before everyone on the board, except Tetrick, resigned. In the following years, Hampton Creek changed its name to Eat Just and brought out a new plant-based scrambled egg product, Just Egg, before quietly shifting to cultured meat. Today the company has an expansive industrial headquarters in San Francisco’s hip Mission district and facilities in Singapore and Minnesota. It boasts a staff of about 170, with the charismatic, if controversial, figure of Tetrick at the helm. In 2016 the company became a “unicorn” startup with a valuation of $1bn, and its most recent rounds of investments have pushed its valuation close to $2bn. Now Tetrick says he is moving towards an IPO. Nonetheless, the company has recently faced a mounting number of lawsuits, including a suit filed in March by the landlord of its San Francisco headquarters claiming that it owes nearly $2.6m in overdue rent payments. And despite its debut in Singapore, its chicken nuggets, which it promotes under the brand name Good Meat, are probably years from being available in the US. Critics say Eat Just has overstated the promise of its product in order to take the lead in a hot investment market, even though its product may never be profitable. “This is a continuation of what the company has been doing for years: it is selling us seductive narratives with very little substance,” says Oron Catts, an artist and biology researcher at the University of Western Australia, who has become a leading critic of the push to develop lab-grown meats, saying he is skeptical of whether it can actually be done in an economical and ethical way. Michele Simon, a public health attorney who specializes in food policy, has spent decades advocating for plant-based foods and was once a supporter of Eat Just. But today says she has become disillusioned after seeing the company ensnared in repeated cycles of big money fundraising followed by controversies. “It’s all smoke and mirrors … This company keeps reinventing itself, so it’s a perpetual start-up,” she says, adding that investor interest in lab-grown meats seems overblown. “It’s a bunch of men with a lot of money in tech, who got bored with apps and are now excited to put their money towards this so-called solution to factory farming.” Be first at all costs There’s a striking anecdote in Billion Dollar Burger, a glowing biography of Tetrick and his quest to upend the meat industry. The author, Chase Purdy, describes how in 2018 Tetrick tried to sneak a package of lab grown meat into the Netherlands, just hours before a new European law was set to take effect. Tetrick hoped that by selling his meat ahead of the deadline he would be grandfathered into the market and avoid regulation. The plan was foiled, however, when inspectors got wind of the sale. It’s a story that sums up what former staff and industry figures say is Tetrick’s enduring strategy – be first at all costs. “Tetrick has this ‘go get ’em’ attitude,” says Peter Verstrate, the co-founder of Mosa Meat, a Dutch company that’s currently developing a cultured-meat beef burger. Eat Just’s European competitors have been more cautious, says Verstrate. Mosa Meat’s burger, for example, still costs more than $100 per serving to manufacture and is at least a year away from market. “If anyone were eager to be – at any cost – the first, it would be Josh Tetrick,” Verstrate says. “He’s kind of the cowboy of the field.” Tetrick founded Hampton Creek in 2011 with his childhood friend Josh Balk, then a manager at the Humane Society. Tetrick was 30, with a law degree but no scientific or entrepreneurial background. From the outset he showed a knack for raising capital but had a tendency to rapidly “blow through” the money he raised, says Javier Colón, the original operations manager and third employee of the company. Colón claims he tried to rein in the spending and Tetrick fired him; he says he has been a detractor of Tetrick’s leadership ever since. The company gained early fame after it fended off a lawsuit from the food giant Unilever, who sued over the use of “mayo” in the product’s name. By 2014, Tetrick had impressed investors by getting Just Mayo on to the shelves of major supermarkets including Whole Foods and Safeway. But controversy hit when, in a series of 2016 articles, Bloomberg reported the company had instructed employees to buy up huge quantities of Just Mayo – sometimes 140 jars a day – in a scheme allegedly aimed at driving up revenues as Hampton Creek was seeking further investments. The company claimed it was only buying small amounts for quality control testing. Investigations by the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission were eventually dropped. A former scientist at the company, who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, confirmed similar details to those reported by