Impossible Foods says it is close to finishing a large-scale production facility | Hacker News Reader

Impossible Foods says it is close to finishing a large-scale production facility

qz.com

71 pointsprostoalex62 comments

I haven't tried Impossible Foods yet, but I have been dabbling with Beyond Meat (both companies backed by Bill Gates apparently).

In case anyone is curious about this product category, here are my thoughts on Beyond Meat:

Beyond Meat has a normal burger replacement. Other than the factory-formed shape (easy to fix I'd think), the texture and taste approach the real thing. It probably wouldn't pass a blind test and it's expensive, but if they got the cost down and In-n-out started cooking with it I could see myself preferring it.

They also have a healthier burger (Beast). This one's not trying to be as convincing and isn't going to convert any carnivores. I don't really recommend it unless you must eat something healthy in patty form.

Then there's the Beefy Crumble. This is a ground beef substitute that isn't in patty form. It's on the healthy side and isn't going to fool anyone either, but I use it all the time as it's nice to have another protein in the rotation (all the Beyond stuff uses pea protein). Easy to throw into burritos or pasta.

Looking forward to the future of this space.

https://www.impossiblefoods.com/faq/

    Nutrition Facts
    Serving Size (85g)
    Servings Per Container about 85
    -------------
    Amount Per Serving
    Calories 220    Calories from Fat 120
        Calories from Saturated Fat 100
    -------------
                     % Daily Value*
    Total Fat 13g            20%
      Saturated Fat 11g      55%
      Trans Fat 0g
    Cholesterol 0mg           0%
    Sodium 380mg             16%
    Potassium 250mg           7%
    Total Carbohydrate 6g     2%
       Dietary Fiber < 1g     4%
       Sugars 1g
    Protein 19g
    -------------
    Vitamin A 0%  - Vitamin C 25%
    Calcium 2%    - Iron 10%
    Thiamin 1260% - Riboflavin 15%
    Niacin 20%    - Vitamin B6 10%
    Zinc 15%      - Vitamin B12 50%

One note: the saturated fat component is most likely from the coconut oil. The nutritional impact of coconut oil as a saturated fat is complicated. 55% daily value may not be as terrible as it looks on first glance.

http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/coconut-oil

For special requirements (allergies, diets) reengineering the patty would be way easier than reengineering a cow, i would expect. This is their first product.

Allergies, yes. Zero carbs, probably impossible. That's okay though. No product can satisfy everyone!

With ~5g of carbs per 200 calories, you would have to eat these things pretty much exclusively to break keto, the only diet I'm aware of with an actual need for virtually no carbs.

I'm guessing someone on keto would need at least 150g for satiation, if not double that. For reference, a quarter-pound is about 120g. That's about 10.5g of carbs. It doesn't break the bank by itself, but it does mean there's a limit to the amount of extras on the burger.

This is easier to read on mobile: https://www.impossiblefoods.com/images/faq/nutrition-facts.p...

EDIT: Here's a link to the FDA comment I deleted, but is reference in the comment below: https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabel...

Your deleted comment from the FDA filing was interesting. I also couldn't make much of it due to unfamiliarity with the terminology.

My favorite part was the "this is submitted on a certified Virus-free CD".

Original comment:

> Not sure what to make of this doc: https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabel...

Of note in that filing is that Impossible Foods later requested that the FDA not review that PDF linked to above and the FDA agreed to stop reviewing it:
https://www.fda.gov/Food/IngredientsPackagingLabeling/GRAS/N...

I hope you don't mind that I resurrected your comment; I thought it added value.

Nope, don't mind; deleted it because I could figure out what it was.

What is a normal weight for a burger pattie? 85g sounds on the small side.

A quarter-pounder is about 120g.

Protein content looks good, but how does it compare to animal protein in terms of essential amino acids? Is it complete protein? If not, what is the limiting amino acid here?

