From Impossible Burgers to Fake Steak

Published Jan 26, 2023, 5:05 AM

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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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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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? 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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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