The Rich Roll Podcast - Can A Burger Help Save The Planet? Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown Says Yes

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

By now, most of you have heard about the Impossible Burger. I imagine many of you have tried it. Arguably the ‘beefiest' plant-based patty, even the most attuned palate has trouble believing it isn't real meat. Now ubiquitous at fine dining establishments and fast food franchises alike, it's a global phenomenon. Today we explore the mission behind the burger with Impossible Foods founder & CEO Pat Brown, the man responsible for upending everything you thought you knew about plant-based meat, on a mission to forge a better environmental future for all. A world-renowned geneticist, Pat is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University. He is also a founder of Lyrical Foods, maker of Kite Hill artisanal nut milk-based cheeses and a founder of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), a nonprofit publisher that pioneered the open-access business model. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine. His numerous accolades include the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor, and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology. Moved to action by the urgent need to redress global climate change, Pat founded Impossible Foods with one clear goal: to eliminate animal agriculture — inarguably one of the biggest contributors to planetary warming — by providing delicious, nutritious, and environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and dairy directly from plants. The mission statement is ambitious, some would even say audacious. But his impact is already undeniable — and he’s just getting started. Today he shares his story. This is a broad and far-reaching conversation that covers Pat's background and the impetus behind Impossible Foods. We cover the company's initial success in converting high-end chefs, the subsequent penetration of the fast food industrial complex, and the entrepreneurial difficulties of rapid growth and meeting demand at scale. We then turn attention to Pat's mission to redress climate change. The important need to replace food from livestock with more environmental friendly alternatives. And what is required to achieve that, while meeting the finicky palate requirements of the average consumer. Irrespective of your opinion on plant-based meat analogues, the deleterious environmental impact of intensive animal agriculture is irrefutable. Seismic changes to our food systems are mandatory if we want to responsibly redress global climate change. And each of us has the power to promote these changes, beginning with our daily food choices. You can watch it all go down on YouTube. I really enjoyed this exchange. A compelling companion piece to last week's conversation with Paul Hawken, my sit down with Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown and my episodes with Good Food Institute founder Bruce Friedrich (RRP 286 & 402), I encourage all of you to listen with an open and appreciative mind. Peace + Plants, Rich

The mission is very simple. It's to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035. The use of animals as a food technology is by a huge margin the most destructive technology on Earth and really poses a catastrophic threat. It's a major source of greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. It is the biggest user of fresh water in the world, a major source of greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.

It is the biggest user of fresh water in the world, the biggest polluter by far of fresh water in the world. And the biggest issue is that about 50% of the entire land surface of Earth is actively in use right now, either growing feed crops or grazing livestock. And that land footprint comes at the expense of all the biodiversity that previously occupied that land. You know, in the past 40 years, we've basically wiped out half the wild animals

that were living on Earth back then. And it's just across the board. Mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, even insects. And that has happened so fast, and it's continuing to accelerate because the driver is the land footprint of animal agriculture and overfishing. And the demand for meat and fish is growing faster than the population. That's Pat Brown, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What's the latest? How are you? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. Did you enjoy the live event podcast with NQ and Paul Hawken? If so, did you catch the video version? I hope you did. If you missed

it, please check that out. Not only am I super proud of that entire event, I'm extra proud of my team for the incredible production value that they brought to that, still basking in the glow of that experience. And we're already hard at work at planning more live events just like this for 2020. So stay tuned and I'll keep you posted on that. I got to tell you, I'm a little bit wiped today. It's been a crazy month to say the least. I spoke at the Nantucket Project a couple weeks ago. I hosted conversations there with Russell Brand and Dr. Zach Bush, podcast favorites. In fact, Russell shared a short clip of that exchange that you can find on his YouTube channel. Check that out.

Then I came home to perform at the live event. Then I jaunted to Tell your ride for another event called Original Thinkers, which was super cool. Everybody should definitely check that event out. I spoke there. I hosted another conversation with Zach Bush, came home, got another couple shows up. Then I just drove through a big brush fire to get here to the studio today. The Santa Ana winds are kicking up again, which is a little anxiety provoking after last year's experience. And what else? I'm about to head up to Stanford for my 30th college reunion next week, which is just insane. All of this,

in fact, is surreal. I guess I'm officially old at this point, but I got to tell you, I don't feel old. I feel grateful. I feel energetic and super enthusiastic about my life and about today's episode. So thank you guys for showing up. I feel very blessed to do this thing. I think the word is grateful, and I do not take your attention for granted. So most of you have heard about this thing called the Impossible Burger. And I imagine many of you out there have already tried it.

Arguably, it's the plant-based patty that comes closest to fooling people that it isn't real beef. And I think it's fair to say that the Impossible Burger has become a bit of a phenomenon. It's now widely available at all manner of restaurants all across the globe, lots of fast food chains, et cetera. So what's the story behind all this? How did it come to be? And what is the intention, the mission behind it all? Well, today, I'm very excited to host the man responsible for upending everything that you thought you knew about plant-based meat, Impossible Foods founder, Pat Brown. In addition to being a world-renowned geneticist, Pat is a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, as well as a professor of biochemistry at Stanford

University. He's also the founder of Lyrical Foods, which makes Kite Hill artisanal nut milk-based cheeses. And he's a founder of the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit publisher that pioneered the open access business model. Pat was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. He's a member of the Institute of Medicine. And his numerous accolades include the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor and the NAS Award in Molecular Biology. Basically, this is a guy who was moved to action, spurned into action by the urgent need to redress global climate change. And he founded this company, Impossible Foods, with one

clear goal, to eliminate, to eradicate animal agriculture, which is, as we all know, one of the biggest contributors to planetary warming. And he's doing this by providing delicious, nutritious, and much more environmentally friendly alternatives to meat and dairy directly made from plants. So this mission statement is ambitious. Some would say it's audacious, but you simply can't deny the impact that he and his team at Impossible has already made. And Pat is a guy who's just getting started, and today he shares his story. And today, he shares his story. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care.

Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to TheCounselingRecovery.com. Okay, Pat Brown.

