January 26, 2023 • 24 mins
Pat Brown is the founder of Impossible Foods. Pat's problem is this: How can you make meat without animals?
Pat's goal isn't to make better burgers for vegetarians; he wants to sell to meat eaters. To succeed, he'll have to figure out how to make fake meat that is at least as good -- and as cheap -- as the real thing.
This is the second episode of What's Your Problem's four-part series on the future of food.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Let's talk about meat. It's delicious, very satisfying to
cook and to eat, smells incredible on the grill. But
at this moment in history, billions of human beings eating
(00:35):
all that delicious meat has become something of a problem.
Raising livestock and growing food for them to eat takes
up a huge amount of the earth, an area the
size of the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego
in all, and the animals themselves make climate change worse.
Cows methane, you know that story. These facts, though, are
(00:57):
not going to be enough to change the way billions
of people eat. Meat. Just taste too good, Our relationship
with it is too deep. But what if we could
nudge people not with facts or guilt trips, but with
something delicious. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem.
(01:19):
My guest today is Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods.
Pat's problem is this, how can you make meat without animals?
Pat founded Impossible Foods in twenty eleven. Since then, the
company has received roughly two billion dollars in investment. Burger
King now sells the Impossible Whopper. You can buy Impossible
(01:39):
Burger patties and chicken like nuggets at the grocery store.
But Pat doesn't come from a business background, or even
really a food background. He got an m d and
a PhD and worked for decades as a professor of
biochemistry at Stanford. I had my dream job. I had
awesome colleagues, awesome students, a great intellectual environment, all the
(02:01):
funding I needed. I had no intention of leaving it.
And my research was into something completely related food, so biomedical,
very basic biomedical research. Essentially, I had zero interests in
the business world. And about ten years ago I had
a little extra time, and I challenged myself to find
(02:21):
the most important problem in the world that I might
be able to contribute to solving. And so step one
was figuring out what is that problem? And it was
pretty apparent to me at the time that the two
most urgent threats the future of humanity were number one,
ob used to pretty much everyone, global heating by anthropogenic
greenhouse gasses and climate change climate change, and less well
(02:43):
known but actually probably more important and more urgent threat
is the precipitous, ongoing collapse of global biodiversity. That was
what I was going to take on. And then the
second step was figuring out, oh, it's a lot. That's
a lot. You're going to take out the two biggest
problems of the world. Okay, keep going, why not? Why not? Fair?
So then the second step was to figure out what
(03:05):
would be a path to a solution, and that started
with recognizing that the fastest, surest solution to both problems
is to eliminate the user of animals to produce food.
I think I know the answer, but just briefly, why
is raising animals to eat really bad for both climate
change and biodiversity? For climate change, obviously it's an ongoing
(03:29):
source of greenhouse gases, but more importantly is the opportunity cost.
So cows burp up a lot of methane. That's really bad.
And you're saying the second thing is if we weren't
using all this land to raise cattle, we could grow
new plants. I mean, is that the other piece of it?
So yeah, yeah, the two greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide,
the biggest source of which is livestock, biggest anthropogetic source
(03:49):
of livestock. And then the land footprint of animal agriculture
is more than eighty percent, probably about eighty five percent
of the entire land footprint of humanity. Okay, it occupies
about forty five percent of the ice free surface of Earth.
All of that land used to hold a lot of
biomass in forests and prairies and savannahs and so forth.
That was eliminated when they got transformed into annual crops
(04:12):
and pasture land. Okay, and the annual crops are largely
going to feed livestock, right, yes, yes, yes, so you
got the big problem. Now, you just got to decide
how are you going to solve the two biggest problems
facing humanity? Right? Well, the nice thing about was the
solution was the same in both cases. It was to
eliminate the use of animals as a food technology. You're
(04:35):
not going to solve the problem by telling people what
to eat. You're not going to solve the problem by
asking governments to you know, make animal our culture illegal. Yeah.
So the problem isn't that people love meat, it's that
we're using the wrong technology to produce That seems like
the big insight, right like, that seems like a real
(04:56):
shift from what I've heard before. Right Like, people have
been arguing for decades longer in some cases, that it's
wrong to eat meat even before climate change was a
known issue. But the idea that you're going to change
people's behavior not by telling them that they're wrong to
be doing what they're doing or that it's bad, but
by giving them a better option. That seems like your
(05:18):
big insight. Well that was the critical thing that caused
me to leave my job and found impossible foods. Because
you're not going to get a grant for that, you're
not going to get university funding for that. But fortunately
you can get investment because there's a big investment proposition.