Bloomberg, saying employees were called to an “all hands” meeting and asked to buy out a store’s entire mayonnaise stock, offering an explanation to store managers such as procuring supplies for a company picnic. “That sort of thing was pretty common. It was the way the place was run,” says the scientist, who adds that it wasn’t unusual to see slide decks for prospective investors that overstated the company’s capabilities, or to be asked to avoid disclosing the real facts to board members when they came to visit headquarters. When employees complained about misleading practices, the scientist says “managers would just say: ‘This is supposed to be aspirational. It’s just marketing’.” By early 2017 nearly all the company’s directors had resigned, leaving only Tetrick on the board. Bloomberg reported that the resignations followed months of infighting, during which directors and investors “lost faith in the aggressive founder they’d previously hailed as a visionary”. In a statement, Andrew Noyes, Eat Just’s spokesman, said the Bloomberg articles were based on false charges by disgruntled former staff. Noyes also said Eat Just had commissioned an extensive audit by a major accounting firm, which found that the buybacks amounted to less than 1% of the company’s net revenue at the time. Several other former employees say they did not find Hampton Creek’s practices particularly questionable, with one former manager describing its ethics as typical for Silicon Valley. “I think it’s a normal Silicon Valley story of a company that was over-hyped and has lived through this rollercoaster of hype and scandal and now it’s just plodding along,” says the former employee, who asked not to be named because he signed a non-disclosure agreement. “Josh is a normal Silicon Valley huckster. He stays on the legal side of the line. But he straddles that line,” he says. “It’s just like Uber. People keep saying it’s a house of cards and it’s going to fall down. But it just keeps standing.” In response to criticism of his leadership, Tetrick says he is driven by an ambitious vision for the company, even if that vision has yet to be fully realized. “Some companies are going to take longer to get to profitability than others,” he says. “But it’s really important that you have a path.” ‘A thousand things can go wrong’ Eat Just joined the cellular meat race 2017, but the technology behind it is hardly new. Scientists have used the technique of reproducing cells in vitro as far back as the development of the polio vaccine in the 1950s, and it has since served as the backbone of many biotechnology breakthroughs. More recently, the idea was picked up by entrepreneurs who saw its potential for commercial meat production. The first lab-grown burger was created by a Dutch professor in 2013 and came with a price tag of $325,000 per serving. “Since then, the space has exploded,” says Harini Venkataraman, an analyst who follows the cell-based meat sector for Lux Research. She now tracks 80 companies racing to develop products, backed by $800m in investments. Eat Just brought in a team of international scientists, including several with backgrounds in cellular development. But experts, including the lead professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s alternative meat lab, say that Eat Just and others still have huge hurdles to overcome. Chief among them is cost. While numerous companies have come up with palatable formulations, few report being able to make their products for less than about $100 for a meal-size serving. Solving how to produce cultured meat at anything close to supermarket meat prices will ultimately make or break the industry’s mission. Furthermore, companies face the uphill battle of convincing government regulators to approve their products – then getting the public to buy them. While production costs have dropped significantly since 2013, Venkataraman says they remain a major problem. “No one has scaled up production to the point where they can produce the meat at a competitive price.” In 2019, Eat Just said it had reduced the cost of a single chicken nugget from $1,000 to $50 – which still amounts to a very expensive pound of chicken. Eat Just’s chicken nuggets – described in a sample recipe in the company’s 2020 patent as containing cultured cells bound together with plant protein, meat glue and fat – have a taste that testers compare to a McDonald’s patty. They were temporarily offered at the Singapore restaurant on a very limited basis, and a small number of portions are now available through a delivery service. Tetrick acknowledges that actual production costs are substantially higher than the $23-per-dinner price tag. He won’t say how much money the company is losing on the sales. Professor Ricardo San Martin, who runs the alternative meats lab at Berkeley’s engineering