Jeremy Hux has joined Upside Foods as chief financial officer, and Sheetal Shah, former senior vice president 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, 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.

Jeremy Hux, chief financial officer at Upside Foods. Photo courtesy Upside Foods.

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 Hux. "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."

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 and leading Upside's plans for manufacturing at commercial scale.

Sheetal Shah, chief supply chain and manufacturing officer at Upside Foods. Photo courtesy Upside Foods.

"I'm extremely proud of what our team at UPSIDE has accomplished already," said Shah. "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 the company's commercial product portfolio to include ground-textured cultivated meat products, pending regulatory approval.

Source: Upside Foods