If you can develop better technology to replace animals in
(05:43):
the food system by producing products that consumers value more, okay,
you can capture a market that today is worth two
trillion dollars globally. And the thing about it is that
a lot of people think, oh, that's such a big
how could you possibly do that, Like it's such a
part of the world. You know, animals, livestock, and you know,
you could have said that about horses one hundred years ago,
(06:04):
and the horse was much more a part of the
family than a cow. You know, essentially every every household
had had a horse. But in less than two decades,
basically it went down to essentially zero, and the horses
were a hobby and not a motive transportation. So better technology,
if it does a better job of delivering what consumers value,
(06:25):
can sweepingly replace an old technology very fast, much faster
than people ever expect. Okay, so that's that's like the
big picture behind the company. I want to talk in
a little more detail. In particular, I want to talk
about this molecule called hem hem as in hemoglobin, like
what we have in our blood. It's also in a
protein called soy leg hemoglobin. And I guess that protein,
(06:49):
if I understand right, is a key reason your burgers
are way more meady than the like old school veggie
burgers that I grew up with. So tell me about
hem and soy leg hemoglobin. I would say it was
the first thing that we really put a lot of
effort into because we didn't know, nor did anyone, why
(07:09):
doesn't beat taste like meat and unlike anything from the
plant world. So we had to figure that one out.
And one of the striking characteristics of meat in general
is that it behaves like an active chemical system. It
starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively not
very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you cook
(07:32):
it in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms and
in the process it produces this explosion of aromas that
weren't there at the beginning. Okay, that's why a barbecue
smells so good, right exactly. And you will notice that
you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you
barbecue broccoli, okay. And so meat has this distinct behavior
(07:56):
word behaves like a really kind of explosive chemical system.
And because meat, unlike plants, like hundreds of thousand times
higher levels of heam and HEAM is one of the
best biological catalys is known. So how do we get
to soil like hemoglobin? So we needed a plant source
of heme at scale. This this is known in botany
(08:19):
that legums, that plants that fix nitrogen. They take atmospheric
nitrogen and turn it into a monitarne into fertilizer. They
have the structure called a root nodule that does that
little trick. And the root nodule contains very high concentrations
of a hem protein called leg hemoglobin. Okay, okay, And
(08:40):
leg hemoglobin presumably is like it's like hemoglobin like in animals,
but from a legum. Is that what leg hemoglobin means exactly.
You figured it out. It's actually structurally extremely similar, like
you would pick it out in a lineup as being
identical to myoglobin, which is the hem protein and muscle tissue.
So if you're looking to make meat from plants, that
(09:01):
is a very promising protein. Is a correctical to protein.
By the way, sorry remedial questions. So like hemoglobin is
a protein, I celic that the amount of leg hemoglobin
in the roots of the US soybean crop would be
enough to match all the hem and all the meat
consumed in the US. Okay, okay, good news. So it
(09:24):
seemed like, oh, bingo, that's how we'll do it. Well,
we'll just harvest the root nodules from soybean something that
nobody was bothering to harvest. That's amazing. They're growing it anyways,
and they're just getting rid of it right perfect. So,
for the first year or so, our primary effort was
figuring out how to go a scale source of a
hem protein okay, and in particular soyle hemoglobin, in particular
(09:48):
soilake hemoglobin, because it was the only plant source of
a hem protein that was a sufficient scale anyway, So
we spent a lot of time in fields of soybeans
figuring out how to harvest the root nodules. There are
some ludicrous videos of the contraptions we built for that.
(10:09):
Give me an example, you say ludicrous video and contraption.
One of the first things we did was we went
to a soybean farm that was owned by the cousin
of our chief businessperson in Minnesota and harvested a couple
of acres of soybeans, dug them up with a potato digger,
(10:29):
and then we had to figure out how to separate
these nodules, which are like two millimeters in diameter attached
to these fragile threads of roots, and they're buried in dirt,
so we could isolate it while we built a contraption
out of sheets of plywood and then the bottoms of
Janitor brooms, you know those rectangular rooms. And then we've
(10:50):
brought along a street sweeper that has this big spinning
room so that that broom would cross with the Janter brooms.
And then I was doing a lot of this shoving
these soybean roots under this wheat streeper so that the
(11:10):
spinning thing could rip the nodules off from the rest
of the plant. Did it work? Did it work? It worked? Okay,
But here's the problem. Okay, when we looked at the
entirety of it, after six months or more of trying
this approach, we realized that the cost and complexity of
(11:31):
getting rid of the dirt and all the other crap
from the root nodules made it. Basically the economics didn't
look like they were going to scale. So, but meanwhile
we got enough of the soil people who are willing
to prove that this is the magic ingredient for meat flavors.
Then the question was, Okay, we need another way to
get this to scale. So we knew just from the
economics of producing proteins by fermentation and so forth, that
(11:54):
that was potentially doable. Producing proteins by fermentation, that's a
whole other thing that doesn't actually involve soybeans or dirt
or anything. Right. Yeah, So this has done a lot.
You know, most of the enzymes that are in your detergents,
A lot of the enzymes they're using breadmaking and stuff
like that are produced by microorganisms that have been engineered
with the genes that encode those those proteins and so forth.