So we talked about a lot of stuff. We covered Pat's background story, the mission behind Impossible Foods. We talked about Impossible's recent successes and reaching fast food chains like Red Robin, Little Caesars, White Castle, and most recently Burger King, which offers the impossible Whopper nationwide, which is unbelievable. We talked about the difficulties in meeting demand at scale, the important need for replacing food from livestock. And we talked about land, water, and sun, why you don't need to complicate technology to solve climate change. I think this is a great companion conversation to my previous episode with environmentalist Paul Hawken

and also a bit of a companion piece to my conversation with Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown. And that one's from way back in the day, episode 136, March of 2015. Check that out if you missed it the first time around. Irrespective of your thoughts on plant-based meat analogs, the impact of animal agriculture on our planet is undeniable and tremendous. Big changes are mandatory if we want to solve this dilemma. So please, I encourage you to listen and listen with an open mind because I believe we really do have the power to make the necessary changes and it begins with our personal choices. So with that, I give you Pat Brown. Here we are, Pat Brown. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you making the trip out here. I've been looking forward to this for a long time. You've got a big vision and a huge mission that I applaud, and I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. Before we even get into it, though, I have to say that I didn't realize until I started digging in, doing some research for this today, that a few months ago you hired Dennis Woodside as your president. A rival? Yeah. Yeah. So Dennis, I've known Dennis since like 1993. Oh, man. We were summer associates at a law firm in San Francisco way back in the day

and have remained friends over the years. And I remember working with him very vividly and I was just struck with how smart and capable this guy was at a very young age and somebody who demonstrated incredible leadership skills. Even in this junior position, we were paired together to work on a few matters and he just took total control of the situation in a way that I've never seen in anybody else. So I knew way back then

that this guy was destined for big things. And he's been at Google running the Motorola division and then he was at Dropbox as COO and now he's with you, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, we're so happy to have him. I mean, he's already made a huge impact. He's a terrific leader, complete straight shooter, no BS. Yeah. Yeah, and just a great guy.

He is super smart and also an incredible Ironman. You know that, right? He's done like 14 Ironmans or something like that. Yeah, I know. I haven't followed his career, but I've heard that since. Yeah, cool. So I think the best way to- He was just out training yesterday.

Oh, was he? Watch your back. Trust me. I think he went like 922 on an Ironman, I think. He's super fast. He's a out training yesterday. Oh, was he? Watch your back. Trust me, I think he's, he went like 922 on an Ironman, I think, he's super fast. He's a very good athlete. Yeah. Let's talk about the mission statement,

the why behind Impossible Foods. Sure, well, the mission is very simple. It's to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035. it when I realized what I should have known earlier, and which I did, that the use of animals as a food technology is by a huge margin the most destructive technology on Earth and really poses a catastrophic threat. And I thought I was pretty savvy about environmental issues, and I had been on a plant-based diet for a long time, so I had no particular investment in that business. But it really came as a surprise to me when I started looking for a problem to work on,

just trying to figure out what's the biggest problem that I can contribute to solving. What a humongous, disastrous impact that technology has. I think as most people know, it's a major source of greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. It is the biggest user of fresh water in the world, the biggest polluter by far of fresh water in the world, the biggest polluter by far of fresh water in the world. And the biggest issue is that it occupies a huge land area for land-based agriculture.

About 50% of the entire land surface of Earth is actively in use right now, either growing feed crops or grazing livestock. And that land footprint comes at the expense of all the biodiversity that previously occupied that land. And as a result, it is by an overwhelming margin, the biggest cause of this catastrophic meltdown biodiversity we're experiencing. For all practical purposes, nothing else really matters. It's land-based animal agriculture and overfishing that are causing this thing. And that is even more of a, I think, risk to the future of our planet than the climate change issue.

And I think people are increasingly starting to become aware of it. But, you know, in the past 40 years, we've basically wiped out half the wild animals that were living on Earth back then. And it's just across the board, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, even insects. And that has happened so fast. And it's happening, you know, it's continuing to accelerate because the driver is the land footprint of animal agriculture and overfishing, which are the demand for meat and fish is growing faster than population. growing faster than population.

When you take pieces of an ecosystem out of the ecosystem, it's like pulling bricks out of a wall. It's extremely destabilizing and basically won't immediately cause, but is setting up for a crash. And so I don't think we've even begun to feel the full impacts of this problem. But anyway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I realized this, I felt that, okay, this is what I've got to work on. And I also realized that very quickly that you're not going to solve the problem by asking people to change their diets, telling them to change their diets, educating them, coercing them, anything like that.

It's never worked. It's been tried every which way. Yeah. I'm still trying now. No, there's no reason not to try. Yeah. But I hear you. I think you're absolutely right. You have to solve this problem. You don't have to meet people where they are. Exactly. You have to meet people where they are. And, you know, I mean, China, which is used to getting what it wants when it asks its citizens for something, asked its citizens to reduce their meat and dairy consumption by half. This was two or three years ago. And what happened was absolutely nothing. The demand didn't go down. It kept going up. Yeah, it's going up.

Well, the rise of the middle class there is contributing to that. And I think Asia accounts for something like 46% of all meat consumption. Yeah, Asia as a continent, absolutely. It's Asia and Africa are where most of the growth is happening, Asia in particular because of the big population. So that's a big target for us. But I think the real take-home message, though, is that, yes, I was in education for most of my life.

I'm all for education, and I think it's very important for people to understand what's going on in the world. But the people who understand what's going on in the world. But the people who understand this problem the most, I was at the COP21 climate conference like three years ago, and you have hundreds of the most dedicated environmentalists in the world at this event. And literally almost to a person, they went out and had steak for dinner. So I think that pretty much tells you that knowing about the issue, caring about the issue, is still not enough to get people to change what they love in their diet. And so what that meant for me is that the only way to solve it is to basically frame it as a technology problem.

The world is going to continue to demand these foods, but we're making them the wrong way using incredibly inefficient and obviously quite destructive technology that underperforms in every way that matters, including economics. So because it's so inefficient on a nutritional basis, the foods we get from animals are more than an order of magnitude more expensive than any plant-based equivalent. That's a huge opportunity to come up with a new technology that outperforms in every way that matters to consumers. outperforms in every way that matters to consumers. Most importantly, deliciousness, but also nutritional value, affordability, and so forth. And I was sure that's completely doable back then, and I'm even more sure now. So that's how we're going to solve the problem. Right. So here we are. I mean, the disconnect and the dissonance is huge when you look at the statistics.

As you said, something like 50% of all arable land on the planet is devoted to animal agriculture in some respect. And a very large fraction of the non-arable land is heavily grazed. Right. Right, 14.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to animal agriculture, which is basically on parity, if not exceeding transportation, which is what everyone wants to talk about. But the mass species extinction

is something that you don't hear that much about. And truly like 50% of our species have gone extinct in like the last 50 years or something like that. Well, it's not, just to correct that, it's not species extinction. It's the total number of individual wild animals, pretty much across the board, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, is down by more than 50%. But it's a precursor to species extinction. Basically, you reduce the populations,

they become more and more unstable. And once you get to a certain size, basically they're just on a slippery slope to extinction. You pass a threshold and then you can't come back from that. And it becomes evident when you kind of look at what's going on in the Amazonian rainforest, right? Where we're decimating these beautiful ecosystems at the rate of like one football field a minute or something like that. And that's all going towards cattle grazing and clearing land to raise crops for these cows.

Yeah. Pretty much, right? I heard you talk about the biomass of cows alone, like exceeding every other animal on the planet by some ridiculous number. By tenfold. Tenfold, right? Yeah, and the biomass, so, and that's, I think, just a striking symbol, you could almost say, of how out of control this system is. That the dominant species by biomass overwhelmingly on Earth's land surface is cows.

