“I went around to food industry conferences and gave a spiel to the effect that someone’s going to make a killing if they are the first mover to replace animals in food production technology,” he said in 2017. He anticipated that an established food producer would adopt the meat-alternative idea as enthusiastically as he had. He first set out to eradicate animal agriculture while on sabbatical from Stanford in 2009 and thought he could do it by persuading someone else to take on disrupting the industry. Compared with being a professor, he thought a job in business would be dull. Staffing with scientistsīecoming a CEO wasn’t in Brown’s original plan. Impossible Foods explicitly states that its mission is to eliminate all animals from the food production system by 2035. He wants to solve the problem by making meat imitations so appealing that they’ll outcompete what he calls the legacy industry. “You don’t solve the problem by asking people to change their diets.”īrown frames the problem instead as relying on an outdated technology - namely the cow - for beef production. “That experiment has been done,” he told an audience of microbiologists during the American Society for Microbiology’s keynote lecture in June, which he delivered wearing a “no cows” T-shirt. Because cattle are the least efficient livestock animal at converting feed into edible meat, environmentalists have argued for years that reducing beef consumption is an important conservation act.īrown, who has been vegetarian for decades, says that those arguments have not been effective, even when made by parties as influential as the Chinese government. The world eats a lot of beef: 57 pounds per person per year in the U.S., with consumption increasing worldwide. “Basically, start looking at what are all the possible components that could be players … and then deconstruct and reconstitute the biochemical system.” Market and mission “We were approaching (meat) the same way you might approach figuring out the entire system for replicating genes,” Brown said during an interview in June. Pat Brown is the CEO of Impossible Foods. “They’re targeting the meat eater who is being more conscious about their decision.” “They’re not targeting the vegan or vegetarian consumer,” Welch said. He said one of the reasons Impossible Foods and its strongest competitor, Beyond Meat, have garnered so much interest from investors is their average customer. People like me are exactly the people Impossible Burger is targeting: millennials who eat meat sometimes but fret about its impacts on a crowded, warming world.ĭavid Welch is the director of science and technology at the Good Food Institute, a think tank promoting the burgeoning plant-based meat industry. I, on the other hand, was a fan his burger tasted better to me than my own, which was made the old-fashioned way, with beef. He had lost his taste for ground beef and found the experience of a plant-based, completely vegan yet beefy-tasting burger less than appealing. In what has become a journalistic cliché, I took my boyfriend, a vegetarian for the past 10 years, to our local greasy spoon to try out an Impossible Burger.
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