(12:18):
This has been going on for decades, so that technology
is reasonably mature in its own right, and so we
could project the economics of it and seem like this
would be scalable and doable and so forth. So just
to be clear, you decide that instead of trying to
get soileg hemoglobin out of the roots of soybeans, you're
going to take the gene that produces soi leg hemoglobin,
(12:40):
put it into yeast and grow the soileg hemoglobin in
a vat. You're going to cut out the soybean middleman. Yes, exactly, exactly, Okay,
I mean it comes to mind, like why not just
do the one that's in a cow? Right? It is
that a dumb question? No, it's not at all dumb question,
and it's actually one of the ones that we looked
at was bovi and myoglobin, which is the one that's
in a cow. But we also looked at similar heame
(13:03):
proteins from everything from paramecium to barley and the end
we looked at three dollsand different heame proteins, and just
by random chance, the best performing one was soilo hemoglobin.
Best performing meaning it just made the tastiest burger, stayed
fresh the longest, was the best behaved in terms of
expressing in yeast, in terms of being able to be
isolated efficiently, in terms of not turning brown, sound up,
(13:28):
putting the planting then code soil hemoglobin into yeast, do
you know? And so they were able to produce it
in a minute. Impossible burgers are still way more expensive
than beef burgers. What's it going to take for the
price to come down? Also, when will I be able
(13:50):
to order an impossible steak? That's the end of the ads.
Now we're going back to the show. Let's talk briefly
about oh, health and safety. I like that you're not
trying to make like a super healthy burger, right. I
(14:12):
like that you're trying to make a burger that's like
a burger, and a burger is not that healthy? Right?
First of all, is that a fair way to think
about it? Like you're not trying to make health food,
You're trying to make something that is delicious, like meat
is delicious, but without an animal. It's almost fair. But
I want to do better than almost sure. I want
to get to face. We want to make something that
delivers what meat consumers want, which is above all, a
(14:35):
delicious eating experience, and we can't compromise on that, but
we have the opportunity to make it healthier than the
cow version, Okay. And one of our core principles has
always been We're never going to sell a product that
we don't believe, based on the evidence, is healthier than
what it replaces. Not healthier than a salad, but healthier
(15:00):
than a burger made from a cow, or a chicken
nugget made from a chicken, or whatever product it's intended
to replace. So we are very conscientious about health and nutrition,
but within the context of a product that consumers actually
want to buy in place of specific animal products. Right.
Your target customer is not a vegetarian, right, It's a
(15:22):
person who eats burgers, and you want that person to
buy an impossible foods burger because they like it better,
not because they feel bad about cows or climate change
or whatever. Right, Yeah, exactly. You know. The problem that
I'm trying to solve is that this industry is supported
by people who love meat, Okay, and for us to
compete them out of existence, we have to give them
(15:44):
exactly what they want and do it better than the animal,
and we're not interested in serving vegetarians. Perfectly, I love
vegetarians and vegans as much as the next guy. Okay,
I'm vegan, my wife is vegan, no offense, but we
don't accomplish anything by making better meat for vegans. One
other thing on health and safety is, well, just that
(16:08):
what you're doing is novel. Right. I'm interested in it
because you are out on the technological frontier trying to
solve what is clearly a very large problem. At the
same time, you know, it seems to me there's a
kind of common sense in eating things that people have
eaten for a long time and being cautious about new
kinds of foods, not new mixtures of old foods, but
(16:30):
actually new kinds of foods. And I think of, say, margarine, right,
which was introduced as a healthier alternative to butter and proved.
I think it's fair to say at this point to
be less healthy than butter. Help me not worry. Convince
me that impossible burgers are not margarine. So if you
look at our product, okay, there's nothing at them like
(16:50):
your level that isn't an abundant part of the human diet. Humans,
for example, consume thousands of different heam proteins every single
day in their normal diet, because every plant has hundreds
of hem proteins, all the meats have their own different
heam proteins, and so forth. The other ingredients in our
(17:12):
product are all things that have been part of the
human diet for decades, if not centuries, okay, and most
of them have been really really well studied in terms
of their nutrition and health properties. When will an impossible
burger be cheaper than a beef burger, Well, the definite
answer is eventually, because producing it requires one twenty fifth
(17:35):
the land, at tenth the water, less than a tenth
the fertilizer, and agrochemicals, less farm labor growing plants, no
farm labor, imagine the animals, and our production process is
much more labor efficient, and yet it's more expensive now
in spite of all that. But the point is, the
fundamental economics of the technology are vastly, vastly better. Again,
all the inputs, all the costly inputs of agriculture are
(17:58):
much much less, like not just a little less. But
the difference is that the incumbent industry already has all
its infrastructure in a place doesn't have to introduce a
new project product that consumers can't imagine and haven't heard of. Yeah,
and we are building all our everything about our business
(18:19):
from scratch, which means we have to be investing in
that continually making investments. And we're not nearly at their scale,
but as emtotically at scale. It's no contest. So look,
I'm a fan of impossible burghers. I grilled them for
my family last night. True story. The impossible Whopper is
our go to road trip food. I'm not a vegetarian,
(18:39):
but some people in my family are, and I'm happy
to not eat beef. So what's next? And in particular,
I would love for you to tell me the story
of something you haven't cracked yet, whether it's steak or
chicken breast. I mean, those things seem way harder than
ground meat. Is there something some problem you haven't solved
yet that you can just tell me about sort of
(19:01):
how you're trying to do it? What hasn't worked when
we started out, Okay, we took on a problem that
we didn't know how to solve. Right. We believed it
was solvable based on not fantasy but understanding the biochemistry.
