Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Food |
Founded | 2011 |
Founder | Patrick O. Brown |
Headquarters | Redwood City, California, US |
Key people | Dennis Woodside (President) [1] Peter McGuinness (CEO) [2] |
Website | ImpossibleFoods.com |
Impossible Foods Inc. is a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. The company's signature product, the Impossible Burger, was launched in July 2016 as a vegan alternative to beef hamburger.
In partnership with Burger King, Impossible Whoppers were released across the United States by summer 2019. The company also makes plant-based sausage and chicken products. [3] [4]
Impossible Foods was founded by Patrick O. Brown in 2011. [5] In July 2016, the company launched its first meat analogue product, the Impossible Burger, which is made from material derived from plants. [6] The company says that making it uses 95% less land and 74% less water, and it emits about 87% less greenhouse gas than making a ground beef burger patty from cows. [7] The plant-based burger has more protein, less total fat, no cholesterol, and less food energy than a similar-sized hamburger patty made with beef. [8] It contains more sodium and more saturated fats than an unseasoned beef patty. [9] The Impossible Burger received Kosher certification in May 2018 [10] and Halal certification in December 2018. [11]
On January 7, 2019, Impossible Foods introduced the Impossible Burger 2.0. [12] In July 2020, Impossible Burger patties became available at Trader Joe's and about 2,100 Walmart locations in the United States. [13]
Unlike most plant-based products intended to emulate meat, the Impossible Burger contains heme. Heme is the molecule that gives blood its red color and helps carry oxygen in living organisms. [14] Heme is abundant in animal muscle tissue and is also found naturally in all living organisms. [15] Plants, particularly nitrogen-fixing plants and legumes, also contain heme. [16] The plant-based heme molecule is identical to the heme molecule found in meat. [17] [18]
To produce heme protein from non-animal sources, Impossible Foods selected the leghemoglobin molecule found naturally in the roots of soy plants. [19] To make it in large quantities, the company's scientists genetically engineered a yeast and used a fermentation process very similar to the brewing process used to make some types of beer. [20] In 2014, Impossible Foods declared leghemoglobin is generally recognized as safe after testing under FDA oversight, [21] and filed updates with the FDA in 2017 and 2018. [22] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a "no questions" letter in July 2018, accepting the unanimous conclusion of a panel of food-safety experts that the protein that carries heme is safe to eat. [23] This acceptance letter was limited to products cooked in restaurants because soy leghemoglobin required safety review as a new food colorant for uncooked products. [24] An FDA rule change that accepted the colorant and allows the sale of Impossible Burgers in grocery stores took effect on September 4, 2019. [25]
LightLife, a brand of meat analogues, criticized its competitors Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods in an open letter published in The New York Times , asking that these companies reduce their use of "hyperprocessed" ingredients. [26] Impossible Foods responded by calling it a "disingenuous, desperate disinformation campaign". [27]
The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a nonprofit advocacy group that has received funding from the meat industry, has targeted Impossible Foods and other meat analogue producers through advertising, including a commercial during Super Bowl LIV, criticizing meat analogues for using additives. Impossible Foods quickly answered with a parody commercial. [28]
In 2016 and 2017, Impossible Foods produced Impossible Burgers in both Redwood City, California, and at Rutgers University in New Jersey. [29] Since the production was in relatively small quantities, the burgers were not available at retail locations. [30] Impossible Foods also worked on plant-based products that emulated chicken, pork, fish, and dairy, [31] but decided to concentrate on creating a substitute for the ground beef in burger patties. [32]
The restaurant Momofuku Nishi in New York, owned by David Chang, began serving the Impossible Burger in July 2016. [33] In October 2016, the Impossible Burger became a standing menu item in selected additional restaurants in California, [34] such as Jardinière and Cockscomb in San Francisco, and Crossroads Kitchen in Los Angeles. [35] The Michelin-starred restaurant Public, operated by Brad Farmerie, began serving the Impossible Burger in January 2017. [36]
In March 2017, Impossible Foods announced it would build its first large-scale plant in Oakland, California, to produce 1 million pounds of plant-based burger meat per month. [34] In the first half of 2017, the Impossible Burger debuted on the menu of multi-unit franchises, including Bareburger in New York City, [37] Umami Burger in California, [38] and Hopdoddy in Texas. [39] In April 2018, White Castle started serving Impossible Burgers. The partnership with White Castle eventually expanded to include all 377 of its locations. [40]
By July 2018, two years after its debut in New York, the Impossible Burger was available at about 3,000 locations in the United States and Hong Kong. [41] By the end of 2018, 5,000 restaurants across all 50 states included the burger on their menus. [42]
In April 2019, Burger King began test marketing an Impossible Whopper, using the patty at locations around St. Louis. [43] Later that month, the company announced plans to roll out Impossible Whoppers nationwide before the end of the year. [44] In August, it was officially made available nationwide. [45]
The Impossible Burger became available in grocery stores for the first time in October 2019, at Gelson's stores, which are only in Southern California. [46] As of May 2020, Impossible Burgers were also available at Fairway Market, Wegman's, Jewel-Osco, Vons, Pavilions, Albertsons in California and Nevada, Safeway in California and Nevada, and various chains owned by Kroger. [47] In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, the FDA started allowing restaurants to sell Impossible beef substitute to consumers, with an additional printed-out sheet satisfying label requirements. [48]
In May 2019, Little Caesars began testing the Impossible Supreme pizza in Florida, New Mexico, and Washington state. The pizza featured Impossible Foods' first plant-based sausage product, which CEO Patrick Brown claimed had involved the development of 50 prototype sausage products before Little Caesars began offering it to the public. [49] Impossible sausage sandwiches are being sold at many restaurants, including Burger King and Starbucks. [50]
