SCiFi Foods closed in early June 2024 before its planned hybrid burger reached a restaurant or grocery store. The San Leandro startup’s co-founders said they could not raise the capital needed to commercialize the product and had run out of time.
What SCiFi Foods was trying to sell
Founded in 2019 as Artemys Foods, the company later renamed itself SCiFi Foods. It was developing a burger that combined cultivated beef—meat grown from animal cells—with plant-based ingredients. It was therefore a hybrid product, not a conventional plant-based burger.
In January 2024, SCiFi announced plans to build a manufacturing facility in San Leandro, California. The facility announcement did not mean the burger was commercially available: the company shut down before it brought the product to restaurants or grocery stores. Contemporaneous reporting covered the closure and the absence of sales.
Why the startup said it closed
In a June 11, 2024 statement, co-founders Joshua March, the CEO, and Kasia Gora, the CTO, said the company had been unable to raise enough money to commercialize the burger: “Unfortunately, in this funding environment, we could not raise the capital that we needed to commercialize the SCiFi burger, and SCiFi Foods ran out of time.” The founders’ statement is the source for their explanation.
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They also pointed to capital-market conditions, the funding required to reach commercialization, a change in sentiment toward meat alternatives, slow regulatory progress, and political opposition to cultivated meat. These are the founders’ account of the pressures facing the business, not an independently established ranking of causes.
Industry funding figures offer context but do not, by themselves, explain SCiFi’s closure. AgFunderNews reported AgFunder data showing cultivated-meat startup investment of $989 million in 2021, $807 million in 2022, and $177 million in 2023; the reported 2023 total was 78% below 2022. AgFunderNews’ account of the figures provides the sector context, not a company-specific explanation.
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What the company said about burger costs
SCiFi’s founders said their estimated cost for one burger fell from $20,000 when the company started to under $15 after five years. They based the calculation on cell-line performance and media costs in a 500-liter pilot plant. Those are company-reported figures, not independently audited commercial costs; a pilot-plant estimate is not the same as a demonstrated retail price. The company statement gives the founders’ account, and Futurism’s coverage also reported the cost figures.
What happened to SCiFi’s assets
When it announced the shutdown, the company said it had ceased operations the previous week and appointed an advisory firm to oversee a sale process for its intellectual property and assets. A later report said the Good Food Institute acquired a portion of SCiFi’s cell lines, which were transferred to Tufts University for storage and potential distribution. That describes the disposition of some cell lines; it does not establish what happened to every company asset. Contemporaneous coverage describes the sale process, while the later report covers the cell-line transfer.
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What the closure does—and does not—show
SCiFi’s planned burger never became a restaurant or grocery-store product, so there were no commercial sales from which to judge consumer demand or market performance. The founders said they were disappointed not to bring it to market despite what they described as technical and regulatory progress and good taste. That assessment is theirs; the product did not reach the market for independent consumer testing.
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