And it's completely consistent. I think if you, you know, a lot of people say, how could that possibly be? And all you have to do is think, okay, when was the last time I drove any distance? It doesn't matter where you are in the world. What animals did you see? Cows, cows, cows, the occasional sheep, a squirrel, maybe, you know, a crow, more cows. You'd probably see pigs and chickens, but they're all inside these CAFOs where you can't actually see them. Yeah, that's actually a very good point. So the pigs on earth today outweigh every remaining wild animal on land by more than a factor of two. The pigs outweigh them all. And you're right. We don't see a lot of them wandering around because they're in CAFOs.

And chickens outweigh every remaining wild bird by more than a factor of two. So, you know, it's wacko. It's completely out of whack. Yeah. All right. Well, you're a very unlikely entrepreneur. You come from this academic background. entrepreneur. You come from this academic background. You had a very nice situation all set up for you at Stanford where you were a tenured professor in biochemistry and genomics,

right? And you were somebody who had been vegetarian at least or plant-based for some number of years. You got interested in the environment and you decided to take this sabbatical. So I'm interested, it's a very interesting journey to get you to impossible, like this evolution in your thinking to how you arrived at this point. So walk me through that a little bit. Sure. Yeah. Well, I was looking for something new to work on. I just wanted to start with a blank slate. That's one of the great things about the job I had at Stanford is I could pretty much do anything constructive that I wanted. I wanted to pick the most important problem I could work on.

As I said, it very quickly became clear that this is not just the most important problem I could work on. It's overwhelmingly the most important urgent problem in the world. And once I realized that, I spent some time thinking about how to do it. I made one false start, which is that the first thing I did was I organized a conference where I wanted to bring together economists and environmentalists and food security experts and so forth to just look at the hypothetical scenario in which the entire food system is plant-based. And the question is, what are the economic impacts locally and globally? What are the environmental impacts? What are the food security impacts? What are the economic impacts locally and globally? What are the environmental impacts?

What are the food security impacts? What are the public health impacts? And I organized it kind of bringing people with no preconceived notions, but with pretty high confidence that the answer was going to come out. It's a win, win, win, win, win on every axis. And that that would persuade policymakers

that this is something to try to achieve. Well, then I came to my senses and I realized that abundant evidence that a policy change would be good for the world rarely makes it happen. And we don't have time- It's so disappointing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just look at all the things we need to do to avoid a climate catastrophe. And I think even at this point, most people in the world, including most politicians in the world, acknowledge that this is a very real serious threat. And yet-

We can't marshal the political will to even make tiny steps towards the solution. Yeah. So anyway, the point being that I did this kind of academic thing of bringing a bunch of people together to kind of look at the issues. And then I realized that that was a complete waste of time. And that the only way to change it basically is to accept that policies aren't going to change fast enough, people's food preferences aren't going to change fast enough, if at all. We need to find a way to meet the huge demand for these foods with a much lower environmental footprint and compete in the marketplace and basically make these destructive industries go away, not by attacking them, but by beating them in the marketplace, the good old fashioned American capitalist way. What's interesting about the

journey that you then embarked on is rather than just trying to come up with a plant-based alternative that tastes good, you took a very biochemistry approach to solving a very hard problem. The hard problem being, what makes meat taste like meat? Is it inherent in this food that we as a culture embrace and love that creates that craving or that desire to continue to eat it? Like really getting into the minutia and the building blocks of this product to understand it at a cellular level. to understand it at a cellular level. Yeah, well, I think that the starting point was realizing that, you know, there have been for millennia, basically, or at least for centuries, plant-based foods that are intended to approximate meats, okay? But they do, by and large, you know, kind of nice try,

but a pretty crappy job of it. And it's just not going to work. If you're competing for meat lovers who are not looking for an alternative, those foods are good enough for someone who's looking for an alternative or someone on a vegetarian diet that wants something vaguely meat-like. We need to outperform meat from animals in every way that matters to meat lovers. And I knew we just don't know how to do this. And we don't really understand what is the kind of molecular, you know, biochemical basis of the craveability of meat. But it's an answerable question.

And I felt like it's actually an easier question to answer than a lot of the kind of big medical problems that I was involved in working on and others are involved in working on, because basically the things that we eat as meat are incredibly complicated as biological systems, but as food, you know, like it may have started as a muscle tissue, doesn't need to move, doesn't need

to produce energy from simple nutrients, doesn't need to keep the cell membrane potentials active and all the kinds of things that a tissue does. It just needs to do a few simple things that are producing the flavor that consumers love and the textural properties. And I felt like that's a hard problem. It's a hard scientific problem. We need the best scientists we can possibly hire, but it's the most important scientific question in the world. I still believe the question, why does meat taste delicious in micro terms, is by far the most important scientific question in the world right now. Because if we can answer it and use that knowledge to make the most delicious, craveable meat products in the world using more sustainable ingredients, we can save the world from an environmental catastrophe that we're headed toward right now.

And actually, scientists get that. And so when it came to recruiting scientists, we've been incredibly successful in recruiting awesome scientists because the way you recruit a great scientist is give them a really important problem that's really challenging. And the best scientists in the world just gravitate toward that. So we put together- Do you have like 100 out of 330 employees or something like that?

We have about 110 people on our R&D team. We're actually just about to start hiring a bunch more people, roughly double the size of the team. We're actually just about to start hiring a bunch more people that are roughly double the size of the team. And so if you're a scientist and want to work on the most important scientific problem in the world- Email Pat directly. Yeah, you know where to go. So the beginnings of trying to answer this question, how does that work? So there are different attributes that have different molecular bases in meat, but focusing on the one that I think is that most uniquely separates meat from any plant-based foods is the flavor and aroma profile. That based on the flavor and aroma profile,

irrespective of texture, whether it's just ground up into a mush or however you want it, and irrespective of what species it comes from, you will recognize as being meat and not a plant. And so that was a really important question. and um so that was a really important question and you know i had a hypothesis as to what might be important for that that could have proven wrong but basically the premise was it's based on it's based on an observation actually that um when you cook meat something magical

happens that never happens with plants or a veggie burger or anything like that, which is that there's this dramatic transformation of the flavor and aroma profile. It goes from being something very mild flavored with almost no aroma to something that has a potent cooked meat flavor and all the aromas that come with it. And nothing like that happens with a plant. I mean, you cook broccoli, it gets warmer and mushier and maybe a little caramelized or something like that. But meat as a category does something magical. And that suggested that there was a catalyst that's catalyzing the chemical reactions that happen during cooking that produce this explosion of aroma and flavor. And one of the

best biological catalysts known is heme. And animal tissues categorically have a lot higher heme concentrations than almost any plant tissue, like 100 or 1,000 times higher concentration. So a potent catalyst, super abundant in the things we call meat, was a suspect. And our R&D team, we immediately started working on heme on day one, basically, because it was a suspect. But our R&D team did some experiments over the first few months that very clearly established that heme is the magic ingredient that takes simple nutrients that are just like the things

that you would find in vegetable broth, amino acids, vitamins, sugars, and fats. Throw in heme, and instead of a a mild brothy taste, you get meat. And heme is what binds to oxygen in our red blood cells and carries oxygen to our respective organs, et cetera. It's what makes red blood cells red. And I think it would come as a surprise to a lot of people to discover that heme actually also exists in the plant kingdom. Yes.