But we didn't know how. We had to figure it out,
and every new product, if it's not already on the market,
we're still figuring it out. And we have very high standards.
(19:22):
So we've had a lot of products that you know what,
have been successful in the market well before we launch them.
But we want to launch products only if we believe
they can successfully compete against the best animal products on
the market. So we're working on hull cuts like you
could say steak and chicken breast, and that seems so
(19:43):
much harder, is it? It's harder in a different way.
Do you have to kind of start from square one? No,
we don't have to start again because because first of all,
we've already figured out the fundamentals of the flavor chemistry.
So the different thing about hull cuts they have the
same kind of components, but they have anatomy okay, and
they have a different texture and cooking behavior you know
(20:06):
related to that. Yeah, but we understand and it pretty well.
We're making great progress. Let's just say, um, but I
don't want to say anything more anyway. The point is, yes,
it's a harder problem. It's not I would say a
step function harder. It's just it's just got additional sort
of technical engineering challenges that we have to figure out.
(20:27):
I wouldn't be saying it if I wasn't highly confident
that we're going to have something to launch the world
within the next, say, couple of years. What are you
going to launch? And by when more or less, we
certainly expect to be launching a great steak product and
other hole cuts you can think of as like pork
tenderloin or chicken breast or like great pieces of meat
(20:51):
years pieces of meat that have that have the anatomy,
if you know what I mean. Yeah, Yeah, within a
couple of years, meaning like twenty twenty four ish. You know,
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make promises here, but
I would say pretty high confidence. Yes, Impossible Foods has
(21:12):
made a profoundly better veggie burger, but the company still
has a ways to go to solve that big problem
slash dream of really making meat without animals, which is
an absurdly big, hard problem that lots of companies are
working on. We'll have more about that next week, including
both some of the struggles the industry has been going
(21:32):
through lately and also more on what may be coming
in the next few years. But before we go to day,
we'll do the lightning round. That's in a minute. Okay,
let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
the lightning round. What's the most overrated vegetable? That's interesting?
(21:57):
I think the sweet potnia. I'm gonna get some haymail
on that one. But sweet potato, Heymail's good, Hey mail.
What's the most underrated vegetable? That's really tough fun. Oh
maybe Brussels spread. Okay, they've made a comeback. It's a
divisive one. They've made a comeback. Yeah, they're hip, They're
it vegetable. I'm a fan. If everything goes well, what's
a problem you'll be trying to solve in say, five years. Oh, actually,
(22:21):
that's a very good question. So and impossible foods. What
we're doing is using market competition to reduce the economic
incentive for covering land with cows and crops to feed
pigs and chickens and stuff like that. Right. The next step, though,
is what to do with that land and how to
(22:42):
make the most of the opportunity. Okay, here's another question.
There are other companies trying to do what you do.
Beyond meat is a big one. There's lots of others.
You are clearly driven by mission, right, I believe that
you are not in this to get rich or whatever.
So does it matter to you whether Impossible Food winds
or some other company makes incredible technology that makes meat obsolete? Like,
(23:04):
does that matter to who wins? Not? Really? No, I
mean it matters to me a little bit. Now that
I have the company. There are people who you know,
depend on it for their jobs. But basically, even the
from the standpoint of our business, the best thing that
could happen with other companies is for them to make
better products. Okay, because the biggest obstacle to you know,
(23:27):
our growth and traction and so forth is there's a
very strong preconceived notion that any purported meat product that's
made from plants is going to suck and making more
products that reinforce that notion only hurts us. So I
would love to see any any plant based company, any
(23:48):
company that's trying to replace animals in the food system,
however they're doing it as far as I'm concerned as
an ally, and I sincerely wish them the best success.
Pat Brown is the founder of Impossible Foods. He's currently
on leave from the company, scheduled to return in March.
(24:08):
I spoke with m last year. Next week, we'll have
more on the future of fake meat, including a company
trying to grow meat from animal cells. Which do you
even call it fake meat anymore? If it's made from
animal cells? Truly, I don't know. Today's show was produced
by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith and Sarah Knicks,
and engineered by Amanda k Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein. You
(24:31):
can find us on Twitter I'm at Jacob Goldstein, or
you can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm.
