Impossible Foods brings total funding to $2B with new $500M raise
agfundernews.com
agfundernews.com
But also many lifetime vegetarians, so probably able to adapt away from the craving.
> I would literally pay double not to cause an animal to suffer ever again.
Think of it this way. It's not about _you_ it's about the _animals_ suffering. It's a selfless thing to do and fairly simple. Most foods are not animals they're plants! It gets easier.
Are you really saying that slaughtering animals is more "compassionate" than growing meat synthetically? And are you saying that the massive environmental cost of factory farms makes it more "integrated" with nature?
It's like you're deliberately trying to attach a negative connotation to synthetic meat by using the words "corporate lab".
Literally all first world amenities originate in a corporate lab! Are you suggesting we stop taking COVID vaccines because they were developed in Pfizer's corporate lab?
What do you propose we do instead to curb the world's desire to eat meat? You say "factory farms are terrible". Yes they are! And synthetic meat is the only way factory farms will go away.
I don't have any economic answers, however I think the vegan vision of a human race separate from nature is very scary, and not separate from one where we eradicate the natural world through industrialization.
I wish they added strains of imperfection that get stuck in your teeth or something.
I'm also trying to be as vegan as possible, but mainly for health reasons. Though after starting that, I now also think there's ethical reasons. Funny how that works.
Our family decided to adopt a more vegetable based diet and buy more ethically sourced local meat, especially beef and pork. The unit cost is higher but we spend about the same by eating smaller portions.
Substituting food like a burger for food like a burger isn’t doing much other than some warm fuzzy stuff.
I like Beyond just fine (but I prefer Dr. Praegers, so not exactly representative of the American public) but Impossible is enjoyable in its own right as a marvel of technology.
Just tried the nuggets for the first time this week - truly indistinguishable, aside from being a bit more consistent than real chicken.
Impossible's marketing is actually the same as Beyond: "we were first to have a great replica!" No doubt the next competitor will say the same thing.
I just tried them 30 minutes ago with some picky children. They could immediately tell something was amiss and wouldn’t eat more. I thought the chicken nuggets were adequate but the texture was smushy.
Otherwise the whole premise is totally pointless, other than for taste for vegetarians.
I would switch all my beef consumption to impossible if the cost were significantly lower.
From an investment perspective it seems kind of poor, given that there are already two players and likely more down the road. Will not be able to bear high margins on these kind of items. Cool that some are willing to fund the R&D even though returns are likely to be poor, though!
Competition will bring price down in longer run either way.
Is the cost significantly lower in non-subsidized markets like Netherlands, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Norway? Or do Impossible and Beyond charge more in those markets?
If we assume the inputs to impossible are significantly cheaper than beef, then cost of impossible should be significantly cheaper too.
But you're right, subsidies distort the equation. If somebody can chime in with what the level of beef subsidy is, but I'm doubtful it's enough to offset using vegetables over cattle. Should be an order of magnitude cheaper in a free market, once production is scaled up appropriately.
[edit : one can also try a simple-but-probably-wrong end-to-end estimate... Divide $38B by 325M to get $116 per person. Then divide by 57 pounds of beef consumption per person per year [4] to get ~$2 per pound. A quick search finds ~$4 per pound for ground beef, so one may naively guess the subsidies add up to at least a 33% discount.)
[1] - https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/removing-meat-subsidy-our-cogn...
[2] - https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-the-average-pound-of-beef-...
[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/the-true-cost-of-...
[4] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/183539/per-capita-consum...
Also, if capital costs of building a plant are low relative to yearly revenue, say 10%, even at profit margins of 5%, over 10 years you got 5x of returns, and that's without counting other ways of raising capital.
A lot depends on scale, and meat has scale.
Just a question of valuation and ROI on a longer timescale. BYND stock seems wildly overvalued if you consider the very long run, for example.
You can't have a tech like multiple on a food/grocery product and expect a good long term return.
Vast majority of people will not buy meat alternatives if they are more expensive than meat.
On the other hand, if you can bring cost well below meat, many will choose it for economic reasons alone.
https://impossiblehq.com/impossible-foods-lawsuit-statement/
Ground impossible meat is as good as real ground beef IMO, though it took me a while to realize that you need to salt/spice it just as you would real meat too! ie. if you put straight ground beef on a grill, it'll taste a little bland. Same with the fake meats.
I'm biased (chicken farmer), but to me it seems quite strange to think that some highly-processed factory-produced meatlike substance could ever come close to matching the nutritive quality of well-raised and processed meat.
Factories are in general not well-known for producing healthful food.
As for the ground impossible meat, my only negative feedback is that it's a poor candidate for use in boxed dinners (like Hamburger Helper), because the addition of too much liquid ruins the illusion: it starts to dissolve into its constituent vegetable powders.
But heck, I recently found the burgers flagged with a modest discount at Costco that made them cheaper than the beef burgers, per unit!
For dishes where you're already using lower quality ground meat as 'bulk' I can absolutely see it competing. The main problem is that it still costs a fair bit more than the low end meat it has a reasonable chance of replacing. Once it gets to a price point where McDonalds can sell their Impossible Big Mac for $1 cheaper than their meat Big Mac, then I think things will really start to change.
I found impossible tastes more like real meat, reminded me of a cheap frozen grocery store patty
To me Beyond tasted less like real meat but had a better flavor/spices
You should absolutely eat it hot though, once it cools down it's a a bit less good.
Overall it's pretty amazing and can work as a substitute for meat.
