Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution
In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.
Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.
This week we learned Pat Brown is leaving his role as Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods to start a new research arm within the company, tentatively called Impossible Labs.
According to an email obtained by Insider, Impossible Labs’ goal is “to focus on the transformative innovation that will propel Impossible Foods to achieve our mission.”
In other words, Brown is building a moonshot factory for the future of food. In fact, the new mission and structure of Impossible Labs sound pretty much like that of X, Google’s not-so-secret secret research arm that exists outside of the company’s core R&D division and incubates new ideas on everything ranging from driverless cars to Internet-by-balloon to diabetes-detecting contact lenses.
The move comes just half a year after Brown stepped away from his role as CEO to become the company’s chief science officer, a move in which he said at the time would allow him to lead “research and technology innovation, strategic initiatives, public advocacy and, most importantly, our mission.”
So why start a new group when, to be honest, he just started a new role six months ago that sounds pretty similar to what he’s focused on at Labs? My guess is Brown found trying to build the future within Impossible’s existing product R&D group wasn’t future-focused enough. Impossible has lots of products now that need continuous iteration and improvement, and iteration and improvement involve a totally different focus and set of processes required for building disruptive breakthrough ideas.
We also can’t ignore that the move may have something to do with the moment Impossible finds itself in, one in which they’ve witnessed some executive departures and a flattening of plant-based meat industry sales. We’ve also seen some criticize Impossible (and Beyond)’s products as too processed, a claim that seems to have resonated with at least some consumers.
While I won’t pretend to be smart enough to figure out any specific scientific breakthrough Brown might come up with next, here are a few high-level guesses on what he might be up to next.
Create New Alt-Protein Building Blocks. Brown’s first breakthrough idea for Impossible – that we could use create a version of heme using plant-based inputs to give a meat analog many of the same attributes of the real thing – was a big idea that has now become a foundational concept for many alternative protein companies. However, as companies like Shiru have shown, there are a whole lot more molecular building blocks out there that could create functional or taste parity to animal-based products. Brown, no doubt wants to find more plant-based building blocks that could deliver sustainable alternatives to animal-based products.
Build Internal Discovery Platform. Speaking of Shiru, the company is gaining traction with its AI-powered approach that is allowing them to create a massive database of potential proteins. The approach contrasts with Impossible’s more traditional (and slow) approach to ingredient discovery. Brown (and Impossible) might be looking to create its own AI-powered discovery engine to speed up its own innovation process that will help uncover the next big idea.
Cellular Agriculture. Brown is famously skeptical of cell-cultured meat, so I think the chances of his company looking at creating cultivated meat or other protein product is pretty low. But, maybe he has an idea for a technology or process breakthrough he’s thinking of that he thinks could be a gamechanger.
Explore Entirely New Food Products, Processes, and Inputs. Impossible’s existing product road map is pretty straightforward and similar to lots of other products out there, but there are no doubt lots of entirely new products we haven’t conceived of yet that can use novel processes and inputs that have yet to be discovered. Maybe Brown has an inkling for another breakthrough idea similar to that of plant-based heme that will change the industry.
Non-Food Products. Impossible has shown they’re happy to move into new forms of food products, whether it’s chicken or milk. But what about products that aren’t food? Creating alternatives to products that use animal inputs would align with Brown’s mission of reducing greenhouse gas and fighting climate change, so maybe he has an idea for products in clothing, cosmetics, or other industries. Impossible Shoes, anyone?
This week Impossible Foods announced that founding CEO Pat Brown is stepping down from his current role and assuming the new role of Chief Visionary Officer. The company’s new CEO will be longtime Chobani exec Peter McGuinness, who recently served as the yogurt pioneer’s president and COO.
Explaining the move in a company blog post, Brown said that as Impossible has grown in size and scale, he’s had less time to devote to strategic initiatives, communicating the company’s mission to the public and policymakers, and guiding R&D for new products. Brown said the demands on the role of CEO at Impossible Foods will only continue to grow, which means now is the time to appoint a proven executive to lead the execution of the company’s day-to-day business.