We'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Your Problem.
Pushkin. Let's talk about meat. It's delicious, very satisfying to
cook and to eat, smells incredible on the grill. But
at this moment in history, billions of human beings eating
(00:35):
all that delicious meat has become something of a problem.
Raising livestock and growing food for them to eat takes
up a huge amount of the earth, an area the
size of the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego
in all, and the animals themselves make climate change worse.
Cows methane, you know that story. These facts, though, are
(00:57):
not going to be enough to change the way billions
of people eat. Meat. Just taste too good, Our relationship
with it is too deep. But what if we could
nudge people not with facts or guilt trips, but with
something delicious. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem.
(01:19):
My guest today is Pat Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods.
Pat's problem is this, how can you make meat without animals?
Pat founded Impossible Foods in twenty eleven. Since then, the
company has received roughly two billion dollars in investment. Burger
King now sells the Impossible Whopper. You can buy Impossible
(01:39):
Burger patties and chicken like nuggets at the grocery store.
But Pat doesn't come from a business background, or even
really a food background. He got an m d and
a PhD and worked for decades as a professor of
biochemistry at Stanford. I had my dream job. I had
awesome colleagues, awesome students, a great intellectual environment, all the
(02:01):
funding I needed. I had no intention of leaving it.
And my research was into something completely related food, so biomedical,
very basic biomedical research. Essentially, I had zero interests in
the business world. And about ten years ago I had
a little extra time, and I challenged myself to find
(02:21):
the most important problem in the world that I might
be able to contribute to solving. And so step one
was figuring out what is that problem? And it was
pretty apparent to me at the time that the two
most urgent threats the future of humanity were number one,
ob used to pretty much everyone, global heating by anthropogenic
greenhouse gasses and climate change climate change, and less well
(02:43):
known but actually probably more important and more urgent threat
is the precipitous, ongoing collapse of global biodiversity. That was
what I was going to take on. And then the
second step was figuring out, oh, it's a lot. That's
a lot. You're going to take out the two biggest
problems of the world. Okay, keep going, why not? Why not? Fair?
So then the second step was to figure out what
(03:05):
would be a path to a solution, and that started
with recognizing that the fastest, surest solution to both problems
is to eliminate the user of animals to produce food.
I think I know the answer, but just briefly, why
is raising animals to eat really bad for both climate
change and biodiversity? For climate change, obviously it's an ongoing
(03:29):
source of greenhouse gases, but more importantly is the opportunity cost.
So cows burp up a lot of methane. That's really bad.
And you're saying the second thing is if we weren't
using all this land to raise cattle, we could grow
new plants. I mean, is that the other piece of it?
So yeah, yeah, the two greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide,
the biggest source of which is livestock, biggest anthropogetic source
(03:49):
of livestock. And then the land footprint of animal agriculture
is more than eighty percent, probably about eighty five percent
of the entire land footprint of humanity. Okay, it occupies
about forty five percent of the ice free surface of Earth.
All of that land used to hold a lot of
biomass in forests and prairies and savannahs and so forth.
That was eliminated when they got transformed into annual crops
(04:12):
and pasture land. Okay, and the annual crops are largely
going to feed livestock, right, yes, yes, yes, so you
got the big problem. Now, you just got to decide
how are you going to solve the two biggest problems
facing humanity? Right? Well, the nice thing about was the
solution was the same in both cases. It was to
eliminate the use of animals as a food technology. You're
(04:35):
not going to solve the problem by telling people what
to eat. You're not going to solve the problem by
asking governments to you know, make animal our culture illegal. Yeah.
So the problem isn't that people love meat, it's that
we're using the wrong technology to produce That seems like
the big insight, right like, that seems like a real
(04:56):
shift from what I've heard before. Right Like, people have
been arguing for decades longer in some cases, that it's
wrong to eat meat even before climate change was a
known issue. But the idea that you're going to change
people's behavior not by telling them that they're wrong to
be doing what they're doing or that it's bad, but
by giving them a better option. That seems like your
(05:18):
big insight. Well that was the critical thing that caused
me to leave my job and found impossible foods. Because
you're not going to get a grant for that, you're
not going to get university funding for that. But fortunately
you can get investment because there's a big investment proposition.
