BERKELEY, CALIF. — Upside Foods is tapping a veteran of the plant-based industry to lead its commercialization efforts. Sheetal Shah has been named senior vice president of supply chain and manufacturing at the Berkeley, Calif.-based cultivated meat company.

Mr. Shah will oversee the development of Upside’s supply chain and strategic sourcing for cell feed and other inputs that will reduce costs and enable scale, according to the company. He also will oversee Upside’s production facilities, including its Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC) and future large-scale commercial facilities, as well as quality functions.

He joins the company from Impossible Foods, where he was senior vice president of product and operations, managing the supply chain throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that he was chief operations officer at Verifone and chief procurement officer at Google’s Motorola division. He began his career at Motorola as a DSP software engineer and hold several patents for speech recognition and audio processing technologies.

“Cultivated meat will transform our food system for the better, and Upside is the clear industry leader,” Mr. Shah said. “Developing a reliable supply chain for making cultivated meat at scale is one of the greatest opportunities for the planet.”