Upside Foods Withdraws $50M Bid to Buy Believer Meats’s US Facility, But Retains Interest

US startup Upside Foods has withdrawn its $50M offer to purchase the North Carolina facility of defunct cultivated meat firm Believer Meats, although it remains interested in the sale.

Eight months after abruptly ceasing operations, the fate of Believer Meats’s 200,000 sq ft cultivated meat factory in North Carolina is no closer to a resolution.

The $150M facility had received the green light from the US Department of Agriculture to manufacture cultivated chicken in November 2025, with the capacity to produce up to 26 million lbs annually. But a failure to raise funds meant the company couldn’t overcome its debts, leading to its closure just weeks later.

The company entered insolvency in Israel under the control of trustee Yoel Freilich, and its US subsidiary was put into receivership under Kevin Sink, with a North Carolina court approving the sale of Believer Meats’s assets stateside.

Californian startup Upside Foods, the best-funded player in the cultivated meat space, made a $50M offer to take over the facility in Wilson, North Carolina in June. But, as first reported by AgFunderNews, it has now dropped its bid as its conditions were not met, while retaining its interest in purchasing the plant.

Upside Foods ‘remains interested’ in factory, ‘will evaluate next steps’

Upside Foods’s original offer for Believer Meats’s assets was approved as a baseline “stalking horse” bid, with the North Carolina Business Court approving it as a baseline offer that others would have to better.

The deal included the Wilson facility, bioreactors, media and process tanks, centrifuges, freezing systems, wastewater systems, automation and production-control systems, as well as certain permits and licences.

The court said qualifying bids must exceed $52.25M and be submitted by July 20, but no such offers came by the deadline. And earlier this month, Upside Foods notified Sink that it was terminating its purchase agreement, too.

The terms of the purchase agreement allowed the Californian startup to withdraw its offer on without any liabilities on several grounds, including if the receiver breached the deal or went with a competing offer, if the agreements with creditors Gray Construction or GEA were not executed on time, if Upside Foods couldn’t determine that operating the plant avoid infringing on third-party IP, or if the court failed to enter the required orders.

“Unfortunately, the conditions of the transaction were not met, so we have exercised our termination right,” an Upside Foods spokesperson told Green Queen, echoing the statement sent to AgFunderNews.

“Upside remains interested in the facility and will evaluate next steps once the receiver outlines a new process and timeline,” they added.

In a court filing, Sink said he was now “evaluating appropriate next steps in light of the foregoing events and will proceed accordingly”: “The receiver reserves all rights against the buyer and all other parties in connection with the purchase agreement, the sale procedures order, the order amended deadlines, and otherwise.”

Lawsuit, delays, and political factors drove Believer Meats’s closure

Freilich – the Israeli trustee managing the sale of Believer Meats’s IP – told AgFunderNews that he has “received bids from several parties for the IP all through the industry”.

It’s an unfortunate saga for what was once one of the most promising innovators in the cultivated meat industry. Believer Meats had secured approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to sell its chicken in the country last year, months after completing the construction of the Wilson plant, which it claimed was the largest in the sector.

In December, however, it was sued by Gray Construction over an alleged $34M in unpaid bills for the facility, with the case going into mediation two days later. Believer Meats announced its closure soon after, though, with its bankruptcy filing calling the lawsuit “the straw that broke the camel’s back”.

It had racked up debts of $11M in Israel and around $213M in the US. Its factory construction was hit with delays and saw the cost ramp up from $138M to $154M (without including equipment).

The company had secured $387M in funding since 2018. And during 2024 and 2025, it approached a “large number of banking and financial entities” to raise debt from local and foreign banks. But its fundraising efforts did not come to fruition, with the firm citing prolonged regulatory delays due to changes in FDA policy, as well as the Israel-Hamas war and the naval blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip.

Believer Meats was a victim of the larger funding decline for cultivated meat – funding for these startups nearly halved in 2025, the fourth consecutive year of decline. It has led several other startups to close (such as Meatable), or diversify operations.

Upside Foods, which has raised nearly $400M to date, itself conducted multiple rounds of layoffs in 2024 and 2025 and paused plans to build a large-scale factory in Illinois. It has instead been working to expand the capacity of its existing EPIC facility in Emeryville, which would be able to churn out as much as 400,000 lbs of cultivated chicken.

The company has also branched out with a new life sciences division, Lucius Labs, and is now awaiting regulatory clearance for a new cultivated chicken product in the US, having secured approval for an earlier iteration in 2023.