3 Takeaways - Solving the World's Biggest Problem and Creating the Impossible Burger with Impossible Foods Founder Patrick Brown (#55)

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Meat production is one of the world’s greatest contributors to climate change. Patrick Brown, the creator of the Impossible Burger and the Founder of Impossible Foods, wanted to figure out how to make delicious, affordable meat from plants that is better for the environment and consumers. Learn about his journey from Stanford University professor to creating the Impossible Burger and how he built Impossible Foods into the multibillion-dollar company it is today. 

Welcome to the Three Takeaways podcast, which features short, memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other newsmakers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers. And now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, Lynn Thoman. Hi, everyone. It's Lynn Thoman. Welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be here with Pat Brown, creator of The Impossible Burger and founder of Impossible Foods. As a Stanford biochemistry professor, he started thinking about big problems in the world and how he could have the largest impact. He realized that one big global problem was the destructive impact of animal agriculture, as in meat production. Meat production is one of the world's greatest contributors to climate change, not only for the level of greenhouse gas it

produces, but also the water and land consumption it requires. He started thinking about how to make delicious, affordable meat and dairy products directly from plants that would be better for the environment and better for consumers. And so he left Stanford to found Impossible Foods. I'm excited to learn about his journey from Stanford professor to the creator of the Impossible Burger. And I'm also excited to learn how he built Impossible Foods into the multi-billion dollar company it is today. Welcome, Pat, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Thanks for inviting me, Meg. My pleasure.

I am so fascinated that you are a professor at Stanford and you decided to take a sabbatical to see what important problem you could solve. Could you tell us about that? I was a professor at Stanford. I had a really awesome job where I basically had the freedom to just pursue my curiosity wherever it took me. And my only responsibility was to try to discover and invent things and help students learn how to do that. And it was exactly the job I would have created for myself. And that chance, I'd previously done a project that was a little

ectopic to my Stanford role, which is I founded a nonprofit scientific publisher that was basically intended to disrupt the business model of the incumbent industry. And that was something that wasn't part of my job, but I considered it was just like, yeah, of course, no one else is doing that. That's something to do. Well, this was the same thing. I took the time on my sabbatical, and I think it's not a bad idea for scientists and people in general to do periodically to just ask myself, what's the most important thing I can accomplish? What's the most important and urgent problem in the world that I can contribute to solving? And it happened that when I did that, I realized relatively quickly when I started looking into it, that the use of

animals and food technology is by a huge margin, the most destructive technology in human history. And that it's catastrophically destructive. It's the biggest thing that effectively stands in the way of our being able to have a very fast and substantial impact on the progression of climate change. And it's overwhelmingly the driver of an environmental catastrophe that I think is even more serious and urgent than climate change, which is just an absolute collapse of global biodiversity. When I realized that, and that we absolutely have to get rid of this technology, basically, get rid of this ridiculous system of using animals in food production, it was also apparent to me that we're not going to solve the problem by

regulating it, by pestering people about their dietary choices, educating them about the problem and so forth. All those things have been tried for billions of people around the world. These foods that we get from animals are one of the great pleasures of their daily life. And it's unrealistic and psychologically naive to think that you can just ask people to sacrifice that. So that's not the solution. The problem isn't that people love these foods and they're going to keep wanting to eat them no matter what we say. It's more using this ridiculous, prehistoric, incredibly destructive, inefficient technology to produce them, which is using animals to turn plants into meat, fish, and dairy foods. And that was a solvable problem to me because my past life was all trying to understand in molecular terms how whatever cells work, how viruses work,

mechanisms of disease, and just trying to understand biology. And the desirable characteristics of the food we get from animals are just an emergent property of their biochemistry, of their molecular makeup. And it's a much less complicated emergent property of their makeup than being a living organism. Muscle tissue as muscle tissue is incredibly complicated. It's precisely regulated to control its movements. It requires exquisite control of metabolism and signaling inside the cells. And it requires those proteins and muscles to, in a very controlled way, convert chemical energy into mechanical motion and such a complicated system. As meat, it has to do something much, much simpler, which is it just has to

