Pod Insights The Vergecast Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown on a new kind of meat About this episode Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown about Impossible's mission to replace animal-derived meat worldwide and what that would mean for our climate and culture.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:00 Nilay Patel? Hey, everybody. It's Sam from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown. Impossible Foods makes the Impossible Burger that you've seen everywhere. Patrick is a really interesting guy. He was a professor at Stanford before taking a sabbatical, figuring out what the next biggest problem in the world was, and then deciding to make Impossible Foods. We talked a lot about where Impossible came from, where it's going, how they get out of just sort of the fast food zone that they're in right now, how they get into grocery stores, how they replace more meats, not just ground beef, but other meats like pork and chicken, how they can eventually get to something like steak. Then we got a little weird. We talked about whether they could make a meat that doesn't exist, which is something that they're thinking about doing. And we talked about the big dream, which is not just substituting for meat, but replacing
1:41 Nilay Patel? it entirely worldwide and what that would actually mean for our climate, for our culture. Super interesting conversation. Patrick is a very heady guy. Here's Patrick Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods. Super interesting conversation. Check it out.
1:58 Nilay Patel? Pat Brown, you're the CEO of Impossible Foods. Welcome to the RoachCast.
2:01 Speaker 06 Thank you.
2:02 Nilay Patel? How are things in this time of coronavirus for you?
2:05 Speaker 06 Oh, well, so far, things are going pretty smoothly. We're obviously taking, you know, public health precautions, common health, public health precautions, which basically come down to trying to reduce the number of unique individuals that you come into close contact with per unit time. And so we've instituted some stuff at our company and so forth, but so far, not too disruptive.
2:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Every, every chance I get to speak to a national scientist about, about the virus and its impacts, I'm taken. So, thank you for, for leading with that. But you guys are not a public company. It doesn't seem, you're probably not affected by the turmoil in the markets that are being caused by that sort of thing. Do you have supply chain issues and things like that?
2:45 Speaker 06 Not yet. We're, we're obviously paying very close attention to that because, well, we do have a supply chain and I think it's generally pretty robust and so far, no significant part of it is an area that's particularly vulnerable, but things are changing fast. So, we're just keeping a close eye on it and we'll figure it out if we do run into any issues.
3:07 Nilay Patel? All right. Well, let's get off the, the minute to minute news of the virus and just take one step back. So, we've been paying close attention to the rise of plant-based meats, the future of food. That's something we care about a lot. Just give me a little background on Impossible. You started, you were a professor at Stanford. You've done a lot of things. You took a break and you founded Impossible in 2011. Walk me up to that moment.
3:29 Speaker 06 Okay. Well, I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. So, I was a professor in medical school at Stanford. My main role was basically running a very active research lab where graduate students and post-docs trained. And we were doing research that was, had nothing directly to do with food whatsoever. It was, it was basically developing tools for being able to watch how the genome works, understanding genes and how genes and cells work and developing tools that, to improve, you know, diagnosis of various human diseases, including cancer and all sorts of stuff like that. But the common thread is nothing to do with food.
4:08 Speaker 06 And I had a sabbatical and I was fortunate that, you know, in my role at Stanford and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, I had wide latitude to pick research problems to work on. And so I just gave myself a broad mandate to look for the most important and urgent global problem that I could potentially contribute to solving. And when I did that investigation, I very quickly realized that by far, by a huge margin, the most important problem is the catastrophic impact of the use of animals in the food system. It is by far the most environmentally
4:50 Speaker 06 destructive technology on earth. And at the time, I would say it was not widely recognized. In fact, even most environmental organizations hadn't fully gotten their heads around it. Now, I would say, I would say most serious environmental scientists that look at global environmental problems would completely endorse the statement that the use of animals in food production is by far the most destructive technology on earth. It's the greatest threat, I would say, that arguably the greatest threat that our species has ever faced, is the catastrophic impact of this technology on the planet. So I realized that, I felt like, okay, bang,
5:31 Speaker 06 I know what I'm going to work on. I spent some time thinking about what would be the most effective way to solve the problem. And after a couple of false starts, decided that basically it comes down to, you're not going to change people's diets, you're not going to change people's food preferences, not on any reasonable time scale. It's been tried a million times, never works. And that meant that it's a technology problem. The way to solve the problem is to make it a losing proposition to be using this technology to produce food. And the way we do that is to compete in the market against the incumbent industry by making products that outperform in all the ways that merit to consumers, that outperform the products that we today make using animals.
