Impossible Foods Closes $75M, Fueling Plant Burger Hysteria

Sizzling hot consumer startup Impossible Foods announced the completion of $75 million in financing. The round was led by Singapore investment company Temasek Holdings, with participation from Open Philanthropy Project, Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, and Horizon Ventures.  

“Finding a sustainable way to make massive amounts of heme from plants is a critical step in solving the world’s greatest environmental threat.”

Impossible Burger Patty | Credit: Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods develops plant-based meat and dairy products. Thus far, the company is known primarily for its “Impossible Burger,” a plant-based hamburger patty that has garnered unprecedented attention from culinary professionals and food writers. The company, which was founded in 2011 by Patrick Brown, a former biochemistry professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Stanford University,  debuted its Impossible Burger in July, 2016, at the famed Momofuku Nishi in Manhattan, a world-class restaurant led by celebrity chef David Chang. The company’s team of top scientists, farmers, and chefs had spent the previous five years investigating the molecular basis of food flavors and textures, with the goal of identifying methods and ingredients in order to create them naturally.

Umami Customer Thomas Emanuel Enjoying an Impossible Burger

Fast forward one year from that highly publicized debut, and the Impossible Burger has become one of the hottest items on menus at 50 upscale restaurants in California, New York, Nevada, and Texas. Gourmet burger chain Umami carries the Impossible Burger across all of its California locations, and, according to one store manager in southern California, it is the store’s best selling burger on the menu and has helped the chain increase its revenue by more than 10 percent system-wide.

Although partnering with upscale restaurants has been Impossible Foods’ “amazingly brilliant” go-to-market strategy since its start at Momofuku, the company is also working toward mass-market distribution of its “bloody burger.” The company’s east coast competitor Beyond Meat, which has also

Beyond Meat Burger Patty | Wikipedia

developed a plant-based burger patty, already sells its product in 360 Whole Foods stores and select restaurants across the country. In a March announcement, Impossible Foods said it was close to finishing a large-scale production facility in Oakland, CA, that can produce as much as one million pounds (454,000 kilograms) of meatless meat per month. Last week, the company announced that it is launching sales in more than 600 Kroger stores across 13 states.

Patrick Brown, CEO and founder of Impossible Foods | Credit: Impossible Foods

Animal agriculture uses 30 percent of all land and more than 25 percent of all freshwater on the planet, creating as many greenhouse gas emissions as all of the world’s cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes combined. Impossible Foods is on a mission to change that by making plant-based meats that are good for both people and the planet.

“Our scientists spent so much time and effort studying a single molecule — heme — because heme is what makes meat tastelike meat,” The company’s CEO Brown said in an official statement. “It turns out that finding a sustainable way to make massive amounts of heme from plants is a critical step in solving the world’s greatest environmental threat.”