From the post:
Peter and I will work together to lead Impossible and its long-term strategy, combining our complementary strengths and experience. Peter will be our CEO and a director, and will report to the board. I will continue in my role as Founder and director, and take on the role of Chief Visionary Officer reporting to the board, leading research and technology innovation, strategic initiatives, public advocacy and, most importantly, our mission.
McGuinness comes aboard at a time of uncertainty for the plant-based meat industry. Starting last fall, we began to see signs of a potential slowdown in sales across the segment. This year, companies like Kellogg’s are warning of continued soft sales and predicting a possible shakeout.
It’s important to note that Impossible has signaled their sales are doing fine. They very well could be, but there’s no way to have 100% certainty around the health of Impossible’s income statement since we don’t have any real visibility into the company’s numbers since they are still private. Still, it’s hard to see how Impossible could completely sidestep what seems to be a growing set of concerns for the space.
One potential concern is consumers’ growing questions about the ingredient lists for plant-based meat. With Impossible’s genetically engineered heme and a long list of other ingredients, they are one of the companies whose products might get a hard look from a segment of consumers who are looking for simpler, clean ingredients.
There’s also growing evidence of consumer apathy towards plant-based meat. At this point, most alt-meat curious consumers have tried it out, and some are not coming back for seconds. This might be for various reasons, including they don’t like the taste, the higher price tag or they just prefer animal meat. Whatever the reason, plant-based meat companies need to figure out how to make their products a mainstay on the weekly grocery shopping list.
Finally, while a large pipeline of interesting plant-based (and cell-cultured) meat products is coming to market, there’s been an over-saturation in a few categories like burgers and chicken nuggets. While Impossible is likely a market leader in the burger category and seems to hold a decent shelf share for their nuggets, there’s lots of competition for their flagship products.
All of which brings us back to Pat Brown. By clearing his schedule of running the company day-to-day, Brown can now focus on what he is no doubt good at (and I assume probably prefers) in innovating new products. The company has teased new products ranging from whole cuts to a new milk product, and imagine we might see even more as Brown sets his sights full-time on building out the product roadmap.
And while he’s famously opinionated, Brown is also one of the industry’s best ambassadors. The plant-based meat industry owes him a debt of gratitude for much of the early excitement built around the category, so having him focus on messaging could help both Impossible and the rest of the industry as consumers cast a more discerning eye on plant-based meat.
Impossible has raised a massive amount of money, and its investors have big expectations of seeing a return on their capital through the equity markets. I am pretty sure this is one of the rationales for transitioning to a food industry executive with experience in growing a brand. And so, while McGuinness has his work cut out for him running a company that has exited the honeymoon phase of the market, his job will no doubt be made easier by letting Pat Brown do what he does best.
You can’t say Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown is a flip-flopper when it comes to downplaying the future of cell-based meat. At our Smart Kitchen Summit in October of last year, Brown declared that cultured meat was “never going to be a thing,” and based on a Washington Post interview that ran this morning, he’s only strengthened his resolve over the past nine months.
In a Q&A, Post reporter Laura Reilly asked Brown whether he thought the labeling battles currently being fought over plant-based meat will repeat with cell-based meat. Brown responded:
Cultivated meat is complete vaporware. Don’t hold your breath. The fact is that the economics of animal cell cultures as a food production system in no conceivable way can compete with the current industry. If you could use cultured cells to make any reasonable replica of an animal tissue, which would you do: Sell it for $5 a pound as meat, or sell it for $1 million a pound to treat people with muscle-wasting diseases?
It’s actually hard to make a reasonable facsimile of an animal tissue from cultured cells. Theoretically it’s doable, and there’s no question that it will be done at some point. But it will never be done with anything remotely like the economics you need for food.
