Anika Begay
Upside Foods, a cultured meat company, has filed a lawsuit against Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat, arguing that the state’s law prohibiting the sale of cultured meat is unconstitutional.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the ban into law in May, describing the legislation as a way to “combat the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or insects to achieve their authoritarian goals.”
In a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, Upside Foods and the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, argue that Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat is intended to protect the state’s beef industry and that the law is unconstitutional. The complaint alleges that SB 1084 violates the Constitution’s supremacy and commerce clauses, as well as two federal laws that regulate the inspection and distribution of meat and poultry products.
“Our Constitution gives Congress the power to create and enforce a national common market so that people can make their own decisions about what products they want to buy in the interstate market,” Paul Sherman, a senior staff attorney at the Institute for Justice, said at a Tuesday press conference. “States simply don’t have the power to insulate themselves from products that have been approved by the USDA and FDA.”
Alternatives to conventional meat products, including plant-based and cultured meat, have become a thorny issue in the culture war between liberals and conservatives. As a result, companies that offer alternatives to animal products have found themselves targeted by state laws that limit or even prohibit them from selling their products.
Upside and the Institute for Justice argue that Florida’s cultured meat ban is intended to protect the state’s beef industry from outside competition. The ban therefore violates the “dormant limb” of the Commerce Clause, which prohibits state protectionism, Upside argues. The complaint notes that at the signing event, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was flanked by cattle ranchers and “spoke at a podium that featured a sign that read ‘SAVE OUR BEEF.’”
Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, named as a defendant, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”
“Lab-grown ‘meat’ has not been proven safe enough for consumers and is being pushed by a liberal agenda to shut down farms. Food safety is a matter of national security and our farmers are the first line of defense,” Simpson said in a statement. “States are the laboratory of democracy and Florida has the right not to be a corporate guinea pig. Leave the Frankenmeat experiment to California.”
But Upside’s lawsuit argues that Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat is about protectionism, not food safety, and cites DeSantis’s press conference announcing the ban as evidence.
The Food and Drug Administration declared Upside products safe to eat in 2022, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the sale of Upside products and a competitor, Good Meat, the following year.
Upside argues that Florida’s ban also hurts the company’s operations elsewhere in the country. Florida’s cultured meat ban, the first in the nation, has inspired copycat legislation across the country. Alabama banned lab-grown meat in May, though that legislation doesn’t take effect until October. Legislators in Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have introduced similar bans. In the complaint, Upside and the Institute for Justice say the “growing patchwork of conflicting state laws regulating cultured meat” makes it harder for Upside to work with national meat distributors, “who typically won’t carry products they can’t legally sell in every state.”
Upside had partnered with a Miami chef before Florida’s ban on lab-grown meat went into effect July 1, according to the complaint, which was filed in the Northern District of Florida. That chef, who is not named in the complaint, had begun making plans with Upside to host a tasting event at Miami’s South Beach Wine and Food Festival on Feb. 20, 2025. Upside had also planned to distribute its products at Art Basel Miami in early December of this year and had “identified additional chefs in Miami and Tallahassee” who were interested in distributing its product, according to the complaint. Florida’s ban now prevents those events from happening, as Upside’s participation could result in criminal penalties for itself and its potential business partners, the complaint says.
Upside is asking the court to declare Florida’s cultured meat ban unconstitutional and issue preliminary and permanent injunctions against the law. At the press conference, IJ attorney Sherman said Upside wants the injunction to go into effect before Art Basel.
“If consumers don’t like the idea of cultured meat, there’s a simple solution,” Sherman said. “They don’t have to eat it. But they can’t make that decision for other consumers.”