6:17 Speaker 06 And that I realized was actually quite doable. It's a hard problem. It's a hard scientific problem, but it's clearly a solvable scientific problem. And so that's when I dove in, basically, and quit my, you know, job, which I had loved for 25 years and couldn't have imagined quitting, and basically founded Impossible Foods with the mission of completely replacing animals as a food technology globally by 2035. That's our mission. The time factor is not arbitrary, and the way we're doing it is basically focusing on figuring out how to make the absolute best meat, fish, and dairy foods in the world
6:59 Speaker 06 as judged by their consumers, competing in the marketplace, and taking down the incumbent industry, just as has happened to many industries in the past, that that were using underperforming technologies can happen fast.
7:14 Nilay Patel? So you were founded in 2011. It's 2020. It's nine years later. You want a completely displaced animal-based production by 2035. That's 15 years from now. So it feels like you're probably at an inflection point. Is that is that about where you are? Where you're you're going from proving out the tech to mass producing and commercializing? Because you just cut wholesale prices by 15%, I saw on some of the products. So it feels like you're accelerating into creating demand as well as filling the demand.
7:45 Speaker 06 Well, I kind of feel like we're probably going to be at one inflection point after another for a long while, because, you know, the this is a very, a very hard problem, multifaceted. Starts with the challenge of understanding in molecular terms these foods better than they've ever been understood, so that we can make smart choices in figuring out how to deliberately make better versions with plant-based ingredients. And we're still doing that. I mean, that we, you know, we're growing our R and D team. One of the, I would say, probably the decisive advantage we have over the incumbent industry is that we can keep learning and keep getting better at what we do far into the future,
8:27 Speaker 06 whereas they haven't fundamentally improved their technology in a thousand years. And so that's a huge advantage. And so we have, you know, our ground beef product is doing extremely well. It's very successful. We have lots of demand signals that that say that this is going to grow far beyond where we are today, but we're not satisfied with it because we're going to keep improving that product until that there's absolutely no meat eater in the world, no sane person in the world who would choose the cow version over it. So that's still going on and we're working on other strategically chosen products to compete further against the beef industry
9:09 Speaker 06 and other industries that are using animals as food technology. So the R and D is still going on and will be, I would say, you know, far into the future. It's kind of like when the first mechanized transportation could finally win a race with the horse, they didn't say, okay, we're done. Now we'll just keep cranking these things out. No, they had that they had this wonderful advantage that they could keep improving on every in every dimension that mattered and we do too. So that's that's not going to stop. We're still at a very early stage in our growth trajectory. We still have to grow almost 100,000 fold in in scale to fully achieve our mission of replacing animals in the food system. First
9:51 Speaker 06 of all, we need to have a grab an ever greater share of the market for beef products. We need to launch products that compete in other sectors of that industry and do that strategically. We need to expand into international markets. We need to broaden our presence in retail and direct to consumer channels and stuff like that. So it's one thing after another, basically. And one very important point, which is that, yes, we did recently reduce our prices. One of the things that I would say is that, you know, based on the quality of our product and its advantages from a health standpoint, when we can sell it at
10:33 Speaker 06 a price that undercuts the price of cow derived beef, that's the critical moment when the wheels come off the beef industry. So we're putting a lot of effort into achieving the economies of scale and efficiencies, which are absolutely doable.
10:50 Speaker 06 And passing those savings on to customers and consumers.
10:55 Nilay Patel? So I have a couple of questions on that specifically, but I just want to give people a sense of the process here. So you were a research scientist, you were in a lab, you came across this idea, you decided to use heme, which is the key element of the Impossible Burger. How did you go from understanding it scientifically to production? What were the steps there? Because that's usually the part that's fuzzed over in a lot of stories about innovation is we had the insight and now we make a lot of it. What were the big challenges in ramping up production to the place where now you're servicing dozens of fast food companies, you're in Disney World, you're in all these places? What was the ramp up challenge there?
11:33 Speaker 06 Well, one after another, again, because, you know, we're doing something unprecedented. So basically, first of all, we had to get a basic understanding, molecular understanding of what it takes to make delicious meat. Then we, in general terms, then we had to choose what's going to be our first product. We chose raw ground beef for very strategic reasons. It's more than half of the beef sold in the US is sold as ground beef. About a quarter of all the beef produced in the US can't be sold except as ground beef because it's little nasty looking chunks of a cow that no one would want to look at. And the beef industry is by far the most destructive part of the animal agriculture industry. It
12:16 Speaker 06 occupies about 40% of the entire surface land area of the United States and a comparable fraction globally with huge impact on biodiversity and so forth because of that. So we chose beef. That was an important choice once we had the kind of like fundamental, general know-how. And then we had to do a deeper dive at taking what we had learned and figuring out where we could find sustainable, scalable, i.e. there's a supply chain that's scalable, plant ingredients that fit the exacting specifications required to make a product, you know, that would deliver what consumers want. Building that, and so we had a number of false starts.
