$2 Cultivated Pork? Fork & Good on First Sales, Funding and the Future of FDA

Niya Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, on what separates the startup from other cultivated meat players, earning its first revenue, and its regulatory plans.

It was just only in January 2024 that, in an Irish pub in Davos, Switzerland, Fork & Good held Europe’s first public tasting of cultivated meat. The startup served dumplings made from a blend of 30% cell-cultured pork and 70% conventional pork (plus a cultivated and plant-based mix for vegetarians), with more than half of the taste-testers preferring the blended meat version.

This was a marker of progress for the New Jersey-based firm, getting some real-world feedback from an international group of people just 10 minutes away from the World Economic Forum conference.

Now, just over a year later, the company has earned its first revenue, courtesy of a joint development agreement with an $8B global food manufacturer. “It is an exciting milestone to earn revenue in cultivated red meat, and shows market validation of our technology,” co-founder and CEO Niya Gupta tells Green Queen, though she declines to name the company.

In fact, Fork & Good has signed deals with three clients and is in talks with about a dozen manufacturers and retailers – all focused on using cultivated pork as a complementary ingredient in both meat and plant-based formulations. Currently, the protein is being tested as part of ham and meat snacks.

“We have always been a B2B company,” says Gupta. “When we first started, African swine fever had wiped out 25% of the world’s hog herd, and our customers were struggling with reinforcing their supply chains. Pathogen shocks, tariffs, and tighter demand conditions have all resulted in significant volatility, which poses challenges in consistency of product and cost for our customers.”

Joining forces with an industry pioneer

For Gupta, it’s hard to imagine a life without dim sum, the Cantonese term for a whole host of dumplings served for breakfast in restaurants across China. After all, she grew up in Hong Kong, which consumes more meat per capita than any other place. “My family were farmers [in India] for generations, and I spent every summer at the farm, which gave me a deep respect for agriculture and also a desire to improve our food systems,” she says.

Having spent 15 years working in agriculture, including a consultancy stint at McKinsey, it made sense to “come full circle and be a future farmer”.

To do so, she joined forces with Gabor Forgacs, a pioneer of cultivated meat. He co-founded Modern Meadow, one of the earliest players in the space, showcasing a prototype of a cultivated sausage at TEDMED 2011, a whole two years earlier than Dr Mark Post’s world-famous burger.

Modern Meadow “really sparked people’s imagination and showed it was possible to build meat from cells”, says Gupta. Cost barriers led Forgacs and his team to pivot to cultivated leather at the time, and today, the company makes cow-hide alternatives out of plant proteins and upcycled post-consumer tyres. Forgacs left the firm in 2016, and co-founded Fork & Good with Gupta two years later.

“We are working together to invent a much more practical, cost-based approach informed by my experience in the food industry and using his expertise in the fields of tissue engineering and biophysics,” she says.

“We need all the solutions possible to keep having safe, affordable meat and if we [want to] have any chance of meeting our 1.5°C global warming target. Cultivated meat builds a more resilient supply chain and helps us do it sustainably.”

How Fork & Good makes its cultivated pork

Gupta’s agtech background led her to realise that cultivated meat is a lot like hydroponic farming, where you “optimise input for output” – that is, you grow vegetables in nutrient-rich water instead of soil.

“In the same spirit, our process is based on the mutual optimisation of the three input components – the cell line, the medium and the bioprocess – to grow animal cells (i.e. the biomass) more efficiently than livestock,” she explains.

“Specifically, we developed immortal cell lines and corresponding medium with an iterative approach by analysing the waste medium and determining what the cells use (for example, which amino acids and in what concentration). We adopted a bioreactor technology that assures the best control over the way our adherent cells grow in aggregates – we can control the size of the aggregates – to maximise cell density,” she adds.

This approach reduces the calorie intensity of feedstock fourfold for pork and fivefold for beef, making Fork & Good confident it can “grow meat with fewer resources than animals”.

The optimisation through the three components forms the base of its patented integrated cell manufacturing (ICM) platform, which lets it grow a large number of cells in a cost-effective manner. In addition, the company has an optimised downstream process and continuous harvesting process at its pilot facility in Jersey City, which can produce about seven tonnes of product in less than 800 sq ft of space.

