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Niya Gupta and the price of a better lunch
From Singapore rooftops to cultivated pork in New Jersey, Niya Gupta keeps returning to the same question: can a different way of growing food earn its place at an ordinary table?
Niyati Gupta
Niyati Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Fork & Good, a Jersey City cultivated-meat startup betting against the rest of its industry. While competitors chase ever-bigger bioreactors, Gupta builds small ones, arguing that the way to make cell-grown pork as cheap as the real thing is to copy the efficiency of a pig, not the scale of a brewery. A Yale economist and Harvard MBA who advised Nigeria's agriculture ministry and ran a rooftop farm in Singapore before being 'bullied' into starting Fork & Good, she has raised roughly $30M, earned the industry's first cultivated red-meat revenue via a deal with an $8B food manufacturer, and held a public tasting at Davos where half the tasters could not tell her blend from conventional pork.