This is something i am really (REALLY!) excited about. I am a Vegetarian because of the environmental impact, but the desire for the taste is still there (been a few years). All the substitutes i have tried (until now) were bad and left me disappointed and i still have to fight the urge to order a good old schnitzel at a restaurant.
EDIT: if somebody asks why i am being so strict...i will stop being strict when we start living sustainable on a global scale. I don't see that happen in my lifetime. Until then being a strict vegetarian has a good impact on the people around me. I don't try to persuade anybody, i will even grill your meat, i am just a vegetarian for myself and the planet.

What makes you think that this is more environmentally friendly than beef?

well, intuition. Beef is extremely unfriendly for the environment. Also on their website it says:
>Because we use 0% cows, the Impossible Burger uses a fraction of the Earth’s natural resources. Compared to cows, the Impossible Burger uses 95% less land, 74% less water, and creates 87% less greenhouse gas emissions. And it’s 100% free of hormones, antibiotics, and artificial ingredients.

Raising cattle on a mass scale uses more inputs. Mainly because they're fed grain, and caloric value of the inputs is higher than the output (ie. wasted resources), plus the environmental impacts of the cattle themselves.
It's not exactly controversial.

I've scaled back my meat consumption radically in the last six years or so and in my experience, taste is just a factor of habit. Change your habits and you can change what you perceive to be delicious.
Anecdotally, eating meat infrequently has resulted in me finding chicken and turkey generally flavorless and gross when I'm in a position where I must eat them. And while the smell of a burger cooking somewhere is still nice, the smell of bacon being cooked in our building has gone from sublime to rank.
When I do eat meat that I find tasty (burger, steak, kebabs) I've slowly come to appreciate that less is best, and more can turn my stomach. A thin patty ala Shake Shack is vastly preferable to an $18, 3-inch tall burger at a hip restaurant.
I haven't yet come around to vegan cheese. But based on other changes I can't rule that out.

i think if you want to change your eating behaviour, you also have to change your habits. It just doesn't work otherwise. But you can't change all habits. There is a pub with cheap burgers and cheap bear near my university and not going there isn't really an option. Of course that means the smell is there and my friends are eating unhealthy, juicy burgers, but on the other side i enjoy drinking beer and talking to friends.

I'm with you on the cheese. I've only found one vegan cheese that I like, it's Follow Your Heart Provolone. If you haven't tried it yet, give it a shot! Great replacement on pizza, burgers.

Not judging your choice to be vegetarian, but do you think we could actually grow/extract enough coconut oil to manufacture this at anything approaching a global scale? There has already been a run on coconuts due to crazy demand for coconut water. [http://time.com/4488043/a-major-coconut-shortage-with-global...]

i don't see this as a solution, but rather as a step. Coconut oil might not be the perfect ingredient to supply a global scale (there might not be one), but it's, or better will be, the first mass-produced alternative that's available to the common man.

I tried it. It tastes good because of the heme, but it tastes wheaty otherwise. I think most people would like it, but not going for gluten-free recipe seems shortsighted

Where do they get the haem? Yeast or something?

Yeah, GMO yeast

I wonder how this kind of burger compares to lab-grown burgers. I would imagine this process is significantly cheaper than lab-grown – in which case, why don't we just replace all burgers with this?

> in which case, why don't we just replace all burgers with this?
That's the beauty of capitalism. "We" don't have to do anything, if it's cheaper people will buy it and the replacement will happen automatically.

Not to nitpick, because I agree with your point, but that's the beauty of _economics_, not capitalism. Non-capitalistic economies (e.g. socialism) also optimize for high-yield products that require minimal labor, the difference being who owns the means of production (i.e. factories): the workers, the consumers, private shareholders, the state, etc.

If you're looking at it purely in terms of nutrition. But taste? Socialism doesn't measure the actual utility given by goods. Capitalism does by virtue of us spending our money according to what we like.