Because we just associate it so heavily with meat products. Yeah, absolutely. And you associate, you know, it's got a very distinctive red color. You don't see that almost anywhere in plants. you don't see that almost anywhere in plants but yeah every plant cell and every cell pretty much on earth requires him because it's part of the system that cells use to burn sugars and simple things uh for energy to react them without you know well it's it's it's a downstream part of that but basically it's part of the system that generates energy for the cell. For example, the reason that cyanide will kill you in two minutes is that it binds to heme and shuts down those pathways that the cell depends on for energy.

So yeah, it's ubiquitous in nature. It's one of the most important molecules on Earth. But nobody thinks about it in plants. It happened that there was a particular part of legumes, the part that fixes nitrogen called root nodules, that is the one plant tissue that really has a high concentration of heme. And that's because the nitrogen fixation kind of chemistry is sensitive to oxygen concentration, so they have to be buffered. And I knew that. And so I actually, in the first about year of the company's existence, I spent a very large fraction of the money that we had raised to start the company trying every which way to figure out how to harvest root nodules and extract the heme protein

from the root nodules. And it was really the single major effort in the company. And it basically was a dead end. It got us enough of this heme protein, like hemoglobin, that we could do the experiments to prove that it could generate the meaty flavors and so forth, but it was never going to be scalable or economical. And I use this as an example to people in the company of, you know, you've given our mission and the hugeness of it and all the problems we need to solve to achieve it, where we don't know the answer and we don't know the route, we have to do a lot of things that are risky. If you know the answer, it's not an experiment. And we have to be quite fearless about it and not talk ourselves out of what seems like a good experiment

or a good project just because it might fail. Because any good experiment might fail. If they're not failing a pretty decent fraction of the time, you're not bold enough at all. You're not doing really interesting stuff. So I remind people of that because it's really important for people not to be afraid to take on something that could even be expensive. We spent half the money that we started out with pursuing this idea. It was my idea, so I can acknowledge that it's a bad idea

without hurting anyone's feelings, on something that ultimately failed. And it won't be the last time. And it failed because extracting an adequate amount of heme from this root nodule in legumes became too cost-intensive or laborant? It was just too difficult? It was multiple things.

First of all, the root nodules inconveniently live underground. So I thought I'd done a calculation that the U.S. soybean crop in the root nodules contains more heme than all the meat consumed in the U.S. And that, I think, calculation was correct. heme than all the meat consumed in the U.S. And that, I think, calculation was correct. The only problem is that it's a very inconvenient place for that stuff to live because you have to dig up the soil. These things are loosely adherent to the roots of the soybean plant, so you have to, it's kind of a fragile system. Now you, when you do that, you have a bunch of dirt fragile system. Now, when you do that, you have a bunch of dirt with the root nodules embedded in it, and you have to separate out the root nodules in order for it to be food safe.

And then you have to biochemically purify the heme protein, and you concatenate all those steps, and it basically becomes extremely difficult to scale and expensive, on top of which, from an environmental standpoint, it's not a good idea to be turning over the soil because it releases carbon stored in the soil and so forth. So there were a bunch of reasons why I ultimately came to the conclusion that this was not a good idea. And so we moved to producing it by fermentation.

And that's how we produce it now. Right. So it's through a genetically modified yeast, correct? Is that how it works? Yeah. Is that how it works? Yeah. So basically, I knew that we could produce it by fermentation,

by just introducing the gene for this plant protein into some organism like yeast. It wasn't clear how economical it would be, just that it would certainly be more economical than digging these root nodules out of the ground. And so we pursued that route. And one interesting thing that that opened up is that, well, we don't need to just use soy-like hemoglobin. We can just look at all the interesting heme proteins that we know of and try a bunch of them. Because given this approach, it's basically just we can pop the

gene in for whatever heme protein seems the best and uh and produce a lot of that for our use and we looked at like three dozen different heme proteins heme proteins from everything from uh paramecium to mung bean to barley, bovine myoglobin, which is the heme protein that's in beef, et cetera. And what we were optimizing for was the one that performed best in food. And people often say, well, why didn't you just use bovine myoglobin? Well, the cow did not evolve to be delicious, did not evolve to be food, okay? Right. Evolution was not selecting, was not optimizing the cow for, you know, or team protein

for performance in food. And it's really not very good for that purpose. It oxidizes very readily. in food and it's really not very good for that purpose it oxidizes very readily it's um it it's got a narrower solubility range and so forth so ultimately after looking at a bunch of heme proteins including one that i loved although it was never going to be good for food that was a vivid fuchsia color um so it was like unbelievably beautiful to look at but no one would probably want to eat it. And we arrived at soy-like hemoglobin, which is the same thing we'd been looking at as really the best one from a food standpoint. And so we put the soy-like hemoglobin gene into yeast, and that enabled us to produce it at very large scale. Right. So you don't have to till the soil in the same way and it doesn't involve that kind of labor intensity.

Yes, exactly. A different kind of labor intensity. And it's actually a safer way to produce it because we use an organism that's already been well studied for its safety for use in food. It's actually even used to produce some protein-based drugs for therapeutic purposes and so forth. So the FDA and the regulatory agencies have already kind of scrutinized it and basically know this is a safe system. Whereas a root nodule, who knows what's in there? So there's more question marks. The other thing is that the yeast have their own system for producing heme.

They make their own heme. The other thing is that the yeast have their own system for producing heme. They make their own heme. And the heme itself, which is a small molecule, a cofactor, it's a little nugget of a molecule that's held by the protein, which keeps it soluble and sort of protects it against off-reactions and so forth, yeast makes its own heme. And so in terms of heme production, all we did was we kind of like amplified up its own genetic system for producing

heme and then gave it this soybean protein to hold on to the heme. So are the nodules themselves red or is it just because the heme is in such low concentrations that these things, these plants that have heme in them don't appear to be red? No, actually the nodules are vivid red. Oh, they are? Yeah, you cut open a root nodule in sort of early summer when sort of the peak growth of the soybean plant, you cut it open and it looks like you just cut open a steak i could show you i could show you pictures of it literally

take a close-up of it you might mistake it for a freshly sliced steak oh wow um and um but you know no other part of the plant has that kind of high concentration. Which is why it was so tantalizing to me because you look at these things. When I first realized that we needed a heme protein, well, I didn't realize then that we needed it, but I was kind of suspicious that we would. I looked at, literally one of the very first things I did on this project was I pulled up some clovers from a little hill that's in my neighborhood and pulled up a bunch of them and then just cut up the root nodules.