satisfy certain characteristics in terms of its mechanical properties, its texture and stuff like that, and produce the flavor chemistry that generates all these odorant molecules that you learn to recognize as meat. That's a complicated problem, but it's a very solvable problem. And it's a lot easier to solve than to figure out how muscle tissue works in a living animal. That was my perspective on it anyway. So I felt like, okay, well,

nobody is trying to do this. And I have abundant evidence that nobody was trying to do this. I'll just tell you one piece of evidence. Obviously, if you're going to try to solve this problem, you need to understand how does meat work as food in molecular terms. And so relatively early on, when I had decided to do this, I was starting to explore what would be involved in solving this problem. I had the idea that the unique flavor chemistry of meat might have something to do

with this molecule called heme, which is this red iron-containing molecule that actually is in every living cell on Earth. It's an essential part of the system that cells use to generate the energy to keep alive. But in animal tissues, it has multiple functions, including it's used as the carrier of oxygen and blood. And also in other tissues, it's involved in storing and moving oxygen around and so forth. And animals burn a lot of oxygen on the plants and so forth. They're very metabolically active. And so they need tons of heme to fuel the system. And so they have more heme concentration than plant tissues.

And it's obvious because they're pink or red. That's the heme in there. I knew as a biochemist that heme is also one of the best catalysts in nature. In fact, it's the business end of the enzymes in your liver that metabolize drugs like metabolize caffeine, and also in the enzymes that are involved in synthesizing the steroid hormones that protect you against stress, testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, all these steroid hormones that's been known for a long time. But I suspected that because there's tons of human animal tissues, much more

than any plant tissues, and it's a great catalyst. And when you think about the behavior of meat, particularly when you cook it, it behaves like a live chemical system. It has all the signs that there's a catalyst in there because when you cook broccoli, it just gets warm and mushy, basically. When you cook meat, it undergoes this incredibly dramatic chemical transformation. The flavor profile changes completely. In real time, it generates this explosion of aroma molecules and so forth, okay? That is screaming there's a catalyst in here. So I suspected that he might be involved. But once I found Impossible Foods and we started doing experiments, it very quickly became obvious that heme is, for all practical purposes, the magic ingredient that makes meat

taste like meat. So this is how I know nobody was working on this. Because if anyone had tried to look at this problem before, it wouldn't have taken them very long to figure out that heme is the magic ingredient in meat. And one of the learnings from this, which I think was very striking to me, and I just am reminded all the time I'm trying to deal with this system, is that the food industry is the least innovative field on earth that humans have ever come up with. There is no meaningful innovation in food and in the agricultural system we use to produce food. And there's no curiosity, because had there been any curiosity, if someone just asked, gee, why does meat taste so unlike broccoli? It wouldn't have been hard to find food. And there's no curiosity because had there been any curiosity and someone just

asked, gee, why does meat taste so unlike broccoli? It wouldn't have been hard to find out. So anyway, nobody was working on this. So I just figured this is the most important thing I could possibly do with my life. It's absolutely essential to the future of our planet. If we want our kids and grandkids or future generations to inherit a viable planet, this is the most important thing we can do. So bang, I had no qualms about it. I just said sayonara to Stanford and founded Impossible Foods. Okay. Before I ask you more about founding Impossible Foods and creating the Impossible Burger, can you just quantify in simple terms the impact of meat production on the planet in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, collapse of

biodiversity? Can you just tell us about that impact? It's mostly meat production, but let's just call it animal agriculture in general. We are in the late stages of a catastrophic collapse of biodiversity. It's amazing how little attention it gets. Repeatedly published over the past several decades, there's been a study going on for more than 50 years that is led by World Wildlife Fund and Zoological Society of London. It involves hundreds of academic groups. And what they've been doing is, every several years,

taking a census of the number of living individuals across more than 4,000 species. These are species that were chosen as a representative sample of animal biodiversity, just as a practical way of monitoring how it's doing. What they've been reporting and reported recently that the total number of living mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish on Earth today is less than a third what it was 50 years ago. That's insane. You should be scared to death of that because it's not just a shame that I like squirrels and what a shame that there are not as many.

