Impossible grows research team
The creator of the wildly popular Impossible Burger is hoping to accelerate the invention of similarly convincing vegan meats by doubling its research team to create food like meatfree steak and lamb shank.
Impossible Foods, the Redwood City company responsible for the soybased burger, just announced that it’s expanding its research and development team over the next year to about 300 people. The food tech giant spent its first nine years creating, improving
Scientist Pat McGale mixes raw nonmeat ground beef in the test kitchen at the Impossible Foods headquarters in Redwood City.
and scaling up the Impossible Burger, which is widely available in restaurants, from hip vegan spots like San Francisco’s Wildseed to national fast food chains like White Castle, as well as grocery stores nationwide.
Now, it’s time to get moving on all the other types of meat and doing it at enormous scale, the company announced.
“If we want to make a substantial dent in animal farming’s impact on the environment and give ourselves a chance of maintaining rain forests, we
have to basically reach equivalent scale of the current animal industry over the next 20 years,” said Impossible research fellow Chris Davis.
That means not just coming up with a meatfree lamb product, but a lamb chop and rack of lamb and lamb shank, and making enough to compete with ranchers around the world — a lofty goal. Other potential items the new team might research include swordfish, beef tenderloin, scallops, eggs and brie.
Impossible Foods has raised about $ 1.5 billion since its founding in 2011, including $ 700 million just this year.
Davis declined to speculate as to how quickly a new product might arrive or what that first new product might be, but he said Impossible will likely focus on beef and dairy products since cows are the most carbonintensive livestock, responsible for 62% of agricultural emissions. Impossible has already developed a pork sausage — currently available in thousands of Starbucks and Burger King locations — but it hasn’t amassed the same widespread distribution or fervor as the burger.
All of the time spent on Impossible Burger should help speed along future projects, as researchers can apply the fundamental lessons — such as what drives flavor, texture and smell — to other meats. ( The company plans to stick to plantbased versions, rather than labgrown meat like some competitors are developing.) Still, each specifically animal product has its own special qualities that Impossible will need to better understand.
“When you cook bacon, it tends to crinkle, and that crinkle is important for the crunch of a bacon sandwich — so how does bacon do that?” Davis said. “How would you replicate that?”
The company is also launching a program called “Impossible Investigator,” with hopes of attracting scientists who would normally work in academia. The 10 investigators will have the freedom to pursue any work of their choosing so long as it contributes to Impossible’s goal of reversing climate change and eliminating animal agriculture by 2035. Instead of being focused on creating a specific product, one of these scientists might pitch a psychological study on people’s relationships with meat that could be just as valuable, Davis said.
“We need solutions in a fast time frame,” Davis said. “Climate change is an emergency and the way we feed ourselves is one of the major contributors to that. What is a better way to feed the world?”