Impossible? A plant-based burger just won $75m

By Oscar Rousseau

- Last updated on GMT

Impossible Foods recently reached milestones on food safety and intellectual property
Impossible Foods recently reached milestones on food safety and intellectual property

Related tags Beef Processing and packaging Innovation

Start-up Impossible Foods has secured a “significant” $75m cash injection from investors, including Bill Gates and a Facebook founder, who now back a revolutionary plant-based burger that bleeds.

Flagship product the Impossible Burger​ uses a key protein called soy leghaemoglobin, which recently passed several food safety tests with flying colours and won the company a patent to use the ingredient in plant-based meats.
 
This sparked a flurry of investment activity, with Singapore-based wealth fund Temasek leading the charge. Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, Horizon Ventures and Open Philanthropy Project – whose main funder is Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna – have also invested.

Making meat from plants - the Impossible Foods mission

More investment in the business will help to accelerate its expansion plans, with Impossible Foods working on a new factory in Oakland​, California, that can produce 12 million pounds of meat-alternative burgers per year.

Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods in 2011
Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods in 2011

Founded in 2011 by ex-Stanford University biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, the business has been exploring how to meet growing meat demand in a way that does not speed up the impact of climate change.

The business has found a way to make the chemical compound heme – something that is abundant in animal muscle and helps give meat that unique flavour – without slaughtering livestock.

By genetically modifying yeast and using fermentation, the business has unlocked a way to produce a heme protein that is naturally found in plants: soy leghaemoglobin.

The compound is resource-efficient too, as it uses 75% less water, generates 87% fewer greenhouse gases and requires 95% less land than beef cattle, according to Impossible Foods. The burger is also produced without growth-enhancers, antibiotics or artificial flavours.

Our scientists spent so much time and effort studying a single molecule – heme – because heme is what makes meat taste like meat,​” explained Impossible Foods CEO and founder Brown.

It turns out that finding a sustainable way to make massive amounts of heme from plants is a critical step in solving the world’s greatest environmental threat.​”

Related topics Meat

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