Eat Just and its cultivated meat subsidiary GOOD Meat have agreed to pay bioreactor supplier ABEC $4.4 million as part of settlement to end their legal dispute.*
According to court documents, the parties entered into a confidential settlement agreement on March 11 under which each will pay its own legal expenses and end the dispute, with Judge Wendy Beetlestone finding for ABEC in some matters and against it in others.
On Count II of ABEC’s amended complaint, judgment is “entered in favor of plaintiff ABEC Inc and against GOOD Meat Inc in the amount of $4,399,900,” says the filing.
Neither party responded to a request for comment from AgFunderNews.
What is the case about?
The legal dispute began in March 2023 when ABEC filed a lawsuit accusing GOOD Meat of breach of contract by failing to pay its bills on time.
According to ABEC, GOOD Meat owed more than $60 million for work ABEC had already completed. Eat Just, in turn, claimed that ABEC had breached the terms of their contract.
ABEC, which had been working with GOOD Meat on pilot cultivated chicken facilities in California and Singapore, signed an agreement with the startup in August 2021. Under the seven-year deal, ABEC would design, manufacture, install and commission multiple 250,000-liter vessels— “the largest known bioreactors for avian and mammalian cell culture”—for a large-scale facility in the US.
Given “financing hurdles,” by November 2022, Eat Just/GOOD Meat “recommended the evaluation of a phased approach, creating five 125,000-L bioreactors instead of four 250,000-L bioreactors,” and the two started corresponding over amendments to their agreement.
By March 2023, ABEC said it had had no choice but to take legal action over unpaid bills. Eat Just/GOOD Meat responded by filing a series of counterclaims, arguing that the parties never formally ratified amendments to their original agreement, and that ABEC had simply proceeded as if they had.
What’s next for GOOD Meat?
Speaking to AgFunderNews this week, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick said he is not trying to raise money for a large-scale cultivated meat facility right now and is instead focused on process development at the firm’s plant in Alameda, California, and working on new cell lines that will enable more efficient large-scale production.
He added: “We think for cultivated meat to be viable, you’re going to have to build large scale facilities in the $100 million or so dollar amount, not in the hundreds of millions. So our energy is spent thinking through what a system that would enable that looks like.
“We’re still selling at Huber’s Butchery in Singapore and there was utility in that [getting product in front of consumers] but it doesn’t do us a lot of good to continue selling [a loss-making product] at the smallest scale.”
*The case is ABEC, Inc. v. Eat Just, Inc. et al., No. 5:23-cv-01091