He went on to make an analogy about transportation and recreating a horse instead of building a car. His point being, trying to recreate existing animal meat means your stuck with the same limitations of those animals. Both points are pretty much the same arguments he made at SKS last year, but what’s interesting is that so many advances have happened in the cultured meat space since that time.
Perhaps the biggest milestone hit was that cultured meat is being sold to consumers. Sure, right now it’s just one company (GOOD Meat) selling it in one country (Singapore), but people are actually consuming cultivated meat right now. They’re even getting it delivered to their homes.
We’ve also seen a ton of investment in the cultured meat space, funding a range of startups tackling a variety of issues. The aforementioned GOOD Meat raised $170 million, Aleph Farms just raised $105 million, Misson Barns raised $24 million, and Meatable raised $47 million, just to name a few.
At the same time we’ve seen some companies drastically bring down the costs of their cultured products. Mosa Meat generated more than a 65x cost reduction in the creation of its cultured fat. Future Meat has reduced the production price of its cultured chicken breast twice this year, bringing it down to $4 per 110g serving. And Avant Meats said it has achieved a 90 percent reduction in the cost of producing its cultured functional proteins.
And finally, just this month, it was reported that CPG giant Nestlé has partnered with Future Meat to develop some type of plant-based/cultivated meat hybrid product. If this bears out, having a massive company like Nestlé involved could definitely push the cultivated meat sector forward and closer to a reality for consumers.
As the CEO of Impossible Foods, which has raised $1.6 billion in funding and is in the plant-based meat business, Brown obviously has a horse in this race. Part of his poo-pooing cultured meat is protecting his company, and part of it is generating headlines and discussion. He’s right to have some skepticism, cultivated meat still needs to reach price parity with animal meat, regulations need to be created in markets around the world, and we need to see if consumers will even want “lab-grown” meat. But doubling down on the exact same arguments against cultivated meat year after year, when so many obvious advances have been made, seems to just deny the reality of an evolving situation.
Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown didn’t mince words when asked about the future of cell-based meat today at the Smart Kitchen Summit. “That will never be a commercial endeavor,” Brown said. “The reason has to do with the fact that it’s irreversibly expensive.”
While Brown agreed with the sentiment behind cell-based meat — removing animals from our diets — he doesn’t think the concept is a viable solution. Brown said that if companies were able to recreate muscle cells, that technology would be used first for therapeutic purposes, which would be much more lucrative than selling a facsimile of animal products.
Brown went on to create a hypothetical example. If 200 years ago, he theorized, you tried to develop new transportation by recreating the muscle cells of a horse, “you miss the real opportunities” because you’d be “stuck with limitations of animal cells.”
Brown’s fiery assertion is bound to ruffle some feathers in the cell-based meat world, which is full of companies hard at work re-creating meats in the lab. Startups in the cultured meat sector have raised a lot of money just over this past year: Memphis Meat raised $161 million in January, Integriculture raised $7.4 million in May, New Age Meats raised $4.7 million for its cell-based pork in July, and Mosa Meat raised $55 million for its cell-based burgers just last month.
In addition to raising money, cell-based meat companies are busy developing a variety of products including briskets, shrimp, yellowtail, bacon and even kangaroo.
Though Brown definitely has a plant-based horse in this race, his point is something we at The Spoon have pondered before. If plant-based meat tastes this good, do we even need to make meat in a lab? The plant-based ground beefs and pork from both Impossible and Beyond Meat are delicious. Should more resources be funneled into the cultured meat space, which, according to the companies making cell-based meat, is still years away from commercial availability at scale?
As if to erase any doubt about his position on cell-based meat, Brown said “It’s never going to be a thing. I’d put any amount of money on that.”
Wow, what a first day at Smart Kitchen Summit. We learned that the recipe is alive and well (sorry, Tyler Florence), hacked together new kitchen products with Scott Heimendinger and saw a live debut of a new pizza robot, not to mention all the great in-person meetings, breakout sessions, vendor demos and more.
