REDWOOD CITY — Today, a tasty cow-free burger. Tomorrow: fewer dead chickens, lambs, pigs and fish.
That’s the mission of Impossible Foods, a Silicon Valley startup that has begun conducting tests in its Redwood City laboratory to apply its patented technologies — already proven to create sizzling and tasty engineered “beef” — to a wide array of other foods, perhaps even milk, eggs and cheese.
“We want to completely replace animals as a food production technology by 2035,” Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown, Impossible Foods’ founder and CEO, said at a press briefing on Tuesday. “We are working on producing all foods that we get from animals.”
Earlier this month, the company opened its new Oakland-based manufacturing plant — a mothballed former bakery for Just Desserts — and has started producing one million pounds of plant-based “ground beef” every month. That’s a million quarter-pounders a week.
The product is served in 40 upscale restaurants, including New York City’s trendy Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where chef David Chang uses it to replace pork in his $19 Spicy Sausage & Rice Cakes dish. In several years, after the 6-year-old company expands and creates greater efficiency in its manufacturing, it will target the vast retail grocery store market.
The company has raised about $200 million in venture funding and counts Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google Ventures, UBS, Viking Ventures and Open Philanthropy as among its early investors.
Meanwhile, government food regulators are studying the best way to regulate such lab-grown food. Other startups such as Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, SuperMeat and Beyond Meat are also rushing to create fake flesh grown from cells, plant proteins or other vegetable substitutes.
While the U.S. Department of Agriculture monitors animal-based meat, eggs and dairy — and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration oversees drugs and food additives — there’s no formal approval required for foods grown in flasks.
Companies such as Impossible Foods submit what’s called “self-affirming” documents to the FDA, showing that their tests prove food safety. In response to FDA questions, the company is submitting the results of reviews by three outside scientists, said Myra Pasek, the firm’s general counsel.
Brown, a professor of biochemistry at Stanford, began his research years ago into meat alternatives to decrease animal farming, which he’s called “the biggest environmental catastrophe.”
Environmentalists contend that animals destined for slaughter at densely packed farms emit greenhouse gases that cause global warming, deplete clean water supplies and can contribute to the problem of “superbugs,” the dangerously resistant bacteria that proliferate with the indiscriminate use of antibiotics.
A respected innovator in biotechnology, Brown is best known for his invention of microarray technology to study the expression of genes in diseases like cancer. He was also a driving force behind the creation of public “open access” journals such as the Public Library of Science. He was educated as a child in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Taipei — in a neighborhood surrounded by rice paddies and water buffalo. He earned his Ph.D. and medical degrees at the University of Chicago.
During a Stanford sabbatical, he decided to devote the rest of his career to reducing the environmental impact of animal agriculture. Disappointed to discover that his National Research Council-sponsored conference in 2010 had little influence, he focused instead on creating a competitive product.
He hired researchers from labs at Stanford, UC-Berkeley and Cornell. The company’s new Chief Science Officer, Dr. David Lipman, is the son and grandson of butchers in upstate New York and joined Impossible Foods in June after a long career as Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, within the National Institutes of Health.
A critical experiment established that an iron-containing molecule called “heme” gives meat its unique taste. When refined, it looks and flows like blood — it is, in fact, the same molecule in our blood that carries oxygen. It plays a similar role in the taste of fish, lamb, eggs and other animal-based foods.
Heme is the “secret ingredient” behind the company’s meatless patty. While heme is found abundantly in animal muscle, Impossible Foods instead uses a heme found in the roots of the nitrogen-fixing soy plants. It genetically modifies the soy’s heme so it can be produced by yeast in a flask — and “scaled up” in vats for mass production.
When heme is blended with a broth that the company calls “nutrients” — amino acids, sugars and vitamins — and then cooked, it tastes like beef.
“We were the first to discover that heme is what is responsible for the dynamic flavors and aromas that you know is, unmistakenly, beef,” said Rachel Fraser, Impossible Foods’ principal scientist.
Ground beef was the logical place to test a lab-grown replacement because it’s a staple in the American diet, Brown said. The average American consumes nearly 28 pounds of ground beef per year. About 10 billion pounds of ground beef is produced in the U.S. annually.
Meat can be challenging to precisely replicate, said Celeste Holz-Schietinger, the company’s principal scientist. As it cooks, meat’s consistency turns from soft and squishy to firm and juicy. Its color shifts red to brown. Its taste changes from bland and metallic-tasting to flavorful.
The company’s burger is continually updated, as scientists tinker with its formulation to make it more meat-like. Impossible Foods is currently on its 15th version that has been taste-tested and approved by consumers, said Holz-Schietinger, the company’s principal scientist. Inside the lab, hundreds of different versions have been sampled.
The cost of their burger — about $10 to $15 at current restaurants — will drop over time, said Brown. In two to three years, the cost will match that of mass marketed ground beef, as efficiencies reduce manufacturing costs.
“But we’re not a burger company. We’re a tech platform for food,” said Rachel Konrad, the company’s chief communications officer. “Our first product was ‘proof of concept.’ We can have second, or tenth, products after that.”
The same technology — heme plus nutrients — can be transferred to create other meat-free foods, when the concentrations and ratios of the ingredients are modified, said Holz-Schietinger. For instance, chicken breasts have less heme than dark meat such as thighs and drumsticks.
The company has patented the process that uses heme and the other ingredients to generate specific flavors, textures and aromas.
“It’s a platform for how to make things that have tensile strength and are juicy,” Holz-Schietinger said.
“That can be transferred to make things that are much larger,” she said, “like cold cuts, chicken, steaks, pork, lamb and fish…even if you wanted whale meat.”