school, says the challenges of scaling up are also technical. Making larger quantities tends to exponentially multiply problems, from necrotic cells to viral infections. “If you have a thousand cells, that’s a thousand things that can go wrong,” says San Martin, who is skeptical that lab-grown meat can ever be economically viable en masse. “It’s the kind of thing Silicon Valley loves. It’s flashy and high tech. But there are real barriers to scaling it up.” Another problem is fetal bovine serum (FBS) – a blood-like substance extracted from unborn calves that has historically been vital to growing cultured meat. The industry has faced criticism that its dependence on FBS runs counter to claims of being cruelty free. Scientists have struggled for decades to produce a viable FBS alternative. “You take out the FBS and the wheels just fall off,” says Andrew Pelling, a researcher at the University of Ottawa. “The cells stop growing; they look weird; they die. It’s not good.” Pelling has been culturing cells in his lab for 20 years, and searching for a synthetic replacement for FBS for at least 10. Eat Just and at least one other cultured meat start-up say they have the capabilities to produce synthetic alternatives to FBS, though Tetrick admits FBS is used in the nuggets sold in Singapore. But Pelling says he has yet to see hard evidence that anyone has developed a viable FBS alternative. “If someone has a workable replacement, I will be their first customer,” he says. “But the key thing is you have to validate it. I need data and evidence to prove what you’re claiming, because the whole biomedical community for decades has wanted a solution to this and hasn’t been able to come up with it.” ‘Trust gets destroyed’ Despite the many challenges, investors have continued to pour money into the effort. Since its founding, Eat Just has raised more than $800m from venture capitalists, including early investments from Khosla Ventures and Li Ka-Shing, with backers stretching from Asia to the Middle East. But while the company’s revenues remain private, public records reviewed by the Guardian suggest some cracks in its financial foundations. In March 2020, Eat Just’s San Francisco landlord filed a legal suit over $349,000 in unpaid rent for the company’s headquarters, giving the company three days to “pay rent or quit”. In March, the landlord, 2000 Folsom Partners LLC, filed a new suit claiming that Eat Just was now $2.6m behind in its rent. In July, the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company sued Eat Just for failing to pay a 2019 bill for hemp seeds totalling $15,000. In February, VWR International, a company that provides laboratory equipment, sued for $189,000 in unpaid debt. And in April, FedEx sued, saying Eat Just hadn’t paid $72,863 in delivery bills over a four-year period. Noyes says Eat Just fell under San Francisco’s provision granting companies rent relief during the pandemic. He says other than the rent, the company had paid all the bills in question. But court records indicate the lawsuits remain active – except for the FedEx case, which was settled on 27 May. Many businesses have struggled to pay their bills during the pandemic, yet Eat Just received $4,294,987 in federal pandemic assistance relief loans under the Paycheck Protection Program in early 2020, according to a federal database of the loans, published by the Washington Post, alongside the hundreds of millions in new investment. Tetrick says the company does not comment on litigation. But he says it is in a solid financial position. “There are a lot of challenges around building the company,” says Tetrick, but “raising capital is not one of them”. Nonetheless, questions remain as to whether Eat Just’s cultured meat products – and those of its many competitors – stand a chance of changing the world, or even turning a profit, any time soon. Martin Rowe, a researcher who heads the Vegan America Project, pointed out in a 2019 white paper that even beyond the huge technical challenges, cultured meat had yet to gain the approval of US food regulators and earn the trust of consumers. He warned that unless the emerging field could protect against fraud and overclaiming, it risked hosting another Theranos – the disgraced blood testing company – with founders that might promise “a technology that changes everything and doesn’t exist”. Pelling believes that the problems inherent to lab-grown meat can someday be solved, but he worries about companies like Eat Just rushing to market with solutions that haven’t been scientifically vetted or transparently explained to the public. “My concern is this could blow up at some point,” says Pelling, “And what might have been a real solution – maybe not the whole ecosystem, but maybe part of it – might never happen, because trust gets destroyed and wiped out.”