Basically just because I wanted to see for myself, you know, is there really a lot of heme in there? And they're bright pink. Wow. And yeah. So it was very tantalizing to me that, oh man, these things are like practically for free because no one's using them for anything. Yeah. Well, it hadn't even occurred to anyone to even look in that direction. There are actually, it's interesting, there are soybean farmers who've been growing soybeans their whole life that have no idea that they're bright red on the inside. Yeah, it's super interesting. And then how do you figure out the rest of what ultimately becomes the Impossible Burger,

the other ingredients to create that kind of texture and the way that it cooks and the aroma and everything else that is necessary for you to deliver on your promise? Well, we're still in the process of, we're still trying to understand how meat works better and better all the time. still trying to understand how meat works better and better all the time. But we knew relatively early on some of the features of the proteins responsible for texture that we needed to match. So we don't need to use identical proteins. There's nothing, you know, the proteins in muscle tissue, again, they didn't evolve to produce any particular texture or juiciness. It's just an incidental property that when you cook them, which they didn't evolve to be cooked, you know, they undergo a textural transformation and they leak some juice and stuff like that so we um sort of understood what

by studying meat we understood what were the salient kind of biophysical properties of a protein that we needed um you know to produce those characteristics the textural change with cooking, the juiciness. The binding. The chewiness, yes. The cohesion. And then fats, there are also things about the fats that are important to understand because the fats are important for mouthfeel. They're important for the cooking properties because the melting fat contributes to the cooking

and the kind of like bubbling, so to speak, kind of disperses the aromas and so forth. And because most of the flavor molecules that confer meaty flavor are fat soluble, it literally is kind of a delivery system for those molecules to produce the taste. But you've got to tune it right. You can't just use any random fat to get those properties right. So anyway, there are a bunch of properties

that we identified that were important and then needed to find a plant-based way to match them. So you arrive at, you're using potato, right? And coconut oil are the other two main things? Coconut and sunflower oil. I think I'd have to look roughly equivalent amounts. So the sunflower oil contains a lot of unsaturated fats, and they participate in the flavor chemistry. The coconut oil modulates the melting temperature, which is important for mouthfeel and some of the cooking behavior. important for mouthfeel and some of the cooking behavior. The potato protein is there because of textural property that it confers. So not just any random protein will match the characteristics

that we need. So we searched a lot of plant proteins to find the right ones and found the potato protein. We found some others, but the potato protein, there was a readily available supply chain for. We actually found some other proteins that, from a performance standpoint, in many ways are better, but there didn't exist a supply chain for them. We're actually in the process of trying to create a supply chain for some of those better plant proteins that are potentially more scalable and actually better performing. So this is a process of constant iteration. This is the decisive advantage that we have over the incumbent technology.

It's that the cow stopped getting better at what it's doing a million years ago, and we get better every single day. When we can make a product, whatever product, that's as good as the best version that ever came from an animal, a week later we can make it even better. This is the advantage of a technology shift. You can say that a parallel would be in transportation. The first mechanized transportation system famously lost a race to a horse. It was a locomotive in 1835, I think. Doomed. But the point is, it never lost again because the horse never got any faster.

And you switch to a technology platform that gives you the ability to optimize every important feature of it and continue to optimize it. And that's what we've done is that if we identify some flavor component that we think makes our product better, we can dial it in immediately or find a way to make the texture juicier or whatever is desirable there. And that's a huge advantage. And also the economics and the nutritional profile and so forth. So we don't have cholesterol, we have lower saturated fat, we have actually slightly higher quality protein in terms of essential amino acids, and a whole bunch of things that consumers care about. Right, you can continually tweak that.

In addition to all the geniuses and PhDs that you have on your R&D team, do you bring in people that are expert in taste, kind of like how a fragrance company have these people with these special noses that can smell things that ordinary people can't? Like how do you evaluate taste in a scientific way? Yeah, that's a really good question. And it's also a really complicated

question. So for one thing, you know, everybody has their own notion of what the, you know, ideal burger tastes like or the ideal steak tastes like and so forth. So there's not like an agreed upon target. That's just something important to keep in mind because our goal is not to perfectly match the cow version. It's to outperform it in flavor and everything that consumers care about. And we have people who are trained tasters that can give us... And the trained tasting is not only kind of like they've trained their ability to discriminate particular features in a food product, in this case meat,

but also they've been trained on a particular vocabulary for communicating that. Because that's almost equally important, is that you can't just make up your own random metaphors or something like that. It's not useful. And it gives you a way that you can more objectively measure your progress in a particular direction. So we do use trained testers. We also rely heavily on testing where we get one or 200 just random consumers who are meat-eating consumers from the world, and we ask them to rate each version that we're trying out on flavor and texture

and appearance and overall likability and so forth, because that's also very important. In other words, we're not trying to please these highly trained tasters. We want to please as many consumers as possible. Yeah, so that's really important. And then we also use analytical instruments that give us very quantitative and objective measurements of sort of the chemical composition of the aroma and flavor. And where we've annotated a lot of the compounds based on how they smell and what they contribute and so forth. And that enables us, it's more agile than bringing 100 people together in a room to test a bunch of prototypes that you're looking at.

It's no substitute, but it kind of gives you a surrogate measure to tell you if you're going in a good direction. Yeah. to tell you if you're going in a good direction. Yeah. In addition to heme, what have you discovered that people deem to be the most important aspect of what makes a burger a burger? Like when you pull these people

and try to learn what's working and what's not working, what is it that people come back to you and say? Is it texture? Is it aroma? Is it the aftertaste? Like how have you iterated on that kind of feedback? Yeah, well, the thing is that it's almost not that useful to figure out which is the most important because they're all important.

And unless you do a good job on all of them, people will be dissatisfied with it. And unless you do a good job on all of them, people will be dissatisfied with it. But yeah, the flavor, the aroma during cooking, the texture, the specifics of the texture, the chewiness, the juiciness, the appearance is really important. I would say the, and we're constantly optimizing all of them. You know, my own view about which one is the most important, I mean, it just changes all the time based on what we're focusing on. But I think, you know, if the color were off and the flavor and texture were good, it wouldn't win the competition with the cow. If the flavor and color were good, but the texture was mushy, we wouldn't win. If we didn't nail the flavor, if it didn't have the right meaty aftertaste, we wouldn't win. You have to fire on all cylinders. And it's interesting to think like it's really important what the room smells like when you walk into the kitchen and somebody's cooking. It's not just what it tastes like in your mouth.

It is the entire 360-degree experience of working with this product. I mean, one thing that – so early on when we were just getting ready to commercialize it, we were giving samples of our product to a lot of chefs that were kind of meat gurus. And a recurring thing that would happen is they would cook with it, and they would say, this just blows my mind okay why why would that be it's because there's something magical that happens when you cook meat and it's a it's a big part of i think the pleasure that chefs get with it um that uh there's this transformation of flavor there's an explosion of aroma.