It's that you're talking about absolutely essential components of what you would call the web of life, this integrated system that keeps our planet healthy, that the ecosystems, that whatever forests and grasslands and so forth that keep our planet alive absolutely depend on the whole gamut of biodiversity of those animals that live there

to do everything that keeps them healthy, to pollinate, to disperse the seeds, to turn over dead biomass, to eat the insects that might otherwise tear down the forest or whatever, all this kind of stuff. And we've just totally trashed it. And it's not showing any signs of stopping. And here's the point. It's almost entirely due to our use of animals in the food system. So for fish, global fish populations, both freshwater and ocean fish, are down about 70% over the past 50 years. Well documented, and that is not a good thing. And that's almost entirely due to overfishing. For land species, it's overwhelmingly due to habitat destruction and degradation.

And here's where the land footprint of animal agriculture comes in. The estimates of land footprint range from a third of Earth's ice-free land area to more than 45%. And I frankly believe that more than 45% is more accurate because it actually counts something very important, which is grazing animals that are not in official grazing land, but cows and goats and sheep don't follow the boundaries. And when you add all that up, it's 45% of our land area that's impacted by animal agriculture. And that impact is huge.

And the land footprint of animal agriculture is more than 80% of the entire land footprint of humanity. Everything else that humans do is a tiny fraction of that. And it comes at the expense of the native species. The livestock and the feed crops we go to feed at the expense of the native species. The livestock and the feed crops we go to feed them are competing with the native species that would otherwise be living on that land and providing a biodiverse ecosystem. And demand for those products is going up. Earth isn't getting any bigger, as you may have noticed, unfortunately. And so the only way you can expand

production is by increasing the amount of land devoted to animal agriculture. Secondly, for climate change, I actually just with a colleague of mine at Berkeley, Mike Eisen, just published a paper where we did a deep dive to look at the opportunity cost of animal agriculture with respect to climate, which strangely had not been done. So there's been a lot of work on, okay, how much greenhouse gas does this industry emit every year? What hasn't been done is to look at the opportunity cost. So we calculated that. Basically, the opportunity cost is, okay, if we weren't raising animals on this vast amount of land, and instead it had its original biomass, how much carbon would it store? Well, it turns out that

if we kick the frigging cows off the land and let the native biomass recover, not only would we start to restore healthy, diverse ecosystems that have been displaced by cows, but that process would pull out of the atmosphere between 16 and 18 years worth of current total greenhouse gas emissions. So that's an opportunity cost. We give up the opportunity to turn back the clock on climate change during this practice. The other aspect of the opportunity cost is it turns out that two of the major greenhouse gases that are emitted by livestock, methane and nitrous oxide, unlike carbon dioxide, if you emit carbon dioxide, basically, it just stays there. The only way you can pull it out of the atmosphere is by photosynthesis, basically turning into biomass, which is what I was just talking about. Methane and nitrous oxide spontaneously decay, which means if you turn off emissions, you get negative emissions.

And if you sum up all of that impact, basically, if we could replace animal agriculture over the next 15 years, which is Impossible's mission, I should say, is to completely replace the use of animals as food technology globally by 2035. And I think it's completely doable. And if we could do that, then that alone, if we did nothing about fossil fuel emissions, would offset more than 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions through the end of the century. That's the magnitude of the impact. And there's something else great about this approach, which is that it happens fast. So that's the climate impact. The bottom line is it's just an unmitigated disaster.