Socialism measures utility to social decision-makers, and, so, in the case of democratic socialism, weights utility equally across the citizenry, rather by wealth as in capitalism; wealth-weighting not only favors the near-term utility of the wealthy but also entrenches power, since future expectation of power has utility.
Of course, non-democratic (either in theory or practice) socialism (or non-socialist central planning) have unequal weighting that has the same kind of issues as wealth-weighting.

The major problem with lab-grown burgers is that cell culture is quite difficult and expensive to do at even small scale. There are obviously efforts to radically decrease those costs, but some things are going to be quite hard to do cheaply and at large scale.
For example, on their own, cells have zero defense against invading bacteria/fungus. And yet they're being grown in high-nutrient media where any bacteria would thrive and possibly outcompete the growing meat cells. So you probably need a very sterile environment, which isn't so easy to do at very large scale.
In contrast, these burgers are made using materials we know how to handle safely and can produce at large scale. These should be quite a bit easier to get to market. As for taste, I think both have challenges, but can't speak as much to that because I haven't had either.
Full disclosure: Pat Brown was on my PhD committee in grad school

http://www.sciencealert.com/lab-grown-burger-patty-cost-drop...

Yup, the relevant part of that article:
"Post and his team are now working on replacing the serum [fetal calf serum] with something that doesn’t rely on animal products, and told the ABC that while they’re making great process, it’ll be at least a couple of decades before they can scale the technique up and make it commercially viable."
If you're using fetal calf serum (FCS), you're definitely not particularly vegetarian, nor are you reducing the need for physical cows. Let's assume you can eventually get rid of that requirement though.
Cost estimates for something that is quote "decades" away isn't quite meaningful. The hard part is scale, and it sounds like they're quite aware of that problem.
Finally, $11 per burger is still insanely expensive. I can get a burger, with bun, cooked and handed to me on a platter for $1 at McDonald's. It's an enormous challenge to get lab grown meat down to an industrially relevant cost.
I'd still bet on Impossible Foods's approach.

> Finally, $11 per burger is still insanely expensive
Yeah, the price ($80/kg) is apparently quoted down to a quarter-poind burger portion of bulk "meat"; it's about $44/lb, which is around 11× the average retail price of ground beef (about $4/lb.) [0]
> I can get a burger, with bun, cooked and handed to me on a platter for $1 at McDonald's.
To be fair, the "hamburger" on the McDonald's menu is a 1/10 lb. (precooked weight) patty, which is much smaller than what is priced out.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/regions/mid-atlantic/data/AverageRetailF...

Fair enough on 1/10 vs 1/4 pound. Better McDonalds number: they will sell me a quarter pounder with cheese for $3.79, and that includes all the logistics, preparation, overhead etc.
And yeah your bulk price is a better number anyway :)
Fast food is mind blowingly cheap though, and yeah maybe higher end things will help move down the cost curve, but I think the technical difficulties around cell culture are truly massive. I'd be much more interested in things like making meat-like components out of yeast (easier to culture) than taking full on myocytes and culturing those to get a burger.

McDonalds is selling 1/10th not 1/4 lb burgers for 1$. So that's 2.5$ vs 11$. Also, ground beef is fairly cheap ~4$/lb, bacon is $6 per pound and Filet Mignon is 23$/lb. Still, even if they only sell it as flavor enhancer to the ethical vegetarian market that's still enough to scale and presumably drop the price over time.

Does anyone know how the nutritional content compares? For me, the fact that I can cook a 300g burger that, after trimmings, is 1000+ calories is a big deal. Also the massive amounts of fat and protein, and the low carb profile. All these things make burgers a great meal choice for me (taste matters too obviously).
If these fake burgers are cheaper, have similar macros and calorie density, and are better for the environment, I am super interested.

Why is density important. Is cooking a 500g veggie burger that much more effort? (Its not, especially since you don't need it to be properly cooked)

Can you eat a 500g burger? I can't. In fact I wouldn't even want to eat a 300g burger unless I was very hungry. That's 10.5 oz. 500g is 18 oz.