It doesn't give you the meat heaviness, which some people may consider a downside, but I personally consider it an upside. I can't imagine having a 1/2 lb burger and then doing sports even 2 hours later. I'd just feel gross and heavy.kj With Impossible burger sports would be totally, well, possible.
I do also wonder how the food safety compares. Ground beef has a large risk of e-coli and needs to be thoroughly cooked. Presumably plant-based food doesn’t have the same level of danger. Although I imagine if left unrefrigerated anything with that much nutrition in it would quickly become dangerous to eat.
Edit: On the bad side - Canadian A&W featured Beyond Meat chicken nuggets. These tasted nothing like chicken. They weren't inedible, but not a good approximation of even the low quality nugget meat.
imo if vegans want to push their food as a legitimate lifestyle, they should stop trying to imitate meat products. It's a self-defeating premise, an admission that vegan food doesn't taste as good, but "we can make it taste as good as meat with enough hard work and science!"
If you want veganism to catch on, the correct argument is to say, straight up, with full confidence, "this is fully capable of tasting as good or better than meat all on its own!" And working to come up with delicious meals that embrace and utilize the flavors of veggies. Otherwise this will always be second best.
It’s same as people putting water rinsed through oats as a cream substitute, who would no doubt cringe at putting coffeemate in their coffee!
- it's a venture capitalist baby
- people are paid be getting funded rather than selling their product to actual people
because of the two points, you see it promoted online like propaganda because the venture capitalists want their money back, with profit
While I'd love to be buying Impossible's products, I'm generally glad for the high standards.
I want to like it, but honestly I would rather just eat a salad.
Instead of addressing the problem of monopoly and factory meat, let’s drive towards Roman latifundia and pretend that soy, peas and coconut/palm oil are meat.
I think people may be confused about who Impossible and Beyond are marketing to. They are not marketing to people who don't want to eat a cheeseburger because it's too processed or even because it's meat. They are marketing to people who primarily want something that tastes good - not identical to meat, but delicious - and would secondarily prefer non-meat if it is available for equivalent taste. Whether something is "processed" or not doesn't come into it. Not everyone cares about how healthy or natural a food is.
You can tell this because their marketing doesn't in any way promote their food as being particularly "natural" aside from being made from plants. It's all focused on how good it tastes and looks. On their homepage (https://impossiblefoods.com/ as of this writing), Impossible Foods' first three pitches for their product are:
1) It tastes like meat and is delicious. 2) It's better for the environment. 3) It's better for the environment.
You say their environmental impact is unclear - I don't think that's true. It is extremely difficult for even the most intensive plant-based food processes to come close to the environmental impact of meat. Even almond milk, for example, which is an environmental disaster due to its water use, is immensely better than animal milk.[0] Even if Impossible were only half as good for the environment as meat, it would still be enormously beneficial to consume Impossible preferentially, and I suspect it is much better than that.
> Are these really going to replace traditional meat products? In my mind, no.
They certainly won't replace things like whole-muscle cuts of meat. But as costs for meat rise, I could see them edging out the ground meats they intend to replace in a lot of areas. I could also see them being in an ideal position to design and produce non-animal or lab-grown cuts of meat for consumption. There are already some companies doing this: https://kuleana.co/ for example. If I were an investor, that's the bet I'd be making.
[0] https://ideas.ted.com/which-plant-based-milk-is-best-for-the...
People who eat meat aren’t the target audience. The target audience are people who don’t eat meat but still go to MacDonalds or Burger King, it’s a growing segment, and don’t worry, noone is going to try to force you or others like you to join, but just like there are likely 90% of the clothing brands out there that you don’t care for but are still hugely successful, it’s ok that you aren’t in the target audience, they can still be successful.
The plain fact of the matter is that humans evolved on an almost exclusively meat-based diet and to this day thrive on an almost exclusively meat-based diet.
Not only are plants toxic for humans, but widespread agriculture results in the loss of insect life, due to the massive use of insecticides, which in turn contributes to the loss of bird life due to the loss on insect life.
Plant-based diets are terrible for human health and terrible for the environment, what with all the fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. The sooner we come to our senses and massively invest in regenerative herding the better off we'll be as a species.
We should all be eating mostly red meat every day, with maybe a bit of fruit here and there -- this is by far the healthiest diet both for the human body and for the Earth as our home.
And no, I'm not trolling -- this is my sincere and deeply-held belief.
There are currently about a billion cows[1], and these produce 14.5% of green house gases[2] (in the form of methane, measured as co2-equivalent). Doubling that would not be very good.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263979/global-cattle-pop...
[2] https://clear.ucdavis.edu/explainers/using-global-emission-s...
Last time I checked cattle used more water and more land than alternative sources of calories. You want us to eat meat, subsidies for cattle then? That's going to produce less calories at greater land and water use.
You want to terraform the desert? The word "terraform" is no sweet nothing. Talk about destruction to the environment. My goodness.
You want us to use nuclear reactors for energy? I do understand that desire. But you propose to install this in the Sahara? The place with tons of low value land and way too much sun? Might I propose an alternative energy source that is currently beating nuclear at price per watt in CLOUDY areas?
At one point in our evolutionary chain (that of Homo erectus and early Homo sapiens), sure. At other points (Australopithecus) we were exclusively vegetarian. For much of our history (that of Homo habilis and more recent Homo sapiens) we've eaten significant amounts of both plants and animals.
I'd love to see a source for the claim that plants are toxic for humans. Considering that many humans eat exclusively plants, and that those people seem to have lower all-cause mortality rates than people with otherwise similar characteristics [0], I suspect that that could only be true if you're using a very non-standard definition of "toxic."