UPSIDE Foods Appoints Veteran Cleantech Finance Leader as Chief Financial Officer and Promotes SVP to Chief Supply Chain & Manufacturing Officer

- UPSIDE Foods strengthens executive team as the company focuses on scalability, commercialization, and sustainable unit economics
- Jeremy Hux joins UPSIDE as Chief Financial Officer, bringing extensive financial leadership experience in both sustainability and technology sectors
- Technology veteran and UPSIDE's former SVP of Supply Chain & Manufacturing, Sheetal Shah, has been promoted to Chief Supply Chain & Manufacturing Officer 

BERKELEY, Calif., Jan. 31, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- UPSIDE Foods, the leading cultivated meat, poultry and seafood company, announced that Jeremy Hux has joined UPSIDE Foods as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and Sheetal Shah, former Senior Vice President (SVP) of Supply Chain and Manufacturing at UPSIDE, has been promoted to Chief Supply Chain and Manufacturing Officer. These strategic appointments emphasize UPSIDE's commitment to assembling a best-in-class team focused on scalability and financial discipline for long-term success.

"Jeremy and Sheetal's leadership and deep expertise in scaling and disciplined growth will be crucial in this next chapter," said Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods. "Equally significant is their unwavering commitment to shaping a better future. Their mission-driven mindsets, complemented by their decades of experience in finance and supply chain management, respectively, will be instrumental in UPSIDE's success."

Leveraging extensive financial leadership expertise in sustainability and technology, Jeremy Hux will lead and drive UPSIDE's financial strategies to facilitate scale. With a career spanning over 25 years in CFO roles, investment banking, and private equity, Hux has garnered substantial experience across disruptive industries, including clean technology, clean energy, and synthetic biology, and has led and advised on over $85 billion of financing and M&A transactions.

Before joining UPSIDE, Hux served as the Chief Financial Officer for Manus Bio, where he was responsible for capital raising and overall financial operations, including for their advanced precision fermentation facility. Prior to Manus Bio, he led Sustainable and Clean Technology Investment Banking practices at Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Marathon Capital, and he was a Partner at True North Venture Partners.

"I've dedicated my career to sustainability and clean tech, driven by the belief that we all have a responsibility to address global challenges," said Jeremy Hux, CFO at UPSIDE Foods. "I'm excited to join UPSIDE at this pivotal point of scaling commercial operations and look forward to helping address the critical challenge of reducing the environmental impact of our food supply and sustainably feeding a growing global population with finite resources."

In addition, Sheetal Shah has been promoted from the role of SVP to Chief Supply Chain and Manufacturing Officer. Shah leads UPSIDE's manufacturing, supply chain, and strategic sourcing efforts. Since joining UPSIDE in 2021, Shah has played a key role in spearheading the development and expansion of UPSIDE's supply chain and manufacturing operations. Significant accomplishments include strategically sourcing cell feed and vital inputs with a focus on cost reduction and scalability, overseeing operations at the Engineering, Production & Innovation Center (EPIC), and leading UPSIDE's plans for manufacturing at commercial scale.

"I'm extremely proud of what our team at UPSIDE has accomplished already," said Sheetal Shah, Chief Supply Chain and Manufacturing Officer. "We're focused now on scalability, expanding our technology platform and building a world class supply chain and manufacturing footprint that will deliver against our production, cost, and impact targets, setting the stage for our success and allowing us to realize the positive impact we aspire to make."

Prior to UPSIDE Foods, Shah served as Senior Vice President of Product & Operations at Impossible Foods, where he managed the supply chain through a period of global turbulence during the COVID-19 pandemic, expanded the product portfolio, enabled retail expansion globally and unlocked manufacturing capacity. He was also formerly the Chief Operations Officer at Verifone, where he managed global supply chains through periods of hypergrowth. Before that, Shah was the Chief Procurement Officer at Google's Motorola division, where he was responsible for end-to-end global supplier management.

This announcement comes after a series of milestones for UPSIDE. These include the completion of the first-ever consumer sale of cultivated meat in the United States and the expansion of its commercial product portfolio to include ground-textured cultivated meat products, pending regulatory approval. For UPSIDE Foods' press kit, please see here.

About UPSIDE Foods

Based in Berkeley, CA, UPSIDE Foods grows meat, poultry and seafood directly from real animal cells. These products are not vegan or vegetarian—they are delicious meat, made without the need to raise and slaughter billions of animals. Founded as the world's first cultivated meat company in 2015, UPSIDE Foods has achieved numerous industry-defining milestones, including being granted approval to sell cultivated meat in the United States in June 2023 and completing the first consumer sale of cultivated meat in the U.S. The company believes that people shouldn't have to choose between the foods they love and a thriving planet, and is working to build a better food system with access to delicious, humane, and sustainable meat, poultry, and seafood. UPSIDE Foods has won various industry awards, including New York Times' Good Tech Awards, FastCo's Next Big Thing in Tech, and the Best and Brightest Companies to Work For in the Nation by the National Association for Business Resources. UPSIDE Foods has raised a total of $608 million, including from the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), Baillie Gifford, Bill Gates, Cargill, Future Ventures, John Doerr, John Mackey, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest, Richard Branson, Softbank, Temasek, Threshold, Tyson Foods, and others. For more information, please visit www.upsidefoods.com.

Media Contact
Brooke Whitney
media@upsidefoods.com

SOURCE UPSIDE Foods