Impossible Foods has raised rounds of $75 million and $108 million from investors, including Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Viking Global Investors, UBS, [51] Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's Horizons Ventures, and Bill Gates. [52] It was reported that Patrick Brown had turned down an offer of $300 million to buy out Impossible Foods in 2015. [32] [53]
In August 2017, $75 million in additional financing was raised after reaching key objectives, [54] with Bill Gates investing additional money. [55] In April 2018, an additional $114 million was raised, led by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and Hong Kong-based Sailing Capital, bringing the total to $372 million. [56] In May 2019, the company raised $300 million of investment. [57] The total valuation of the company raised to $2 billion. [58] On March 16, 2020, another $500 million was raised. [59]
In total, Impossible Foods has raised $1.3 billion over 12 rounds of funding. [60] [61] In August 2020, the company raised another US$200 million in an internal round led by existing investor Coatue. [62]
Leghemoglobin is an oxygen-carrying phytoglobin found in the nitrogen-fixing root nodules of leguminous plants. It is produced by these plants in response to the roots being colonized by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, termed rhizobia, as part of the symbiotic interaction between plant and bacterium: roots not colonized by Rhizobium do not synthesise leghemoglobin. Leghemoglobin has close chemical and structural similarities to hemoglobin, and, like hemoglobin, is red in colour. It was originally thought that the heme prosthetic group for plant leghemoglobin was provided by the bacterial symbiont within symbiotic root nodules. However, subsequent work shows that the plant host strongly expresses heme biosynthesis genes within nodules, and that activation of those genes correlates with leghemoglobin gene expression in developing nodules.
The Whopper is the signature hamburger and an associated product line sold by the international fast food restaurant chain Burger King and its Australian franchise Hungry Jack's. Introduced in 1957, the hamburger has undergone several reformulations, including changes to portion size and bread used. The hamburger is well known in the fast food industry, with Burger King advertising itself as "the Home of the Whopper" and naming its kiosk stores the BK Whopper Bar. In response to the Whopper, Burger King's competitors have developed similar products designed to compete against it.
A veggie burger is a hamburger made with a patty that does not contain meat, or the patty of such a hamburger. The patty may be made from ingredients like beans, nuts, grains, seeds, or fungi such as mushrooms or mycoprotein.
Patrick O'Reilly Brown is an American scientist and businessman who is the founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University. Brown is co-founder of the Public Library of Science, inventor of the DNA microarray, and a former investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Lightlife Foods is a company that produces food for plant-based diets. In 2018, its worth was estimated at $80 million. It is best known for its plant-based veggie dog, Smart Dog, which launched in 1993. In 2019, the company launched a plant-based burger to compete with Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Lightlife Foods is a carbon-neutral company.
A&W is a fast-food restaurant chain in Canada, franchised by A&W Food Services of Canada, Inc.
Gardein is a line of meat-free foods produced by Conagra Brands. In 2003, the company was founded by Yves Potvin, who remained as the CEO of Gardein until 2016. In November 2014, Pinnacle Foods purchased Gardein for $154 million. Pinnacle was acquired by Conagra in 2018.
McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of fast food restaurants, serving around 68 million customers daily in 119 countries. McDonald's traces its origins to a 1940 restaurant in San Bernardino, California, United States. After expanding within the United States, McDonald's became an international corporation in 1967, when it opened a location in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada. By the end of the 1970s, McDonald's restaurants existed in five of the Earth's seven continents; an African location came in 1992 in Casablanca, Morocco.
Veggie Galaxy is a diner-style vegetarian restaurant located in the Central Square section of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Grill'd is an Australian-owned multinational casual dining restaurant chain specialising in healthy burgers. Founded by Simon Crowe in 2004 in Hawthorn, Melbourne, the group now has over 150 restaurants.
Beyond Meat, Inc. is a Los Angeles–based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown. The company's initial products were launched in the United States in 2012. The company went public in 2019, becoming the first plant-based meat analogue company to go public.
Veggie Grill is a fast-casual vegan restaurant chain that operates in California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. After first being opened in Irvine, California, it already had 29 restaurants across the United States in February 2018.
BurgerFi International, Inc. is an American hamburger restaurant chain aimed at the "better burger" sector of the market. The first location was opened in February 2011 in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida.
McVegan is a veggie burger sold by the fast-food restaurant chain McDonald's. In 2017, McDonald partnered with the Swedish food company Orkla to create a plant-based patty inside a small steel kitchen in Malmö, where they began the creation of the product. In Germany, the chain's vegan burger is sold as the Big Vegan TS.
The Impossible Whopper is a veggie burger sold by Burger King. It is a variant of the Whopper, with a burger patty made from a meat alternative provided by Impossible Foods. First introduced in the United States in 2019, it was made available in Canada in 2021.
The McVeggie is a veggie burger sold by the fast-food restaurant chain McDonald's. It was introduced in 2012 in India when McDonald's opened its first vegetarian-only restaurant in the country.
The McPlant is a vegetarian burger sold by the fast-food chain McDonald's in several European countries. In 2021, McDonald's partnered with Beyond Meat, a Los Angeles–based producer of plant-based meat substitutes, to create the McPlant platform. It features a plant-based meat alternative burger patty made from plant ingredients such as potatoes, peas and rice.
Dick's Primal Burger is a restaurant in Portland, Oregon.
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