Fortunately, it's a completely solvable problem. The solution to this is to recognize that people think that animals are the only way that you can make meat. It's just the only way we've ever done it before, but they're not even the best way. We can do a much better job of creating these foods that deliver everything that consumers want from them without using animals. I think most people have no idea of the impact of meat production. Yeah, it's unfortunate, but it's very well documented. All you have to do is look. Actually, not really. I

think it would be surprising to most people to find out, for example, the impact on biodiversity. I think most people simply don't World Wildlife Fund publishes every couple of years called the Living Planet Report, where they actually report out their tracking of wildlife populations. And that's where this figure of now more than two-thirds of the wild animals that lived here 50 years ago have been lost. And just to give you an idea of just the magnitude and the utter absurdity of the system that we're using to produce meat. If you took just the cows living on earth today and put them on a scale, weighed them all, and compared them to the total weight of every wild terrestrial vertebrate, basically every wild mammal, bird, reptile that's left on earth, the cows outweigh every remaining wild mammal, bird, reptile left on earth. The cows outweigh

every remaining wild mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian by more than a factor of 10. They massively outweigh all the wild animals left on earth. And it's no coincidence because they've displaced them. And the pigs living on earth outweigh by more than 50% all the wild animals left on earth. So do the sheep and goats. The birds being raised for food, poultry outweigh every remaining wild bird by more than a factor of three. So we basically replace nature with the animals that we raise for food. Although you won't read in the New York Times, and shame on you, New York Times, it's not like the data are hidden. They're published. They're available. That is eye-opening and horrifying, Pat. So you set out to create substitutes. And what were your criteria as you set out to cover a planet with livestock and basically destroy the planet process. And the only way we could do that was by making foods that can compete successfully

in the market for consumers of animal products, i.e. we are not interested in making foods for vegans and vegetarians. We need to make foods that outperform the animal products for hardcore meat eaters or people who love those products. So that was a very important criteria. And that's something that really had never been tried before. A lot of people have made, this is a meat replacement product, but it's basically just mush together some beans and barley or whatever and call it a burger. Those things don't appeal to meat consumers. They're not competing against the animal industry. They're fine for vegans and vegetarians.

But the problem of making something that is meat to a meat lover and is better meat to a meat lover, that's a completely different problem. I knew it was a solvable problem, but I didn't know what the solution looked like. And so when I found the company, we basically started out by building this awesome R&D team of just basic scientists. These are not people from the food industry. These are people who are otherwise going to be professors in biochemistry departments or working at a biotech firm or something like that. The people who could actually dig in and understand how meat works as a system and how fish and cheese and so forth work in molecular detail, because that's what it's going to take.

We weren't fooling ourselves. A nice try isn't going to succeed. You have to have something that literally outperforms for the meat consumer. And there was another element to it, which was we're being strategic. The idea here is we don't want to just make a plant-based version of everything that is currently made from animals. We wanted to deliberately make products that compete against the most important products in keeping the incumbent industry alive. The first target was the beef industry, which, as I said, is by far the most destructive. From a climate standpoint, if you get rid of cattle, basically,

you've solved 80% of the climate impact of animal agriculture. So we went after beef first. And in the U.S., more than half of the beef produced in the U.S. is sold as ground beef. And about a quarter of the beef produced in the U.S. can only be sold as ground beef because it's just these nasty little scraps of meat that no one wants to look at. So you grind them up and call them a burger and now you can sell it. That's a pivotal part of the business model.

That's why we chose that first. Also, it's iconic. We felt like it's the perfect vehicle for sending the message to meat consumers that uncompromisingly delicious meat doesn't have to be made from animals. My thesis is that if we just made the most delicious, healthy, affordable burger and the same for one kind of steak, the U.S. beef industry is dead because we never have to make beef liver. We never have to make Rocky Mountain oysters. We never have to make tripe because maybe we'll do it anyway just for the fun of it it but you can't sustain the beef industry selling those things our goal was again to put this industry in the