And it's something that you never get with a veggie burger or a plant-based product or anything like that. So it's kind of like... It's mystical and magical. It's a magical experience, I think. And the language that people and chefs use when they do it, it's very commonly... I mean, literally, it's like, this blows my mind. I've heard that multiple times. And you need to blow people's mind because meat, the behavior of meat when it cooks is, it's, you know, it's just basic chemistry, but it's magical in the sense that, you know, this transformation happens. You can also, it's also the fact that, you know, you have to be able to cook it to your liking.

Again, something you can't do with veggie burgers. The only thing that mattered for our product is that it has to deliver for meat lovers. We don't care about anyone else. I'm vegan. Many people I love are entirely plant-based, but we don't care about anyone else. I'm vegan. Many people I love are entirely plant-based, but we don't care about them from a consumer standpoint. It's all about delivering for the meat lover.

We can't kid ourselves. We have to deliver what they care about, and the experience of cooking is a big part of it, and the versatility. They may big part of it, and the versatility. So they may want to serve it as tartare. Well, it has to behave as tartare. It has to have that raw meat taste as tartare. They may like it to cook their burgers very rare.

Well, it has to not only look, but the texture and the juiciness and the flavor has to match a rare burger. And if it's well done, it has to match a well done burger. And you're not going to solve that by making kind of a pre-concocted product that tastes like a cooked burger, but doesn't have the magic. And the only way you get the magic is by understanding the biochemistry, the underlying beef flavor, and delivering it. One of the neat side effects of that is when you understand how meat works as a system, the problem of producing delicious meaty flavor gets simpler.

delicious, meaty flavor gets simpler. You don't have to kind of like take the hundreds of molecules that make up the aroma profile of meat and figure out a way to cram them into a product. You just need simple amino acids, just simple biomolecules. They're not only simple, but they're abundant and cheap, unlike the fake flavors that go into a lot of veggie burgers um just simple amino acids vitamins simple sugars unsaturated fats and a catalyst bang you get the magic you get all those flavors for free and uh you make

it sound so easy well it's it's actually's actually an interesting thing that you often find when you try to understand in a fundamental way a system. It goes from like it's got thousands of things going on and complicated properties, but then it turns out that the underlying magic is relatively simple. And it goes from being a big, hairy problem. Like the problem of how do we make a food that delivers everything that meat lovers care about and does a better job of it than the cow seems kind of like a big, hairy problem.

And conceivably, it could have turned out to be a big, hairy problem. But very often what happens is when you get down to the fundamentals and you really know how the system works, it gets much simpler. Yeah. Well, that's something that I stumbled across in preparing to speak to you today, which is that it's easy to think of Impossible Foods as just the impossible burger. But in reality, the value of your company is in this database that you've created through the result of all the science that you put into it that is really drilled down into how

to make all these different flavors using plants as a source, right? these different flavors using plants as a source, right? That you can then extrapolate on to make all different kinds of beef products and chicken products and ultimately fish and dairy and the rest, right? Well, first of all, the way I define the value of a company is our ability to achieve our mission. I mean, we're serious. By 2035, we want to have essentially eliminated the use of animals as food technology by beating them in the marketplace and outperforming for consumers. And that really does come down to building the know-how

so that you have the capability of producing enough of the products that meat lovers crave and making them better than the corresponding animal-derived product that you can win in the marketplace and succeed. And yes, a lot of what puts us in a position to be able to do this is, well, I would say pretty much most of it is just the knowledge that we've been accumulating. And we're almost doubling our R&D team's size because we're not kidding ourselves, okay? there's still a lot of hard problems to solve ahead we've figured out a lot of things about you know all kinds of meat flavors fish flavor um um you know how to control texture and juiciness and stuff like that but we're not at a point where every meat lover is basically saying i'm never gonna eat anything but an impossible burger. And I mean, although plenty of them do, but until we get to that point, we're not done. And we have to be able to get better at flavor, at aroma, at juiciness, at

texture. And also another very important thing is that we have to beat the incumbent products on cost. Yeah. But that comes with scale. It comes with scale, but it doesn't come automatically with scale. You have to have a system that asymptotically is much less expensive. And then with scale, you win there. But you have to make the right choices. You have to have ingredients that are inherently scalable and where the economics of those ingredients work out. And that's something that we spend a lot of time on. It's also really important for food security. I mean, part of our goal is to improve global food security by basically making... Right now, meat is one of the most important sources of

protein and iron in the global diet. Protein deficiency and iron deficiency are probably the two most common nutritional deficiencies in the world. There's almost a billion people who are protein deficient, almost 2 billion people who are iron deficiencies in the world. There's almost a billion people who are protein deficient, almost two billion people who are iron deficient in the world, mostly in the poorer parts around the equator. And that's a huge problem. And making a product that American consumers will buy doesn't solve the problem for them.

So, and asymptotically, so the ingredients that we've chosen now, based on their underlying economics, we should be able to be much cheaper when we're at scale. Right. And I think that's incredibly important, even in the developed world, because consumers are price sensitive. If we have a product that delivers on flavor, outperforms in flavor and nutrition, and it's cheaper, it's game over. All of those are important goals. We see many ways to improve on all those axes going forward with our research.

And also because the other reason that we've built this big team is that we don't want to do it methodically over a long period of time. We want to solve a lot of problems fast and in parallel that have to do with every aspect of making the product better, the products better, and be able to launch a bunch of new products. One of the things that over the next couple of years we're going to really build up is work on a whole bunch of other products that we want to launch in the next few years. Yeah, there's been some press about the fish. Yeah, fish, for sure. I mean, fish, I would say in terms of environmental impact, you can debate it,

but I would say beef is number one. Overwhelmingly, the land footprint of animal agriculture is cows. the land footprint of animal agriculture is cows. Like I said, they outweigh every remaining wild animal on Earth by a factor of 10. But fish, I would say, is probably a close second because the global fish populations are down by half. The demand still outweighs the ability of the population to kind of reproduce themselves

and so that's a really urgent problem to solve and we're working on it and you know we've made a huge amount of progress on fish flavor we are going to be working over the next couple of years hard on on getting textures right because there's different textural properties of fish tissues. And yeah, that's going to be really important. You've made some really interesting choices as a brand in terms of how you've launched this product and introduced it to the public. And there are similarities in the way, for example, Tesla began by having this aspirational, very high-end product that created a bunch of demand and then slowly over time building scale around it to create products that are more affordable. And I thought it was fascinating that you mentioned earlier,

introducing the product to some of these high-end chefs, like David Chang being probably the most prominent of them, to get it into the hands of these people that we kind of revere culturally, who are tastemakers and are influencing culture in a substantial way to get them on board and then get everyone talking about what's happening, which is very different from, we have this product, let's get it into grocery stores as soon as possible and make it as affordable as possible to everybody. So walk me through the thinking behind how you've positioned the branding of this and how you're introducing this to the public. Okay. So I would say when we launched and still today, the most important thing we get from every sale of our product is awareness of our brand and a change in psychology that plant-based products don't suck as meat.

