On May 30th ABEC Inc. filed a motion to compel Good Meat operated by entrepreneur Josh Tetrick. This action follows the failure of Good Meat to respond to requests for admission and accusing the debtor of “choosing gamesmanship over compliance”. The submission to the Court stated, “Since this litigation began, Defendants have engaged in dilatory tactics related to discovery-responses are evasive, propound bad faith objections and represent the worst aspects of litigation practice.”
According to the Plaintiff, Good Meat owes $62.6 million for work completed against orders for a series of bioreactors to produce cell-cultured meat. The original order placed in August 2021 would have required ABEC to install numerous 250,000 liter bioreactors over a seven-year period. Given problems of cash flow in November 2022, Good Meats reduced the order to five 125,000 liter bioreactors. Payment was not forthcoming and in March 2023, ABEC initiated legal action resulting in a series of claims and counter-claims by the parties.
In March, Tetrick stated “he is not intending to raise money for a large-scale cultivated meat facility right now”. The production facility operated by his subsidiary in Singapore is shuttered.
Over the past two decades, Josh Tetrick has raised hundreds of millions for egg replacement products and more recently, cell-cultured meat without establishing significant cash flow. It is apparent that his sources of venture capital funding in the U.S. and the Middle East have dried up, corroborating the Lincoln adage about not being able to BS all of the people all of the time.