Wegmans baby food

The Vision of Impossible Foods

We live in an age of plant-based meat. This market is expected to be worth $85 billion by 2030.

If the trend continues, conventional meat consumption will fall by 33% by 2040.

Now Impossible Foods burger is indistinguishable from meat: it is just as juicy and tasty and sizzles in the pan. But its production requires 96% less land and 87% less water, while creating 89% less carbon emissions.

Impossible Foods products are already available at Walmart, Lidl and Burger King. If earlier alternative meat was a curiosity, now it is becoming one of the basic components of the menu. As of the beginning of 2020, plant-based alternatives accounted for only 2% of packaged meat retail sales, but their share is growing, also due to the pandemic.

Meat supply disruptions, rising prices, and consumer fears that beef and chicken can spread disease are the cause.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown said that for conventional meat consumers, now is the perfect time to try something new.

In the summer of 2020, Impossible Foods has added a new product - Impossible Sausage. Now there are plans to enter the market of alternative dairy products. Unlike other herbal counterparts, Impossible milk will completely imitate cow's milk.

In early 2021, the company announced that it was studying the baby food market and conducting test launches in American schools.

America's Meat Trouble

Impossible Foods CEO and Founder Pat Brown was a professor at Stanford University and is known as a pioneer in the field of genetic mapping. However, his ambitions were greater. In 2009, he went into the Sabbatical for 18 months. His goal was to understand how to change the meat industry - in his view, it represents the most serious threat to the environment.

13-18% of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, and a third of the world's land is allocated for their cultivation. Livestock also contribute significantly to deforestation, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and pollution through sewage and fertilizers.

By the end of his sabbatical, Brown came to the conclusion that people would never give up meat solely for the sake of nature. The only way to reduce its use would be the free market. And for this it was necessary to create an analogue of meat based on plants.

Alternative meats

Veggie burgers have been on store shelves since the 1990s. However, they were positioned as a product for vegetarians. Impossible Foods never aimed to reach an audience that had already given up meat.

In 2019, Impossible Foods CEO Brown stated, “The only consumer we care about is the die-hard meat eater.”

The main problem is that a person depends on meat. We are genetically attracted to protein and fat calories. So right after Brown formally founded Impossible Foods in 2011 and raised $3 million in a seed round, he began biochemical research to understand what meat tastes like.

Researchers have come to the conclusion that it's all about blood, or more specifically, an iron-containing molecule called heme. It took the first year to develop non-meat heme (based on yeast that produces heme during fermentation). Thanks to this, Impossible Foods received another $75 million to create a burger.

During tests, more than 1,500 consumers could not distinguish between an alternative product and a meat product. The scientists themselves conduct "a minimum of 100 internal" tastings a week to control the quality of the product.

From Silicon Valley to Burger King

The Impossible Burger was born in 2016 after five years of research and hundreds of iterations. The final version consists of soy and potato protein, fermented yeast based heme, sunflower and coconut oils, methylcellulose (often used in jam and ice cream) as a binder, and food starch (a common ingredient in canned soups).

The company primarily targets gourmets, chefs and celebrities. Investments from Jay-Z and Serena Williams caused a stir. The first establishment to feature Impossible Burger on the menu was Nishi, David Chang's New York-based Italian restaurant.

The name of the famous chef and founder of the Momofuku network could not fail to attract attention. Now the media was talking about plant-based burgers with the "Approved by David Chung" label.

In 2018, Impossible Burger appeared in chain restaurants such as Applebees, Cheesecake Factory and Hard Rock Cafe.

According to Nielsen and the Good Food Institute, from 2016 to 2017 only. plant-based meat sales rose 8.1%.

Trust in alternative burgers grew. They first appeared on the menus of niche chains such as Umami Burger and Bare Burger. In April 2018, they finally hit the mass market through the White Castle chain. Deals followed with Little Caesars, Qdoba, Red Robin, Little Caesars and Disney Parks, and by early 2019In 2018, a large-scale campaign was launched in partnership with Burger King - Impossible Whopper.

2019 hamburger shortage

Impossible Foods had 25 employees at launch and 125 by the end of 2017. But that wasn't enough to keep up with the demand. To triple production, the team worked 12 hour shifts.

The shortage ended when the company began to cooperate with a large manufacturer. It looks like it paid off: during the pandemic, Impossible Foods did not face a shortage of products

In a way, the limited supply story was actually helpful. She has demonstrated customer loyalty. The owners of Ruby's in New York recall that diners could stop by for an Impossible Burger and refuse to dine if only Beyond Food was available.

Retail entry

By September 2019, Impossible Foods had overcome the supply disruption and began shipping its raw food to retail stores for customers to cook at home.

Meat alternatives appeared in 27 Gelson's supermarkets in Southern California, followed a week later by Wegmans and Fairway Markets on the US East Coast. In the following years, burgers were already on the shelves of Walmart, Krogers, Safeway and other major US chains.

Text photo: Steve Heap / Shutterstock

The company now has almost 600 employees. Impossible Foods convenience foods are sold in 8,000 grocery stores and nearly 20,000 restaurants in the US, Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore.

In January 2021, the company announced the launch of its own online store on the Goldbelly platform.

The terms 'steak', 'sausage' and 'burger'

Correct naming is one of the key challenges that alternative food brands must solve. In 2018, the US Cattlemen's Association asked the US Department of Agriculture to clarify the definitions of the terms "meat" and "beef" so that plant-based producers cannot use them as names.

While this issue remains a matter of debate in the US, the European Parliament recently confirmed the right to use the names 'steak', 'sausage' and 'burger' for plant-based alternatives.

To promote their interests, the big meat companies turned to the infamous lobbyist Richard Berman. He bought entire pages in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and the Chicago Tribune to run ads critical of plant-based meats. During Super Bowl 2019years broadcast a video with children who can hardly spell the names of various ingredients. One of them was methylcellulose, a flavorless thickener that is used in canned food and is certified harmless.

In response, Impossible Foods ran a parody video in which children said the word "turd". This was a reference to studies that found the presence of feces in beef products.

At the same time, Impossible Foods faces serious competition from forward-thinking meat producers who are trying to add plant-based alternatives to their range. Tyson, Smithfield, Nestle and Perdue already make these products and place them alongside chicken wings and ground beef.

Some environmentalists believe that the food system should be simplified, not complicated. For example, nutritionist Diana Rogers draws attention to the long list of ingredients in Impossible Foods and calls their activity greenwashing.

"Beyond Burger and all meat substitutes are just another version of food made from cheap, raw ingredients that are heavily processed and labeled as cleaner, healthier, and healthier," she says.

The biggest problem for vegetable protein

However, the main factor holding back the herbal analogues market is the price. Real meat is very cheap. This is due to a number of factors, including the subsidies received by the agribusiness and the lack of environmental legislation.

Impossible Meat has a solution. Brown says he wants to achieve price parity with meat products and then beat them. In the coming years, he plans to launch at least one product that will cost the same or even less than the meat counterpart.

The company started with wholesale discounts so food chains and restaurants can sell Impossible Meat products at low prices.

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