If you can develop better technology to replace animals in
(05:43):
the food system by producing products that consumers value more, okay,
you can capture a market that today is worth two
trillion dollars globally. And the thing about it is that
a lot of people think, oh, that's such a big
how could you possibly do that, Like it's such a
part of the world. You know, animals, livestock, and you know,
you could have said that about horses one hundred years ago,
(06:04):
and the horse was much more a part of the
family than a cow. You know, essentially every every household
had had a horse. But in less than two decades,
basically it went down to essentially zero, and the horses
were a hobby and not a motive transportation. So better technology,
if it does a better job of delivering what consumers value,
(06:25):
can sweepingly replace an old technology very fast, much faster
than people ever expect. Okay, so that's that's like the
big picture behind the company. I want to talk in
a little more detail. In particular, I want to talk
about this molecule called hem hem as in hemoglobin, like
what we have in our blood. It's also in a
protein called soy leg hemoglobin. And I guess that protein,
(06:49):
if I understand right, is a key reason your burgers
are way more meady than the like old school veggie
burgers that I grew up with. So tell me about
hem and soy leg hemoglobin. I would say it was
the first thing that we really put a lot of
effort into because we didn't know, nor did anyone, why
(07:09):
doesn't beat taste like meat and unlike anything from the
plant world. So we had to figure that one out.
And one of the striking characteristics of meat in general
is that it behaves like an active chemical system. It
starts out with one flavor profile, which is relatively not
very strong, mostly bloody kind of and when you cook
(07:32):
it in a matter of minutes, it completely transforms and
in the process it produces this explosion of aromas that
weren't there at the beginning. Okay, that's why a barbecue
smells so good, right exactly. And you will notice that
you don't you don't get any similar behavior if you
barbecue broccoli, okay. And so meat has this distinct behavior
(07:56):
word behaves like a really kind of explosive chemical system.
And because meat, unlike plants, like hundreds of thousand times
higher levels of heam and HEAM is one of the
best biological catalys is known. So how do we get
to soil like hemoglobin? So we needed a plant source
of heme at scale. This this is known in botany
(08:19):
that legums, that plants that fix nitrogen. They take atmospheric
nitrogen and turn it into a monitarne into fertilizer. They
have the structure called a root nodule that does that
little trick. And the root nodule contains very high concentrations
of a hem protein called leg hemoglobin. Okay, okay, And
(08:40):
leg hemoglobin presumably is like it's like hemoglobin like in animals,
but from a legum. Is that what leg hemoglobin means exactly.
You figured it out. It's actually structurally extremely similar, like
you would pick it out in a lineup as being
identical to myoglobin, which is the hem protein and muscle tissue.
So if you're looking to make meat from plants, that
(09:01):
is a very promising protein. Is a correctical to protein.
By the way, sorry remedial questions. So like hemoglobin is
a protein, I celic that the amount of leg hemoglobin
in the roots of the US soybean crop would be
enough to match all the hem and all the meat
consumed in the US. Okay, okay, good news. So it
(09:24):
seemed like, oh, bingo, that's how we'll do it. Well,
we'll just harvest the root nodules from soybean something that
nobody was bothering to harvest. That's amazing. They're growing it anyways,
and they're just getting rid of it right perfect. So,
for the first year or so, our primary effort was
figuring out how to go a scale source of a
hem protein okay, and in particular soyle hemoglobin, in particular
(09:48):
soilake hemoglobin, because it was the only plant source of
a hem protein that was a sufficient scale anyway, So
we spent a lot of time in fields of soybeans
figuring out how to harvest the root nodules. There are
some ludicrous videos of the contraptions we built for that.
(10:09):
Give me an example, you say ludicrous video and contraption.
One of the first things we did was we went
to a soybean farm that was owned by the cousin
of our chief businessperson in Minnesota and harvested a couple
of acres of soybeans, dug them up with a potato digger,
(10:29):
and then we had to figure out how to separate
these nodules, which are like two millimeters in diameter attached
to these fragile threads of roots, and they're buried in dirt,
so we could isolate it while we built a contraption
out of sheets of plywood and then the bottoms of
Janitor brooms, you know those rectangular rooms. And then we've
(10:50):
brought along a street sweeper that has this big spinning
room so that that broom would cross with the Janter brooms.
And then I was doing a lot of this shoving
these soybean roots under this wheat streeper so that the
(11:10):
spinning thing could rip the nodules off from the rest
of the plant. Did it work? Did it work? It worked? Okay,
But here's the problem. Okay, when we looked at the
entirety of it, after six months or more of trying
this approach, we realized that the cost and complexity of
(11:31):
getting rid of the dirt and all the other crap
from the root nodules made it. Basically the economics didn't
look like they were going to scale. So, but meanwhile
we got enough of the soil people who are willing
to prove that this is the magic ingredient for meat flavors.
Then the question was, Okay, we need another way to
get this to scale. So we knew just from the
economics of producing proteins by fermentation and so forth, that
(11:54):
that was potentially doable. Producing proteins by fermentation, that's a
whole other thing that doesn't actually involve soybeans or dirt
or anything. Right. Yeah, So this has done a lot.
You know, most of the enzymes that are in your detergents,
A lot of the enzymes they're using breadmaking and stuff
like that are produced by microorganisms that have been engineered
with the genes that encode those those proteins and so forth.