The biggest obstacle that we saw to our success is that every meat eater has a very strong, and this is true now, very strong preconceived notion that it is not possible to make a plant-based product that delivers what they crave for meat. that delivers what they crave for meat. And that meant that the most important thing we need to accomplish with each sale is to maximally send the message that this is something that if you're a meat lover, you will actually like to eat. And so the most effective way to send that message is if someone whose livelihood and reputation depends on serving their consumers great food and great meat in particular, because

the chefs that we were particularly working with are people who are particularly revered as meat chefs. Dave Chang famously, a few years ago, banned vegetarian items from his menu. He's a meat god. And those are the people that we wanted to work with. And if he's willing, deliberately on his own, to put something on his menu and sell it as meat in a meat application, that's hugely valuable as an endorsement to us. And when we launched, we had very limited production capacity. Our entire factory, so to speak, was probably not much bigger than your garage. your factory, so to speak, was probably not much bigger than your garage. And so we had a very small supply, and we wanted to get the maximal bang for the buck out of every sale. I think it was probably, I don't really know the history behind Tesla's go-to-market approach,

but I think it was probably similar in the sense that they had limited production capacity, and the most important thing they needed to achieve with every sale was not the pittance of money that they get from the sale. It's the brand building value. Right, creating an experience that exceeds all expectations. Exactly. And then when we were able to increase our capacity, we've still focused on food service because it is, I would say, a much

more on a per sale basis, much more effective way of exposing consumers to our product. For one thing, the restaurant has a stake in curating the experience and making sure that the way it's presented to you is delicious. And the way a sleepy, overworked person coming home and slapping something in a pan isn't necessarily going to be able to do. So we wanted people's first experience, ideally, to be in a situation where someone's done a good job preparing it. The other thing is that you're more likely to be eating in a group if you're in a restaurant, at least most people are. So more people can get exposed to it

by sharing. And the restaurant is doing more to advocate for the product than a grocery store. In a grocery store, there's 50,000 things on the shelves. Yeah, that's a good point. So anyway, it was, I think, a very sensible strategy. And we haven't done the control, but I think it worked pretty well. No, I think it was a brilliant strategy. And kind of in line with that, you guys have always made sure to protect the Impossible brand within the context of the restaurant. Like it's not, they're not serving their, you know, they can call it whatever they want. They sort of have to use the word impossible in it, right? Like whether you're at Umami Burger or Burger King, it's the impossible

Whopper, right? So to kind of keep that foothold. It's interesting though, because what happened was from a very early stage, we established at least within the restaurant and kind of food hyper aware community, impossible as a very strong brand. Most of the world and most of the U.S. still hasn't heard of it, okay? But what that means is that they get value from it, that it means something to a consumer that this is an impossible burger and not just some random veggie patty. So we have no power over them. So most of our sales basically are just a restaurant decides they want to put it on their menu, they buy it from a distributor.

We can't compel them to do anything. So you're not contractually obligating them to use your name. No, but the thing is it's greatly to their advantage. It's like, you know, if you go to a restaurant and basically they sell beer, full stop, or wine, or, you know, some no-name coffee or whatever, you don't expect it to be as good and you probably won't pay as much for it. If it's got a brand that means something, it's more desirable to consumers. So we don't have to compel the restaurateurs to do it, and we can't, and we don't. But they see the same value to it.

They lose all the value of the brand that we've been building if they just put it on there anonymously. Yeah. I mean, we've all had the experience of going into random restaurant X, Y, or Z, and you order the veggie burger or the veggie patty and some nondescript hockey puck kind of thing versus, oh, they have the impossible burger. And this is something that you can only get in a few places, which kind of increases intrigue and and and and you know consequently demand yeah yeah so anyway so we've we've been i mean we put a lot of effort into how we launched to really focus early on not on generating revenue but generating positive brand awareness and so forth and that that has created the incentive for restaurants to put it on the menu as a branded product, which kind of becomes a positive feedback loop.

And it's going to help us when we launch in retail because at least a lot of consumers who've had our products in restaurants or know about it and and recognize as a meaningful brand and something that they they like we'll seek it out in yeah in grocery stores in a way that if it was just some whatever generic thing it you know it would be the best thing in the in in the meat department but um but there'd be no way of people in particular know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the gradual rollout, yeah, I think it definitely has fed into intrigue and interest

in what you guys are doing. I remember when you could just, I think Umami Burger was the only place in LA where you could get it except for Crossroads or maybe one or two other high-end restaurants. Yeah, I think those were the first two in LA, yeah. And now slowly, it's becoming, it's not ubiquitous yet, but you're seeing more and more places. You guys have raised $750 million or something like that to date.

And you're now in how many restaurants? 9,000, 10,000? I would say it's either 10,000 or approaching 10,000. And by the time this is out, we'll be in National Burger King. They have about 8,000 and by the time this is out we'll be in National and Burger King they have about 8,000 restaurants so add about 8,000 to how many we're in now

and then we have other you have White Castle we have Red Robin we have a lot of other really great burger chains Fat Burger in the LA area you know Umami Burger.

And you're doing like a sausage product with Little Caesars also? Yes. So we have actually an amazingly delicious sausage product that, I mean, people are crazy about it. And we did our first kind of test launch with Little Caesars. We're talking to quite a number of other customers about launching it in various form factors, on pizza or as a breakfast patty or things like that. And it really is incredibly good. Wow. You've got to try it.

Yeah, I haven't tried that yet. Yeah. So here we are. I presume that Burger King then becomes your biggest customer. They have to be, right? Yes. Yeah. And they're huge internationally, right?

So I would imagine there's plans for, I don't know if you can speak to that, but ultimately some kind of international rollout with them. you're seeing this kind of coalescing of the fast food industry, you know, kind of canvassing what's available in the plant-based meat sector. It's undeniable that this is a growing trend. It's only going to continue to grow. I mean, you know, there's varying reports on what the market cap is here, but it's in the, you know, it's in the, I don't know, $600 billion or something like that they're projecting in the next decade. So it's not going away. Well, that's good. Yeah, I don't know.

I probably have that wrong. We'll be able to pay our bills. I came across some crazy numbers. Well, I think that there is one number that's worth keeping in mind is that right now the global market for foods made using animals is about a trillion and a half dollars. And by 2030, it's projected to be $3 trillion global market. So there's plenty of money to sustain this industry. And that's important because we need to scale fast. Yeah.

