Impossible Foods – Achieving The Impossible With Plant Based Meat

Plant based meat is an oxymoron in every way, yet a startup called Impossible Foods Inc. is doing just that.  They successfully created a plant based meat which looks, feels, smells and tastes like actual meat. This is no easy feat and it required years of research and development to come up with a product like this.

The world is seeing increasing greenhouse emissions every year and it adversely affects the climatic conditions throughout the world.  Cattle and livestock make up for 10 % of greenhouse gases and in the United States of America alone, countless amounts of water and land is used to breed cows.

Beginnings

Impossible Foods was founded by Patrick Brown in 2011.  Patrick Brown is a renowned personality in the field of microbiology and holds a Ph.D.  As a pure vegetarian and having cut dairy from his diet, Patrick Brown set about to think what the largest environmental problem is and settled down on the production of meat from cattle.  He held a conference to raise awareness about the issue, only to have it make minimal impact. It was then Patrick realised the need to offer a competing product on the free market.

Patrick Brown then immersed himself in research about what makes meat endearing as food and began to develop a process which isolates compounds that make meat feel like meat.  After attracting an initial investment from venture capitalists, he started his venture Impossible Foods Inc.

How Impossible meat is made

After a few years of research, Patrick Brown realised the key to the unique taste of meat was the availability of ‘heme,’ an iron based molecule present in abundance.  Patrick and his team then set out to search for the availability of heme in plants and found it is present in soy plant roots.

Patrick Brown figured out a way to isolate this heme from soy plants and inserted them into a yeast which replicated the heme compound.  This method cut down costs in terms of land and cultivation of soy plants to extract the heme compound. After this, the team decided they need to replicate the flavour, texture, smell and taste of a beef patty and decided to engineer it from scratch.

Impossible Foods employed the use of a mass spectrometer to isolate smells which made a cooked patty delicious and replicated the same in their Impossible patty.  Coconut oil chips, with the coconut flavour extracted, were used to replicate fat which melted upon heating the patty. Potato protein was used to replicate the effect which meat undergoes when it is being cooked and for the taste, Impossible Foods turned to the heme.  This patty was used to create the Impossible Burger and the makers claim it has very less total fat, no cholesterol and fewer calories than a normal burger.

Growth of Impossible Foods

Upon the development of the Impossible Burger, it made its debut in the Momofuku Nishi restaurant, which is owned by David Chang in New York.  Since then, it has featured on the menus of Michelin star restaurants. Burger chains like Bareburgers, Umami Burgers and Whitecastle added the Impossible Burger to their menu.  Since the release of the Impossible Burger, Impossible Foods has worked to refine the Impossible Burger patty to more closely match an actual meat patty and they came up with the Impossible Burger 2.0.

Upon the launch of the Impossible Burger 2.0, Burger King did a test sale in select restaurants by offering the Impossible Burger on their menu and it was a success, which led to it becoming a standard offering on Burger King menus of all their locations in the United States of America.  This demand led Impossible Foods to increase their production capacity to one million pounds a month.

Impossible Foods is now planning to expand their product range and conducting research to further their offerings.  While Impossible Foods is trying to achieve the impossible, the technology they use in their development process will definitely find its use in the future if land and water become precious commodities due to unchecked global warming trends.

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