(12:18):
This has been going on for decades, so that technology
is reasonably mature in its own right, and so we
could project the economics of it and seem like this
would be scalable and doable and so forth. So just
to be clear, you decide that instead of trying to
get soileg hemoglobin out of the roots of soybeans, you're
going to take the gene that produces soi leg hemoglobin,
(12:40):
put it into yeast and grow the soileg hemoglobin in
a vat. You're going to cut out the soybean middleman. Yes, exactly, exactly, Okay,
I mean it comes to mind, like why not just
do the one that's in a cow? Right? It is
that a dumb question? No, it's not at all dumb question,
and it's actually one of the ones that we looked
at was bovi and myoglobin, which is the one that's
in a cow. But we also looked at similar heame
(13:03):
proteins from everything from paramecium to barley and the end
we looked at three dollsand different heame proteins, and just
by random chance, the best performing one was soilo hemoglobin.
Best performing meaning it just made the tastiest burger, stayed
fresh the longest, was the best behaved in terms of
expressing in yeast, in terms of being able to be
isolated efficiently, in terms of not turning brown, sound up,
(13:28):
putting the planting then code soil hemoglobin into yeast, do
you know? And so they were able to produce it
in a minute. Impossible burgers are still way more expensive
than beef burgers. What's it going to take for the
price to come down? Also, when will I be able
(13:50):
to order an impossible steak? That's the end of the ads.
Now we're going back to the show. Let's talk briefly
about oh, health and safety. I like that you're not
trying to make like a super healthy burger, right. I
(14:12):
like that you're trying to make a burger that's like
a burger, and a burger is not that healthy? Right?
First of all, is that a fair way to think
about it? Like you're not trying to make health food,
You're trying to make something that is delicious, like meat
is delicious, but without an animal. It's almost fair. But
I want to do better than almost sure. I want
to get to face. We want to make something that
delivers what meat consumers want, which is above all, a
(14:35):
delicious eating experience, and we can't compromise on that, but
we have the opportunity to make it healthier than the
cow version, Okay. And one of our core principles has
always been We're never going to sell a product that
we don't believe, based on the evidence, is healthier than
what it replaces. Not healthier than a salad, but healthier
(15:00):
than a burger made from a cow, or a chicken
nugget made from a chicken, or whatever product it's intended
to replace. So we are very conscientious about health and nutrition,
but within the context of a product that consumers actually
want to buy in place of specific animal products. Right.
Your target customer is not a vegetarian, right, It's a
(15:22):
person who eats burgers, and you want that person to
buy an impossible foods burger because they like it better,
not because they feel bad about cows or climate change
or whatever. Right, Yeah, exactly. You know. The problem that
I'm trying to solve is that this industry is supported
by people who love meat, Okay, and for us to
compete them out of existence, we have to give them
(15:44):
exactly what they want and do it better than the animal,
and we're not interested in serving vegetarians. Perfectly, I love
vegetarians and vegans as much as the next guy. Okay,
I'm vegan, my wife is vegan, no offense, but we
don't accomplish anything by making better meat for vegans. One
other thing on health and safety is, well, just that
(16:08):
what you're doing is novel. Right. I'm interested in it
because you are out on the technological frontier trying to
solve what is clearly a very large problem. At the
same time, you know, it seems to me there's a
kind of common sense in eating things that people have
eaten for a long time and being cautious about new
kinds of foods, not new mixtures of old foods, but
(16:30):
actually new kinds of foods. And I think of, say, margarine, right,
which was introduced as a healthier alternative to butter and proved.
I think it's fair to say at this point to
be less healthy than butter. Help me not worry. Convince
me that impossible burgers are not margarine. So if you
look at our product, okay, there's nothing at them like
(16:50):
your level that isn't an abundant part of the human diet. Humans,
for example, consume thousands of different heam proteins every single
day in their normal diet, because every plant has hundreds
of hem proteins, all the meats have their own different
heam proteins, and so forth. The other ingredients in our
(17:12):
product are all things that have been part of the
human diet for decades, if not centuries, okay, and most
of them have been really really well studied in terms
of their nutrition and health properties. When will an impossible
burger be cheaper than a beef burger, Well, the definite
answer is eventually, because producing it requires one twenty fifth
(17:35):
the land, at tenth the water, less than a tenth
the fertilizer, and agrochemicals, less farm labor growing plants, no
farm labor, imagine the animals, and our production process is
much more labor efficient, and yet it's more expensive now
in spite of all that. But the point is, the
fundamental economics of the technology are vastly, vastly better. Again,
all the inputs, all the costly inputs of agriculture are
(17:58):
much much less, like not just a little less. But
the difference is that the incumbent industry already has all
its infrastructure in a place doesn't have to introduce a
new project product that consumers can't imagine and haven't heard of. Yeah,
and we are building all our everything about our business
(18:19):
from scratch, which means we have to be investing in
that continually making investments. And we're not nearly at their scale,
but as emtotically at scale. It's no contest. So look,
I'm a fan of impossible burghers. I grilled them for
my family last night. True story. The impossible Whopper is
our go to road trip food. I'm not a vegetarian,
(18:39):
but some people in my family are, and I'm happy
to not eat beef. So what's next? And in particular,
I would love for you to tell me the story
of something you haven't cracked yet, whether it's steak or
chicken breast. I mean, those things seem way harder than
ground meat. Is there something some problem you haven't solved
yet that you can just tell me about sort of
(19:01):
how you're trying to do it? What hasn't worked when
we started out, Okay, we took on a problem that
we didn't know how to solve. Right. We believed it
was solvable based on not fantasy but understanding the biochemistry.