13:00 Speaker 06 One of the earliest false starts was, I thought when I started this, that we were going to be able to. So, early on, we discovered that heme is the magic ingredient for meat flavor. And that's quite unquestionably true. It's a catalyst that is responsible for, you know, all the unique flavors and aromas, or virtually all the unique flavors and aromas that people identify as meat, any kind of meat. That meant we had to figure out a way to scale it. Well, initially, I thought that the easy way to scale it was legumes like soybeans have little structures on the roots called root nodules that are one of the very few plant tissues that have a high concentration of heme. They contain a protein called leghemoglobin that's virtually identical to the heme protein that's in your muscle tissue and makes your muscle tissue red or pink.
13:45 Speaker 06 Anyway, if you cut open a legume root nodule in the middle of the summer, it's bright red inside. And something, actually, even most soybean farmers, I don't think have ever, they don't make a habit of cutting open the root nodule. But it's really dramatic. And I had calculated there was enough heme in the root nodules of the US soybean crop to replace all the heme and all the meat consumed in the US. So I felt like, okay, no brainer, we'll just use that as a source. Well, it turned out, and I was, you know, I'd been learning all along this process. It was, in retrospect, it was kind of a naive idea, but it took us the better part of a year to fully realize that this was just not going to work from a supply chain standpoint,
14:27 Speaker 06 at which point, we switched to producing the heme protein in yeast by genetically engineering yeast cells so we could produce it by fermentation. It was actually not only vastly more scalable and cost-effective and food-safe, because you're not purifying it from dirt, but also has a much lower environmental footprint, because, you know, digging up the soil releases stored carbonates into the atmosphere. So, anyway. That was one of the first kind of learning experience about what it takes to scale. Another is that what we're realizing is we're growing exponentially. We've been growing, we've grown several fold, many fold in our, our sales year by year.
15:11 Speaker 06 That's going to happen again this year. What that means is what looks like a very robust supply chain for ingredients, very quickly you have to start, realize that you have to look years ahead when there's an agricultural supply chain. If you want more of something that comes from agriculture, it's not just that you put in an order because a lot of these things, they weren't built to scale exponentially. They were built to just kind of chug along. So we have to be thinking about, okay, well, in order to have enough of this in two years, we gotta let the seed companies know that they need to produce more seeds and then make sure that the farmers who are growing this stuff know that, you know, the markets will be demanding more and, and basically scale up the whole pipeline.
15:56 Speaker 06 That's something that when you're a, a little company, you kind of know theoretically, but you don't have to deal with it. But at the scale that we're at and where we're looking at in the next couple of years, you know, now building a really robust, scalable supply chain for all our ingredients in a world where the people who have traditionally produced these ingredients think a few percent growth a year is, you know, a smashing success, you know, we need to be able to grow these things exponentially. So that's, that's been a learning experience, but fortunately we have some of the best people in the world at this. You know, we hired as our president, Dennis Woodside, who was CEO of Motorola.
16:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Dennis is familiar to us from those days.
16:38 Speaker 06 Yeah, he's awesome. And so needless to say, managing a very complex supply chain under conditions with unpredictable growth and demand and so forth is like, you know, one of the core challenges of being in that industry. So these guys are really pros at thinking about this, but that's a scaling issue.
16:57 Nilay Patel? So there's a little tension that I wanted to get at that because of what you said earlier, which is we need to get to a place where we're lowering prices and scaling more efficiently so we can take the wheels off the traditional meat-based agriculture industry.
17:12 Nilay Patel? But you also talked about improving the product and introducing more products in more areas over time. Usually, at least in my experience talking to the standard consumer tech industry, those things are a little bit of a conflict with each other. In order to scale and lower prices, you need to achieve some economy of scale, you need to stop changing the product, you need to get marginal investment on each new one. But if you're changing, you're improving, you have to pay that investment back into the product. So how are you managing that tension?
17:41 Speaker 06 Well, here's something to think about. Okay, so let's say when you're making a product that people buy every year or two, the turnover is, you know, on a slower scale and so forth. And the amount of inventory you keep and so forth is, for us is lower because it's turning over all the time. We do have a planning process for changing product. In fact, we have, we hired another guy we hired who came from Apple. And, you know, he's another person who's a pro at planning product launches and so forth. He was, I think, in charge of the iPhone X or something like that launch there. But anyway, really being systematic about planning all these switchovers and so forth. So yeah, that's a big deal.
18:25 Speaker 06 But we've managed it so far and we're going to keep managing it. You know, the way we succeed is by making our product better and better. So we can't just say, well, now that we know how to manufacture this, even though we've learned how to make it much better and it will be more competitive, we're just going to sit on those improvements. We'll launch them, you know, we'll make improvements, we'll introduce them in a thoughtful way, but we're not going to just coast.
18:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Do you think of that in the context, not only of replacing the traditional meat supply, but you've got a lot of competitors now, right? There's your traditional one-to-one competitor that everyone talks about, Beyond Meat, but Kellogg is out in the market now saying they're going to do it, Cargill is saying they're going to do it. These are the giants of agriculture and Consumer goods, do you worry about them? Do you think they're going to be able to get there with you? Are they pushing you?
19:13 Speaker 06 Well, this is something that I think a lot of people understandably are very confused about. We don't think of them as competitors. That's not how we view our business. What you need to start out realizing is our mission is not to take out other plant-based companies, is to take down the animal-based food industry, okay? And we don't achieve that by fighting against other plant-based food producers. In fact, I would say there are more allies than competitors in my mind. The scale of sales of animal-derived meat and traditional animal products is orders of magnitude greater than all the plant-based products combined, okay?
19:55 Speaker 06 So if we thought of it as, well, we're going to fight against a bunch of other small-time operations for dominance in the plant-based food industry, I mean, that would just be moronic. So that's not at all how we think about it. In fact, there is a very good case that could be made that, with one caveat, which I have to get to. But to the degree that those other companies are successful, it actually helps us not only in our mission, but in our business. Because it sends a market signal to the supply chain, you know, the people who are supplying the ingredients for plant-based products, as well as to the market that this is coming, okay? So in some sense, you could say that it is valuable not just from a mission standpoint,
20:39 Speaker 06 but even from a business standpoint, that more and more people are entering the market. The one caveat is that the biggest obstacle, you know, to adoption of our product is that people think it will suck.
20:53 Speaker 06 That fact was the big reason why we strategically launched, specifically with some of the most globally-recognized hardcore meat chefs in the world. Because the first thing that we needed to do with our sale of our product was not, it wasn't about the pittance that we made from selling to five restaurants, something like that. It was to send a signal to the world that a plant-based product can be good enough as meat, that the most uncompromising meat chefs would put on their menu as meat.
21:31 Speaker 06 Okay, that that was incredibly important part of our launch strategy and sort of continues to be for that reason. But even to this day, the biggest obstacle to trial of our product is that this deeply held notion by meat eaters that every plant-based product they've ever encountered has been an inadequate substitute for the animal product that they're used to eating. And the more products come on the market from other companies that really don't have the know-how we have and the tools we have, I would say, I'm not going to comment on the quality of those products, but let's say hypothetically, if they suck, it is only
22:12 Speaker 06 reinforcing, you know, the resistance of meat eaters to try a plant-based product. So mostly, it's good that those companies are launching. The problem is, let's just say that a large majority of them, somewhere between 50% and 100%, and and only serve to reinforce the resistance that meat eaters have to trying trying plant-based products. Unlike ours, which is incredibly delicious, and I wish, in a sense, that all those other companies would make something equally delicious, that would actually be better for us.
22:47 Nilay Patel? So you are in a lot of fast food restaurants now. Are you winning the the head-to-head battle against beef burgers and all the various fast food establishments you're in?
22:56 Speaker 06 Some of that kind of information I can't do on a company-by-company basis, but I would say that here here is what's salient to the Burger King thing. The Impossible Whopper is doing sufficiently well that it meaningfully improved this big company's overall performance in customers and sales and so forth. And then in retail, again, I'm not sure what what I can say about this, but in in one of the two chains that the one that does, I would say, a really good job of consumer awareness and so forth, which is the chain of 25 or 29 or some number of stores in
23:35 Speaker 06 California, our product, last time we looked, was still outselling ground beef from a cow full stop in those stores. I don't expect that to be true everywhere, but one thing I'll say, actually, that's quite interesting, is that when we do blind consumer tests, or when consumers try our product, I should say. And try it more or less blind and then learn about that's made from plants and what its advantages are. And we've done this repeatedly. A large, a majority of them say, if the product was available in where they shop for meat at price parity or even at a price premium, they would choose it over ground beef from a cow. And that's around
24:16 Speaker 06 the country and a majority of current meat eaters having tried our product give that feedback. And I'll also add that our repeat rate among people who've tried our product is very high. So there's every reason to think that if we were available in any place where consumers are looking for meat, had tried our product, a very substantial fraction of all ground beef sales would go to us. Where we are now is that a very tiny fraction of the population in the U.S. has tried our product. Last we looked, I think less than half the population even recognized the name of Possible Foods, much less, you know, had a meaningful opinion of it. And so that's a, that's something that, that we have to
25:00 Speaker 06 work on. And then we have to make sure that our product's available where people shop. So we're only in a tiny, tiny fraction of U.S. retail stores and still a tiny fraction of food service operations. So in order for us to really get the exposure and penetration we need, you know, we actually have to be on the menu in the restaurant or in the meat case in the grocery store. So there's a lot of, lot of potential there.
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25:59 Speaker 02 I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.