rearview mirror to save our planet i've had veggie burgers before and they were pretty unappealing so i was so surprised when i had my first impossible Burger. It was delicious. How do you create deliciousness, texture, smell, essentially the sensory properties of meat? The answer is complicated, but the way we approach it is we took it seriously as a scientific problem to understand what are the biochemical mechanisms that underlie the deliciousness? The flavor and aroma, for sure, but also the mechanical properties, the way the meat firms up when you cook it, the specific mechanical properties that you experience when you chew it, and the mouthfeel, the juiciness. All of those things are basically just emergent properties of the biochemistry and things

that can be understood. And once you understand what are the essential features, you can then recreate them. And it turns out that none of the essential features require products from animals to create them. Most of the systems in a cow muscle cell are pretty much the same ones that are essential for survival of a plant cell. Obviously, there are some differences, but the point is that when you understand what are the specifications in terms of the biochemical properties and biophysical properties of the molecules that produce these sensory properties, then you can go shopping for corresponding ingredients from plants that allow you to recapitulate them. And in fact, one of the things that I think may sound counterintuitive,

but really a cow did not evolve to be delicious. Cow just evolved to try and make the next generation of cows. And people just were able to domesticate it and develop the taste for it and stuff like that. But it's not working on the problem at all. So when we have the most delicious beef on the planet, we can make it better the next day. That's the point. We can continue to understand what is it about this product

that you don't like that can be made better and iterate and iterate and iterate. That's just the same thing that happened when we replaced the horse with mechanical transportation. The thing is that the first mechanized transportation actually famously lost a race to a horse. It was a locomotive. But the point is it never lost again because the horse never got any faster. And now you have moved to a new technology platform that you can continue to improve on every axis. And that's the same thing what we're doing is

now we're in charge of the flavor and texture and nutrition and so forth. That means we can improve and optimize. You talked about competition of horse and car. The 1976 Judgment of Paris wine competition was, of course, very famous. It was a blind taste testing with the most renowned French wine experts. And they were blind taste testing the California wines against the French wines and the California wines won. Would you ever do something similar with Impossible Burgers or another Impossible product? Oh, absolutely. We've done it. We've had a product on the air, on TV for people to do the blind taste test. And then a lot of people with no involvement of Impossible Foods have done it themselves and posted it.

There's one of my favorites. There's a guy, we weren't involved in it at all, but there's a right-wing pundit named Glenn Beck. His producer pranked him and gave him two burgers from a Texas burger chain, one of which was an Impossible Burger, one was made from cow, and asked him and his sidekick to figure out which was which. And lo and behold, they picked the Impossible Burger as the real burger. This guy's a Texan, a rancher, an unapologetic anti-vegan, and he picked the Impossible Burger. So yes, I think that's a very good idea. It's one of these things, as a scientist, any small number of people that you do that test, we do these kinds of tests actually behind the scenes ourselves because we're constantly measuring ourselves against the most popular ground beef. And we have a product under development that has substantially

beat the most popular ground beef. But anyway, we're happy to do that. I feel like bring it on. You've said that your goal is to replace all animals as a food source, ending animal agriculture, as you call it, by 2035. Looking ahead in the shorter term over the next couple of years, what are you hoping to accomplish? First of all, we have a great R&D team that we're actually continuing to build all the time. We're constantly learning and getting better, understanding how to do the things we want to do and so forth. So I want that to continue. We've been relying heavily on the already available supply chain of ingredients, which was never optimized for what we're doing. It was optimized largely for feeding pigs and cows and stuff like that, but most of the agricultural system.