But we didn't know how. We had to figure it out,
and every new product, if it's not already on the market,
we're still figuring it out. And we have very high standards.
(19:22):
So we've had a lot of products that you know what,
have been successful in the market well before we launch them.
But we want to launch products only if we believe
they can successfully compete against the best animal products on
the market. So we're working on hull cuts like you
could say steak and chicken breast, and that seems so
(19:43):
much harder, is it? It's harder in a different way.
Do you have to kind of start from square one? No,
we don't have to start again because because first of all,
we've already figured out the fundamentals of the flavor chemistry.
So the different thing about hull cuts they have the
same kind of components, but they have anatomy okay, and
they have a different texture and cooking behavior you know
(20:06):
related to that. Yeah, but we understand and it pretty well.
We're making great progress. Let's just say, um, but I
don't want to say anything more anyway. The point is, yes,
it's a harder problem. It's not I would say a
step function harder. It's just it's just got additional sort
of technical engineering challenges that we have to figure out.
(20:27):
I wouldn't be saying it if I wasn't highly confident
that we're going to have something to launch the world
within the next, say, couple of years. What are you
going to launch? And by when more or less, we
certainly expect to be launching a great steak product and
other hole cuts you can think of as like pork
tenderloin or chicken breast or like great pieces of meat
(20:51):
years pieces of meat that have that have the anatomy,
if you know what I mean. Yeah, Yeah, within a
couple of years, meaning like twenty twenty four ish. You know,
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna make promises here, but
I would say pretty high confidence. Yes, Impossible Foods has
(21:12):
made a profoundly better veggie burger, but the company still
has a ways to go to solve that big problem
slash dream of really making meat without animals, which is
an absurdly big, hard problem that lots of companies are
working on. We'll have more about that next week, including
both some of the struggles the industry has been going
(21:32):
through lately and also more on what may be coming
in the next few years. But before we go to day,
we'll do the lightning round. That's in a minute. Okay,
let's get back to the show. We're gonna close with
the lightning round. What's the most overrated vegetable? That's interesting?
(21:57):
I think the sweet potnia. I'm gonna get some haymail
on that one. But sweet potato, Heymail's good, Hey mail.
What's the most underrated vegetable? That's really tough fun. Oh
maybe Brussels spread. Okay, they've made a comeback. It's a
divisive one. They've made a comeback. Yeah, they're hip, They're
it vegetable. I'm a fan. If everything goes well, what's
a problem you'll be trying to solve in say, five years. Oh, actually,
(22:21):
that's a very good question. So and impossible foods. What
we're doing is using market competition to reduce the economic
incentive for covering land with cows and crops to feed
pigs and chickens and stuff like that. Right. The next step, though,
is what to do with that land and how to
(22:42):
make the most of the opportunity. Okay, here's another question.
There are other companies trying to do what you do.
Beyond meat is a big one. There's lots of others.
You are clearly driven by mission, right, I believe that
you are not in this to get rich or whatever.
So does it matter to you whether Impossible Food winds
or some other company makes incredible technology that makes meat obsolete? Like,
(23:04):
does that matter to who wins? Not? Really? No, I
mean it matters to me a little bit. Now that
I have the company. There are people who you know,
depend on it for their jobs. But basically, even the
from the standpoint of our business, the best thing that
could happen with other companies is for them to make
better products. Okay, because the biggest obstacle to you know,
(23:27):
our growth and traction and so forth is there's a
very strong preconceived notion that any purported meat product that's
made from plants is going to suck and making more
products that reinforce that notion only hurts us. So I
would love to see any any plant based company, any
(23:48):
company that's trying to replace animals in the food system,
however they're doing it as far as I'm concerned as
an ally, and I sincerely wish them the best success.
Pat Brown is the founder of Impossible Foods. He's currently
on leave from the company, scheduled to return in March.
(24:08):
I spoke with m last year. Next week, we'll have
more on the future of fake meat, including a company
trying to grow meat from animal cells. Which do you
even call it fake meat anymore? If it's made from
animal cells? Truly, I don't know. Today's show was produced
by Edith Russolo, edited by Robert Smith and Sarah Knicks,
and engineered by Amanda k Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein. You
(24:31):
can find us on Twitter I'm at Jacob Goldstein, or
you can email us at problem at pushkin dot fm.
We'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Your Problem.
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