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26:08 Speaker 01 Let's get into layering.
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26:29 Nilay Patel? So that's the curve you've been on with the burger, which I've had. It's very good. At CES this year, I tried pork slider. That's sort of the next big one. What is the difference as you were developing the pork product? What did you have to change? What did you learn? What's the key difference people should understand?
26:45 Speaker 06 Okay, so people often say, you know, like, well, the critical thing for our existing, you know, ground beef product was heme. And I guess if you had to rank the things that we learned in our innovations, that would still be on the top of the list. But obviously, that alone isn't meat. It doesn't solve the problem. There's, you know, every meat from every animal contains heme. And in every case, it's an important part of the flavor chemistry. But they all taste different, right? And the textures are also different, even for a ground product. Ground pork versus ground beef and mouthfeel and so forth. So what are the differences? Well, okay, concentration of heme is lower in pork. There are other differences in the flavor chemistry. You know, the chemistry is the same.
27:29 Speaker 06 Fundamentally, it's all the same chemistry in different meats. But the proportions of different molecules that participate in that chemistry vary from species to species, particularly in the fats. So that's a difference. And then the texture is different. The people described pork... I haven't eaten meat from an animal in a million years, so I'm not the expert. Fortunately, we have people who are experts on, you know, the sensory experience of meat. But basically has sort of a springier texture and more of a fatty mouth feel and so forth. So there are a bunch of things that we needed to do differently for pork.
28:08 Nilay Patel? Are those just levers you pull in sort of production to get there? Is there some, is there a big change you need to make? How does that actually work? What's the sort of mechanics of saying, we're going to go after pork now?
28:19 Speaker 06 Well, it really depends on the, on the product. I mean, I would say the changes are substantial enough that we can't just swap it in. But on the other hand, one of the things that we did early on because of the, we knew to achieve our mission, we need to have a production process that was simple enough, didn't require any highly customized equipment. You know, basically, we could plug in food production equipment that was already produced at enough scale. And then, like I say, ingredients that were scalable and so forth. So the production process uses equipment that's efficiently already widely available that, for example, most of our ground beef product production
29:03 Speaker 06 is, is, is being done by a co-manufacturer that, again, is using equipment that's mostly the same equipment that they use to produce ground beef from a cow. So they're one of, if not the biggest, producers of cow-derived ground beef for the fast food market. And our process was deliberately designed to be adaptable to existing scaled food production equipment so that that wouldn't be an obstacle to our, you know, to our ability to scale.
29:31 Nilay Patel? So when you decide we're going to go into the pork market, what were, what were the steps before launch? What did you have to do?
29:38 Speaker 06 Well, we haven't launched that product commercially yet. That's, that's something pending for later in the year. We did kind of a sneak preview at CES, you know, just to kind of show the world that this is coming, get your orders in now. But what are the steps in launching it? Well, before we launch a product, we, first of all, develop and prototype it at lab scale. Then we do test runs at pilot scale. Then we have to make sure that anytime we make a change in ingredients or process or something like that, we have to make sure it doesn't affect shelf life. So that's a long lag time because obviously you want the shelf life to be many months, which means it takes many months to make sure that you have many months of shelf life.
30:20 Speaker 06 And then we have to make sure that the scaling principles that worked for ground beef work for ground pork in terms of the physical forces and there's when you go when you scale manufacturing of stuff, there are complicated scaling rules that engineers know about and so forth, but you can't take it for granted. So we do then we scale up to production scale, make sure that that works. We do a lot of consumer testing to make sure that the product from the sensory perspective for consumers is delivering to our standards and so forth.
30:52 Nilay Patel? So one thing I want to ask you about with the pork in particular, I feel like this wasn't as controversial on the beef side, but I've heard a lot of pork producers say, well, you shouldn't be able to call this pork, right? And like now the dairy industry is saying we shouldn't call nut milks milk. I know you're kind of passionate about this, but the idea from the traditional agricultural suppliers that we shouldn't call plant-based replacements for meat, various kinds of meat is more prevalent than I think it used to be. How are you feeling about that?
31:20 Speaker 06 Well, okay, the reason they feel threatened is that and weren't complaining before is that for a meat eater, until Impossible Foods basically came along, the products that were plant-based products that were on the market were sufficiently inferior from the perspective of meat eaters that they were not a meaningful threat. Okay. In fact, I would just say that there was no such thing, nothing that deserved to be called plant-based meat was on the market. There were plant-based products, there were veggie burgers and stuff like that, but they were not legitimate plant-based meat in the sense that a blinded consumer would recognize them as meat and and not only recognize them as meat, but
32:04 Speaker 06 recognize them as a very delicious version of the meat. Once that happened, the incumbent industry realized that there was an existential threat on their doorstep, which we are and and we're coming through. So that's why I think that there's been this huge uptick in angst and sort of lobbying and disinformation from the incumbent industry.
