Impossible Foods makes a wheat protein burger with taste and aroma of meat

Impossible Foods has $400 million in funding. Pat Brown founded it in 2011. They now are selling factory produced meat to 2000 restaurants. They have sold 4 million burger patties.

Their goal is to replace animal meat for food by 2035 by their factory produced meat that is more nutritious and better tasting.

The Impossible Burger is made from simple ingredients including wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein, and heme. Heme is responsible for the characteristic of taste and aroma of meat. It catalyzes all the flavors when meat is cooked. Heme is exceptionally abundant in animal muscle, and it’s a basic building block of life in all organisms, including plants. Impossible Foods discovered how to take heme from plants and produce it using fermentation — similar to the method that’s been used to make Belgian beer for nearly a thousand years. Adding heme to the Impossible Burger makes it a carnivore’s delight. Super tasty, super safe.

Heme is an iron-containing molecule that occurs naturally in every single plant and animal. It’s an essential molecular building block of life. Heme gives your blood its ability to carry oxygen.

Heme is superabundant in animal muscle, and that’s what makes a burger so flavorful. It’s also why meat is a particularly good source of iron. The heme found in animal muscle is carried by a protein called myoglobin.

They genetically engineer yeast to make a key ingredient: heme. The process allows us to produce the Impossible Burger at scale with the lowest achievable environmental impact.

There is more heme in soy root nodules than in all of the meat in the US diet. Harvesting root nodules for heme is a bad idea.

They launched the new meat with the most famous chefs.

Some key statistics

$1.5 trillion is spent on meat food every year and this will increase to $3 trillion by 2025.
11 cows, 40 pigs, 2000 chickens, 4000 fish are killed every second in the world.

Full Ingredient List:
Water, Textured Wheat Protein, Coconut Oil, Potato Protein, Natural Flavors, 2% or less of: Leghemoglobin (Soy), Yeast Extract, Salt, Konjac Gum, Xanthan Gum, Soy Protein Isolate, Vitamin E, Vitamin C, Thiamin (Vitamin B1), Zinc, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Vitamin B12

Contains:
Soy, Wheat

Impossible foods is already using
* 74% less water
* 87% less ghg emissions
* 95% of the land

Animal food statistics

The number of land animals slaughtered worldwide for food:
62 billion animals killed every year
170 million animals killed every day
7 million animals killed every hour
2,000 animals killed every second

Total biomass of livestock for human consumption 540 million tonnes.