And we’re just getting started. Here are a few of the things we have in store for day two:
Impossible’s Pat Brown: Washington Post’s Maura Judkis will talk to Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown about a year of massive growth for the company, the rapidly changing alt-protein market and more.
Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick: We’ll hear from the CEO of Eat Just, Josh Tetrick, about why they are one of the very few companies trying to build both plant-based and cell-based meat products.
Food Waste Innovation: The Spoon’s Jenn Marston will talk to Apeel CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute and Alexandria Coari of ReFED about the impact of COVID on food waste innovation
Meat Printer! We’ll head to Spain for a live demo as Novameat CEO shows off his plant-based 3D meat printer in action
Startup Showcase Show & Tell: The show and tell portion of our Startup Showcase will allow you to head into the labs, home offices and headquarters of the 10 finalists where you’ll get to see things like contactless food kiosks, cellular aquaculture, food robots and much more.
Book Debut: Listen in as IndieBio managing director (and longtime tech journalist) Po Bronson and IndioBio Founder and current partner at Mayfield Arvind Gupta talk about their long journey around the world as they worked on their book, Decoding The World.
Table Talk about Cell-Based Meat With Paul Shapiro : I’ll lead an interactive conversation with the author of Clean Meat and CEO of Better Company about the market dynamics around the cell-based meat industry.
Build a Connected Kitchen Product: Microsoft principal IoT engineer Larry Jordan will show you how to build your own smart kitchen device and show off his newly open-sourced hardware and software that will help others get going.
Asia Food Tech: Join us at the end of the day as we head to Asia to talk with others about the fast-changing food tech landscape across Asia and get an update on the Japanese food tech scene from SKS Japan’s Akiko Okada.
If you’d like to join us, you can buy a discounted ticket for days two and three here.
If you missed our coverage from yesterday, here is some of the coverage from The Spoon:
What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business? – What can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type.
Middleby Unveils the PizzaBot 5000, Which Assembles a Pizza in Under 1 Minute – Lab2Fab, a division of Middleby Corporation, unveiled its new PizzaBot 5000 pizza-assembling machine at the Smart Kitchen Summit.
Should We Ditch the Term “Vending Machine?” – Megan Mokri, Co-Founder and CEO of Byte Technologies, Chloe Vichot, Co-Founder and COO of Fresh Bowl, talked with Chris Albrecht about a range of topics impacting the unattended food vending services, including COVID-19, machine vandalism, and whether “vending machine” is a good term.
Last night, Impossible Foods unveiled their new Burger 2.0 at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The newest iteration of the alt-meat is made of soy and potato protein (not pea protein, as I guessed!), is gluten-free, and has fewer calories and fat than the first version.
After tasting our way through sliders, tacos, empanadas, and even tartare made of the new ground “beef,” we got to sit down with Impossible Foods founder and CEO, Dr. Pat Brown, to ask him a few questions about the topic that’s on everyone’s mind during CES: the future. Specifically, the future of plant-based meat.
“R&D has been going at a blazing pace since Day One,” said Brown. Which means as soon as they locked down the formula for Version 1.0 of Impossible’s patties and started selling them in 2016, they were already working on version 2.0 (and yes, now they’re working on 3.0).
While they plan to keep iterating on their flagship ground beef product, Brown explained that they’re also starting to work on what he called “whole cuts of beef,” including steak. “[Steak] has huge symbolic value,” said Brown. “If we can make an awesomely delicious world-class steak . . . that will be very disruptive not just to the beef industry, but to other sectors of the meat industry.”
Watch the video below to hear more about Impossible’s plans to tackle the $3 trillion industrial meat industry, and why they’re not worried about plant-based competition.
If you’re in Vegas for CES, be sure to hit up their food truck outside the Convention Center and taste the burger 2.0!