32:25 Speaker 06 But here's the thing about naming. When digital cameras came along, right? It was common sense to still call them cameras. They didn't call them something new. It was just a better version of, they performed the same function, only did a better job of it as the previous technology. We have done a lot of consumer research that basically tells us something incredibly important for this whole story, which is that meat lovers, by and large, love their meat. They're not going to be persuaded to eliminate it from their diet, or even by and large, reduce consumption. They're going to keep eating it. They like it because it's delicious. They like it because it's a good source of protein and iron.
33:07 Speaker 06 It's accessible, affordable, familiar, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They don't like the way it's made. And that's just true across the board. It's virtually unanimous among meat eaters. It is not part of the value proposition that your meat comes from the carcass of a dead animal, okay? With all the backstory to how it was produced, with all the sanitation problems in the meat system, with all the public health issues, animal welfare issues, the environmental catastrophe, meat lovers do not love that, okay? They love their meat in spite of the way it's made, not because of the way it's made. What that means is that meat to a meat consumer is defined by the sensory pleasures, the nutritional
33:52 Speaker 06 value, the cooking behavior, the familiarity, the affordability. And the way it's made is something that they try to think about as little as possible, okay? So what that means is that for us to call our product meat is actually just reflecting consumer perceptions, i.e. if there's a food that tastes like meat, that delivers the nutritional value of meat. That has the versatility and and performance of meat than to a consumer. It's easily slots in as meat, just like a digital camera slots in to the place previously occupied by a film camera. So we have no qualms about calling it meat because it is meat. It's just meat made a better way.
34:36 Speaker 06 And frankly, you know, if it comes down to it, we're not worried about the whole naming issue. We could call it anything we want, as long as consumers, you know, could find it, we'll be fine. But it's much better for the consumers as well as for us, for us to put it in, you know, salad alongside meat. Because the consumers that have the most to gain from it are people who are currently shopping for animal-based meat. And like I said, our research has shown us something that's incredibly important to understand, which is that almost all meat lovers around the country and globally would prefer that their meat be made without using animals and directly from plants.
35:17 Speaker 06 They would prefer that as long as it delivered the deliciousness, the protein, iron, the things that they value. If you if you deliver that, meat lovers would prefer it to be made from plants. And a corollary of that is that we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't boldly advertise that this product is made from plants. We want consumers, it's in our, absolutely in our interest to make it perfectly clear to consumers that this product does not come from the corpse of a cow.
35:47 Nilay Patel? Right, so you're not causing any actual confusion there?
35:50 Speaker 06 We don't want to cause confusion because it would cost us. Because we know that meat lovers would prefer that their meat be made directly from plants as long as it delivers deliciousness.
36:02 Nilay Patel? So this kind of, this is a big think of a question, but go with me on it. Right now, you're in the business of substitutes, right? You're substituting for ground beef, you're a better product, you think it's better for the environment, you think it tastes just as good. You're doing it with pork. You could make a novel meat, right? Is that something you've thought about, making something that's completely different than any other meat that's currently on the market?
36:23 Speaker 06 Of course.
36:24 Nilay Patel? Is that something, right now, you just want to take over substitutes and then make something new?
36:27 Speaker 06 It's it's something that's been on our mind and obviously. In the course of learning about the flavor, chemistry, and textures of meat and so forth, we know quite a lot about the difference between pork and beef and, you know, other meats from animals, so to speak, where you set the knobs with respect to the flavor, chemistry, and we can navigate that whole space. We can create things that would be unmistakably meat flavor and texture, but unlike anything that you've had before in that category. Because after all, the choices of meat that are available in the world today are basically a historical artifact of the species that people were able to domesticate, you know, 10,000 years ago.
37:10 Speaker 06 And they weren't chosen because they were the most delicious animals on earth. They were chosen because they were capable of being domesticated, and that's what you get. So, yes, there's a lot of possibility for creating, let's say, flavors that would deliver as meat but are unlike anything on the market. Why haven't we done that? Because it gets back to our mission. A sale to us has value from a mission standpoint only if it comes at the expense of the sale of an animal-derived product, okay? And the best way for us to kind of, right now, with our current state of, you know, a lot of people don't even know about us, barely learning about us, the simplest thing to do to make, to maximize the chance
37:51 Speaker 06 that our sale costs a sale to the animal-derived meat industry is to very deliberately occupy the same niche. So that if you're shopping for meat, you know, we send a very clear signal that if you're thinking about buying ground beef, you can buy this and get the same experience and so forth. If you're thinking about buying a Whopper, and that's what you have a craving for, you can buy an Impossible Whopper and you'll get that experience you want. So, in order to maximize that part of our mission, which is that our sales come at the expense of the incumbent industry, right now, it makes sense for us to make products that are easily recognizable as a one-for-one replacement for an animal-derived product. But in the future, I think there's a lot of ways
38:36 Speaker 06 in which I think we can have a lot more fun and create a diversity of flavors and textures and so forth. But we don't want our sale, we don't want our sales to be supplementary to existing meat sales. We want them to be at the expense of existing meat sales. So, that's, that's the core idea.