See http://www.impossiblefoods.com/images/faq/nutrition-facts.pn...
Their competitor Beyond meat has also the following comparison: http://beyondmeat.com/media/img/home/weigh-in.jpg

A 300g Impossible Burger would be
(from 85g serving size):
300g / 85g = 3.53 Calories 220 * 3.53 = 777 Fat 13g * 3.53 = 45.9g Protein 19g * 3.53 = 67.1g Carbs 6g * 3.53 = 21.2g

300g Beef Burger (source: wikipedia)
Calories 612 Fat 48g Protein 45g Carbs 0g

That's without the trimmings. Add buns, cheese, bacon, sauce, etc. and you can easily hit 1000.

I've tried the Impossible Burger twice at Cockscomb Restaurant in San Francisco. It's almost identical in taste to a good beef burger, when prepared by a professional chef at least. But at $19, it's not competitive with a $7.75 Super Duper Burger or any cheaper variants one might find at In-N-Out or fast food joints further down the ladder.

Doubt if impossible burger was at in-n-out it would cost $19. For people's comparison, the normal hamburger at Cockscomb is $15 (+$20 if you want to add foie gras ;)

I might be more fair to compare their $19 Impossible Burger with their $15 Hamburger rather than an In-N-Out burger. I haven't tasted an Impossible Burger (yet) but I'd be more than happy to pay the extra $4 if its "almost identical in taste to a good beef burger".
http://cockscombsf.com/menu/lunch-menu/

> wheat, coconut oil, potatoes, and heme
Replacing meat for carbs is not a great idea.
Edit: I was wrong. 200cal only have 6g of carbs which is pretty good IMO.

I suspect by wheat they mean the gluten part.

this seems like it conflicts heavily with a large portion of their target demographic... Is the carbs also a double negative?

What if animal fats are too heavy for your personal digestive system and you aren't obsessed with your BMI?

You can't "be obsessed with your BMI". If something makes you fatter, you should not eat it.

> What if animal fats are too heavy for your personal digestive system
You could get vegetable fats from avocados, olive oil, etc. Fats are essential to life.
> and you aren't obsessed with your BMI?
It's a myth that eating fats will increase your BMI. It's eating too many calories that causes that.

> You could get vegetable fats from avocados, olive oil, etc. Fats are essential to life.
I agree, those and coconut are my preferred sources of fat.
> It's a myth that eating fats will increase your BMI. It's eating too many calories that causes that.
This is the opposite of my intended meaning. I was referring to GP's blanket statement that replacing meat with carbs is bad. The "BMI obsession" snark is a response to people advocating extreme low carb diets as if they are inherently healthier (rarely are the components of that diet discussed) than a diverse diet of unrefined foods (including the occasional carbohydrate). Keto is great for showing off your six pack. I don't think that means that it is by default healthy.

I've had the hamburger before in NY (~$9 w/ fries) and it's pretty delicious. Probably would have thought it was real beef if I hadn't already known. I'm extremely bullish on IF.

Headline is a dramatic overstatement.
> In an announcement today, the Bay Area company said it was close to finishing a large-scale production facility in Oakland, California that can produce as much as 1 million lb (454,000 kg) of meatless meat a month.
1. Facility not done.
2. Facility not tested.
3. Capacity not demonstrated.
4. Regulatory approval -- pending?
This headline needs editing.

Ok, edited.

> 4. Regulatory approval -- pending?
Their product is already on the market, so I don't see how there would be any more red tape other than certifying the new facilities.

> any more red tape other than certifying the new facilities
That is a very substantial amount of potential red tape.

First 3 points - it's pretty easy to estimate, based on size of the facility, equipment, staff, etc...
Point 4 - what regulation? Apart from the regular food production inspections, which are well known, what issue could there be?
Headline seems appropriate.

This was clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Doublemeat Palace" :)

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