But we figured out ways to leverage that to make our products. But I'm definitely interested in rethinking what the agricultural raw materials are to make a more, not just lower environmental impact, but better food security in terms of the agricultural system. We're so heavily dependent on a small number of crops. It's a setup for food security disaster, basically. So we're interested in also, it's a longer term effort, developing a more robust supply chain of ingredients that are more optimized for our products. But I guess the first short-term goal is we would like to compete successfully against the U.S. beef industry

and make it a losing proposition to be artificially inseminating any more cows. And that, I think, is something that we can potentially do within maybe five years or so, fingers crossed. We're also expanding internationally. We're in the process of getting ready to launch in some international markets. We have new products. We've made both a pork and a chicken product that blind taste tests have eaten their animal competitor, not in public tests, but in our own testing. We got a lot going on and it's all great and it's all fun and it's absolutely essential for the future of our planet. We have literally the best planet and we take it for granted and we're

letting it just basically go down the drain by being so negligent. So you have pork and chicken and a different way of raising crops on the horizon. What do you see as the challenges to doing those? There's so many challenges. First of all, it's serious science to figure out how these foods work and to figure out what are the essential principles that you can use to guide choice of plant-based ingredients and replace it and so forth. That's hard.

And then finding and scaling the necessary ingredients. We're operating an industry where if some company grows 5% in a year, it's like, wow, that's our best year ever. It's just so static and so uninvented. To achieve our mission, we have to double in size every year. It means we have to double the size of our supply chain, our production capacity, distribution, all of that. Totally doable. But what we're realizing is that it's so alien, any kind of real innovation and growth in the food industry and the ag industry and so forth, they just don't do that. We're realizing that we have to actually reinvent a lot of how that system works because we can't rely on the incumbents to move fast enough for us and to see the opportunity and really go

after it. So that's a big challenge for us. I would say the big problem for us is we need the best engineering talent in the world to build this entirely new kind of infrastructure and system. So if anyone happens to be listening to this who is a brilliant visionary engineer and wants to change the food system and do an even better job than Rosie the Riveter in Richmond, California, call me. What are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Number one, the absolute best plant that we know of in the universe.

And the only one that any of us are ever going to be able to live on or our children is in dire shape and absolutely needs action to save it. Number two, the system that is overwhelmingly responsible for getting us in this state is the use of animals as a food technology.

And if we can replace that technology, we can literally effectively turn back the clock on climate change. We can turn back the clock on all the historical damage that this industry has done. And I'm not qualified to be doing this. Or let me put it this way. I am qualified. But I'm not qualified in any usual sense. I'm not, by nature nature a business guy. I've

literally never even balanced my checkbook. I have no interest in that kind of stuff. And I'm not interested in food, actually. I'm perfectly happy to eat delicious food, but I spend no time thinking about it. I've never taken a picture of food in my entire life. So why am I the CEO of a food company? The most important thing, which is that I realized that this problem needed to be solved. No one was solving, and I stepped up. And I think the take-home message there for people is, if there's a big problem that you care about, don't assume that someone else is solving it, because they probably aren't if you don't see it. The fact is, the thing that makes it your job is when you decide it's important enough for you to try to do something about it because the biggest thing that stands in the way

of these things getting done is just the initiative. Pat, that's two takeaways. What is your third takeaway? For me, the most important determinant of what I did in my life was follow my curiosity. I thought the most valuable trait that I have is curiosity and a willingness to follow it wherever it goes, not put myself in the box, not say, oh, I'm a biologist, so I shouldn't read books about history or something like that. I think it's a mistake that people will say, you need to focus

on what you do. Focus, focus, focus. I can't tell you how many times I've been slapped for not having enough focus, but I feel like focus is really overrated. The way that you discover things that you weren't looking for, which is mostly interesting stuff in the world, is peripheral vision. If you see something interesting, I think the critical thing about diving into it is the best kind of problem to work on. And the way you're going to have the most impact is to do stuff that you don't know how to do and to work on problems that you don't know how to solve. Because there's a huge advantage being the outsider because you're not zeroed in on what they think is important. And you can see

things that the experts don't see. And so I would just say, follow your curiosity, wherever it takes you and embrace problems that you don't know how to solve. Pat, this has been terrific. Thank you so much for our conversation today. And thank you for creating and building Impossible Foods and solving such a big, important problem for all of us. Thanks, Lynn.

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