38:53 Nilay Patel? How close are you to making a ribeye steak, to making a short rib, things like that, which are traditionally harder for the plant-based vendors to make?
39:01 Speaker 06 Well, I would say no one has done it. So traditionally harder is probably an understatement. But yes, it's definitely something we're working on. I would say in general, when you talk about how close are you, you don't know how close you are until you get there, and then you can say how close you were. But, you know, it's a work in progress. There's still a lot of development underway, and there's no doubt in my mind that it's coming, but we're not ready to put a date on the calendar.
39:32 Nilay Patel? All right. Let me pull it out of the weeds here a little bit. You've set a date 15 years in the future for the big goal, which is replacing domestic meat production. Where are you 25 years from now?
39:42 Speaker 06 Oh, that's a very interesting question. Let me get a bit into the full impact of the incumbent industry, because it frames how we think about what happens next, okay? So, well, I'll just say, the use of animals in the food system is not only a major contributor to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions. Every time you, you know, see smoke coming from the Amazon, that's a direct reflection of the demand for meat, you know, that's that. But it's by far, for all practical purposes, almost the only driver of an absolute collapse in global biodiversity that we're in the late stages of right now. So, you may or
40:22 Speaker 06 may not know, it's surprisingly not well-known, but there's been ongoing study for 50 years that the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological Society of London, academic institutions have been doing, where they take a census of about 10,000 different animal species, wild animal species around the world, that are chosen to be kind of a representative sample of biodiversity. And what they reported in the past couple of years is that the total number of living wild animals on Earth Is less than half, considerably less than half, what it was forty-five years ago. Okay, in fact, it's about sixty percent less. It's across the board.
41:03 Speaker 06 There's less than half as many mammals, less than half as many birds, less than half as many reptiles, less than half as many living amphibians, fish, across the board. And the slope is just continuing down. And it's almost entirely due to the use of animals in the food system. It's overfishing for fish. Hunting is a very small factor, but, you know, a small but significant factor for terrestrial animals. But overwhelmingly, it's habitat destruction and degradation. Exactly what you're seeing right now in the Amazon. And that's what's responsible for this catastrophic collapse in global biodiversity. And it is probably more dangerous to our future than climate change right now.
41:44 Speaker 06 Because we depend on that biodiversity to maintain the ecosystems that make our planet livable. Okay, and I don't mean livable in the sense that you get to see giraffes. I mean, livable in the sense that it functions in all the ways that it supports life on Earth. So that's something that people should be aware of. The second thing about the land footprint of animal agriculture is that the best way in the world to do something that nobody's even talking about, but they ought to be talking about, but they've more or less given up hope on this, is to turn back the clock on climate change, to actually reduce atmospheric CO2 levels. And there's a very well-proven and documented way to do this that's in our hands right now,
42:27 Speaker 06 which is that if you could snap your fingers and make the animal agriculture system vaporize right now, atmospheric CO2 levels would immediately start coming down. Because the land that's being used to support meat production, grazing and feed crops, is depleted of plant biomass relative to what had been present there hundreds of years ago. Okay, all you have to do is just walk anywhere where you see cattle grazing, and then walk away from that place and see what the native, you know, plant biomass looks like. And it's vastly reduced. Same is true for feed crops, which are annual crops, and it's bare dirt half the year. There's a vast deficit in biomass on that land. And if you get rid of the animal agriculture system...
43:12 Speaker 06 Just the recovery of the native biomass on land will pull carbon out of the atmosphere by photosynthesis faster than we're currently emitting it. So that's a huge opportunity, and I would say a huge opportunity cost of our use of animals for food. So what does that mean for our future after 15 years when we have successfully basically made it an inviable business to be selling, you know, meat and fish from animals? So the total amount of land area required to meet the world's protein needs using plants is about half a percent. Okay, meet the world's, I should say, to replace all the protein, all the meat in the world, it's about half a percent of Earth's land area.