“The ICM, combined with our continuous downstream processing and the fact that we are not using stem cells – instead, [we] are editing muscle cells to skip the cost and complexity of differentiation – substantially differentiates Fork & Good from others,” says Gupta.

“Furthermore, unlike many companies focused entirely on the biology, we are also addressing capital expenditure by having low-cost distributed manufacturing, made possible via designed-for-purpose bioreactors and continuous harvesting,” she adds.

“In particular, this allows us to build much smaller facilities (10×1000 litres) to scale up production to commercially relevant quantities of biomass – $10-20M for a single facility rather than hundreds of millions.”

Fork & Good’s target pricing is $2 per lb, which would match commodity pork, and in-house R&D data supports this goal. But the bulk of this work comes during scale-up and engineering. “In our first scale-up factory, we’re targeting $5 per lb for 100% biomass with our more tried and tested cell line, which would be possible at commercial scale today. This is based on existing observed yields, media costs and purchasing components at scale,” Gupta says.

US regulatory plans hinge on RFK Jr

The startup’s initial geographic priorities are North America and Southeast Asia. “We have been working with the FDA and USDA for two years, and are applying to Singapore as well,” says Gupta.

The latter was the first country to allow the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, and authorised Australia’s Vow to sell cultured quail and foie gras too last year. “Some of our partners in other Asian countries are keeping us informed of the latest regulatory developments for us to be opportunistic there,” she says.

In the US, only Eat Just and Upside Foods have been cleared to sell cultivated meat so far, and with Robert F Kennedy Jr sworn in as the new health secretary, uncertainty looms for how this sector is regulated.

“We believe the biggest relevant challenge in the US is the uncertainty facing all government agencies at this moment,” says Gupta. “If the FDA has fewer resources or is reorganised, this will impact their bandwidth for review and lengthen processing times. Diversifying geographic focus is a good idea to mitigate regulatory risk.”

The growing number of US states looking to restrict or ban these proteins complicates these matters.

Fork & Good has been vocal about this – before Florida finalised its ban on cultivated meat last summer, its head of business opportunities, Emily Bogan, told a House panel in February: “A ban like this threatens a free market and sets a dangerous precedent for government interference.”

If all goes well, though, looking at past approvals, Gupta envisions Q2 2026 as the earliest launch date for its cultivated pork.

‘Nothing is inevitable’ – including cultivated meat

Fork & Good has so far attracted $30M from investors including True Ventures, Starlight Ventures, BBG Ventures, and Leaps, the VC arm of German pharmaceutical giant Bayer. “We closed a Series A2 round October last year, to fund our response to FDA feedback and deliver on customer deals we had signed,” notes Gupta. “We have $1-2M open for this same round closing at the end of Q1.”

Cultivated meat has been a victim of the food tech investor fallout, with companies in the category raising 40% less money last year than they did in 2023. Worryingly, they only secured $6M in the second half of last year.

“The funding landscape has definitely changed due to the burst of the hype bubble combined with macro forces in VC. Our last round was the most challenging of the three institutional rounds we have raised. Luckily, as we have stayed capital-efficient and have had reasonable valuations, [we] were less impacted than others,” Gupta explains.

“If startups rode the wave, they should be taking a hard look at their business and resetting expectations. [They should also be] adopting leaner approaches and looking at alternative forms of capital – particularly from funders who value our solutions. This is still a really huge problem to solve, and supply chain pressures and meat prices are higher than ever,” she adds.

Gupta warns that “nothing is inevitable except for death and taxes”, and this applies to cultivated meat too. “Unlike pure software innovation, outside of the breakthrough, you need to solve for infrastructure, supply chains, consumer education and safety/regulation,” she states.

“This is true of any major zero-to-one innovation, especially in a climate where we have to touch the physical world. But when the need is great enough, you see multiple waves of innovation in the same area until the problem is solved – e.g., solar energy took several attempts over the years, before costs fell faster than any expert or academic predicted.”

The company has ridden that wave Gupta spoke of – can it now make good on its promise to put cultivated pork on your fork?