43:52 Speaker 06 This year's soybean crop going on 0.8% of Earth's land area has more than 50% excess protein over all the meat consumed globally. Do you understand that? There's more protein in this year's soybean crop by 50% than all the meat consumed globally, and it's going on 0.8% of Earth's land area. So what that means is that you get rid of animal agriculture, and it's not like, oh, now you have to grow a lot of plants on that land. No, you actually have to grow fewer plants. You have to grow fewer crops because we use them so inefficiently to produce animals. The value of agricultural land will collapse, okay? That's a good thing because what it means is there's no economic incentive, there's
44:32 Speaker 06 nothing, there's no economic purpose to messing with that land, and just left its own devices, the, you know, ecosystems can start to recover. But what we want to do is actually be looking ahead to that, and what are the opportunities to, to, how can we use this opportunity presented by the removal of animal agriculture from this huge fraction of Earth's surface to best effect to restore biodiversity and also to pull carbon out of the atmosphere? And that's actually something that, you know, we're actively thinking about, and I think that that's, I would say, in general, if you can do something good for the world, there's a business proposition for making it sustainable. And so we're looking, we're looking into that.
45:16 Speaker 06 And it's not because we want to be that business, it's that we have to figure out a way to create economic incentives to use that opportunity in a way that's best for the future of the planet. So that's something that we're thinking of. I guess another thing is, well, at that point, we'll be inventing all sorts of new... Flavors and textures of meat and dairy products and so forth. And you can live out your fantasy of eating a promisaurus burger finally.
45:41 Nilay Patel? It's hard not to think, I mean, we started out by talking about the coronavirus, but those viruses are entering the human population through these markets in China where they're selling extremely strange forms of wildlife to people. That seems like you could line right into that if you wanted to.
45:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, I think that, you know, the problem is some of these things, there's not like a, you know, a fluid global market in civet steaks or something like that. So it's harder for us to really have a near-term impact on that. But actually, that sort of illustrates, so I said that the biggest impact of the use of animals for food is habitat destruction degradation. There's a fraction of it that's due to hunting, and it's exactly that in terms of the impact on biodiversity. It's that there are a lot of, a lot of species whose numbers have plummeted because they're, they're sold in these wet markets and so forth. Pangolins are the one you always hear about. But fortunately, China has banned the sale of wild animals for food.
46:43 Speaker 06 I don't know how effective that'll be, but that would be awesome if that takes hold.
46:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So Pat, the last question I ask every CEO that comes on the show is very small, but I think very illuminating. It is, when do you work? When do you actually sit down and do your email and produce as an individual versus going to meetings, talking to people like me on podcasts? When do you, when do you work? How do you manage that time?
47:08 Speaker 06 I see. Okay. Well, I would say I work in the morning before my meetings start. I work whenever I have the infrequent breaks in my schedule, increasingly infrequent, I should say. And then I work when I get home, and I work on the weekends. And I would say pretty much between the things that I do that are not actually self-directed work. You know, meetings and stuff like that. And basically, you know, trying to go for a run every day, I would say probably, and then, you know, brushing my teeth and shoving food in my mouth and stuff like that, I would say probably 90% of my negotiable time waking hours, I'm either thinking about, you know, studying, doing research about, or writing
47:53 Speaker 06 about, or doing things basically related to our business. I'm completely all in on this. I feel like, you know, when I committed to doing this, I just felt like it's pretty much true, apart from just keeping myself from going completely insane by running and doing other just kind of survival things, the best use of any minute of my life is doing whatever I can do that moves us forward. And because of that, I don't feel like it's at all a burden. I love it. I feel like it's an oppor-, you know, it's an opportunity. I mean, sometimes I'm, you know, if there's shitload of craziness going on, you know, I'll be kind of worn out by it and so forth. But I, really, the stuff I'm doing, I feel like it's exactly what I want to be doing in that minute. So it's a very large fraction
48:37 Speaker 06 of any interstitial time I'm doing something. There's a lot of aspects of this business where, you know, you just have to deal with stuff immediately as it comes up. And it means there's a limited extent to which you can actually carve out those times and really protect them. I have a great assistant who is like world-class at doing that, but, you know, ah, whoa.
49:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah, she's right behind you.
49:01 Speaker 06 Isn't that timely? There she is.
49:03 Nilay Patel? Speaking of which, I, we, it's being increasingly obvious that your time with us has run out. So, Pat, thank you so much for joining us. We'll talk to you soon.
49:11 Speaker 06 Okay, good talking to you. Bye-bye.
49:13 Nilay Patel? All right. My thanks to Patrick Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods. That was a great conversation. I'm very interested in a Brannas source burger. That's something I want. We'll be back next week with the interview show on Tuesday, the chat show on Friday. We're going to keep powering through this work from home situation. Let me know how it's sounding. We're continuously trying to make it sound better, even though we're not in the studio. So let me know how that's going. Let me know who you want me to talk to. I will tell you this, as a podcast host right now, everyone's kind of available. So let me know. I'm in- I'm interested. It's easier to book people than you might think right now, because people have the time. So let me know. I'm at Reckless. Love your feedback. We'll talk to you soon.
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