And scaling fast, basically you have to spend ahead of your growth we need to scale fast. Scaling fast, basically you have to spend ahead of your growth to grow production and supply chain, etc. This is why we've raised a bunch of money because you need that for being able to scale. I think the thing that we're just at the beginning of what I think will be just a continuing

and probably accelerating surge toward plant-based products replacing animal-derived products. And there's so many interesting things behind that. First of all, the reason that it's kind of been just a totally marginalized thing until very recently is to be frank the products from a mediator's perspective just totally sucked and and this is even true of dairy products and other stuff is that they're just not there yet but they will they're getting better all the time uh there's a lot happening

you know to make these products not just incrementally better but vastly better consumers perceptions are correspondingly changing from thinking okay it's a plant-based product i'm not even going to try it because it's going to be terrible we actually you you should watch this there's this uh there's this radio um no it's a i don't even know what it is because i never actually watched it but someone sent me the link of this guy glenn beck he's a i don't even know what it is because i never actually watched it but someone sent me the link of this guy glenn beck he's a right-wing pundit kind of guy um his producer um kind of pranked him by and his sidekick by giving him hop dotty is one of the chains that sells our product in texas they're very big in texas a very good chain actually made great burgers

and um gave him two hop-doddy burgers. One was made with the cow, the other was made with the Impossible Patty and gave him a blind taste test and asked him, okay, which is which? And he and his sidekick kicked it around and eventually they said, well, this is a pretty good try, but this is clearly the one made from the cow and that was the Impossible impossible. You got it wrong. And then he was kind of carrying on because he's a rancher. He's a Texas rancher and raises his own beef cattle and stuff like that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But basically the point is those kinds of things where people who are absolutely uncompromising

meat lovers are basically realizing that this is actually really good as meat. And it's getting better. I think there's a positive feedback loop here. And we also learned something really interesting in talking to meat lovers. They don't love the fact that their meat comes from animals. This is a really important point. Meat lovers love their meat because it's delicious, good source of protein and iron, convenient, affordable,

in spite of the fact that it's made from the cadaver of an animal. Meat lovers almost universally, it doesn't matter where in the country or the world, do not consider the fact that this is made from the cadaver of an animal to be part of the value proposition. It's actually a negative. It's not enough of a negative to outweigh all the positives of the sensory pleasures they get from it. But what it means is that if you focus on, in plant-based products, delivering the things that are important to consumers, deliciousness being overwhelmingly the number one, but nutritional value and affordability,

you win. You're not at a disadvantage. You're at an advantage. I think that's right. Although I would say that there is a caveat to that, which is, I don't know how large this sector of the population is, but there is a swath of people who, who have an emotional connection to the meat that they eat. And it's infused with like gender politics, what it means to be a man and be masculine. And that has a lot to do with meat, even if they're getting it at the grocery store, you know, they're barbecuing at home. And there's something about that emotionally or sociologically that I think still,

you know, needs to be redressed. I mean, ultimately, I think we, yeah, none of us like the fact that an animal has to die for our food, but there's still that thing. I think that's much more fragile and superficial than people give it credit for. And 200 years ago,

you could have said the same thing about the horse, right? I mean, even more so, because it wasn't just that it came from a cow in some farm a thousand miles away and you're somehow emotionally connected to that animal. In this case, basically, this is an animal that you live with every day and you're taken care of and so forth and is part of the household and you would have said wow you know

yeah we have motor vehicles but but we got this emotional attachment to the horse and it's going to be no it took about a decade for the for for the automobile to completely flip from 90% horses to 90% automobiles in households because what they really cared about was not that the power in their transportation had four legs and a tail and ears. It was that it made the vehicle move. And what meat consumers really care about, ultimately, is that it's as delicious as it can possibly be. It has the nutritional value they care about and you can

do what you want to do with it and so forth. I think that you deliver that, you outperform in the things that consumers care most about. And I think we'll find that that, you know, association with an animal as a production system is not valued much, even by the hardest core meat lover. And the association with masculinity, I think that it's just something that's, you know, kind of in some societies sort of culturally programmed, and it can just as easily be, you know, with cultural shifts, history. Well, when you have a guy like Glenn Beck, you know, I mean, that's huge for a certain sector of the population

to see somebody like that, you know, kind of get on board with it. Well, I wouldn't say that he became our big supporter. But just the fact that he was- He accidentally gave us a really good endorsement. Yeah. Um, and then there's the, the, the video of the, the, the people coming out of Burger King and you know, that, I don't know if people have seen that, I'll link it up in the show notes, but you know, these consumers who were convinced that they had just eaten a normal

Whopper and were surprised to find out that. Yes. And regular, regular Burger King Whopper loving customers. And yeah, and that's, that's really what it comes down to is you've got to give the consumer the pleasure and satisfaction that they need and, you know, all those sorts of things. And it, it, it becomes a non-issue that this is made from plants. The reason it's a big issue is that people just think it cannot possibly deliver the things they value from meat if it's made from plants. But that is going to change a lot as consumers see more and more evidence that the most delicious meat in the world can come from plants. Right. What about the argument that comes up that protein from animals is superior to the protein that you get in plants? Well, I mean, first of all, it's complete bullshit.

And this is not something that has been ignored by scientists or anything like that. First of all, protein is a class of molecules made up of a string of amino acids. From a nutritional standpoint, protein just depends on those amino acids, and particularly the essential amino acids and their relative proportions and so forth. That's what defines the nutritional value of a protein. There are lots of plant-based proteins that, from the standpoint of the proportion of essential amino acids, are better than beef. And that's simple and demonstrable.

Even soy is one of them. Then people, a lot of meat eaters think that there must be some kind of, yeah, but okay, maybe it's not the protein. Maybe it's something else, a magic ingredient in meat that you need for optimal health. Right. IGF-1 or something like that? I mean, is the hormonal content? You do not want more IGF-1. I mean, if you look for like, what are the strongest markers of risk for a shorter life. IGF is one of them. But anyway, the point is that here's the experiment

that you should look at. There are people who have never had meat in their entire lives, including my three kids, maybe your kids. They're incredibly smart, excellent athletes. I think my son could beat you in a race in a running race and probably probably an uphill bike race too because he's an incredible climber um i don't want to i don't want to i don't want to throw down the challenge because he's he hasn't been warned well i am 52 but yeah, but- Yeah, no, that's true too. But anyway, but that's not the point.

The point is, and I think this is a point that you try to make all the time, that there's no compromise in terms of your health and nutrition if you have no meat in your diet. Right. Period. It's demonstrably true. There are hundreds of millions of people that have never eaten meat in their lives, and they're thriving. They're successful professionally. They're successful athletes.

They're incredibly smart. Nothing missing. So it's just a complete myth. And also there's lots of reviews in the nutrition science literature that just systematically address all the evidence that not only a meatless diet, but an entirely plant-based diet is completely healthy at all stages of life. Yeah. You don't have to sell me on that. No, I know. I'm with you. But I know that comes up and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

But like, you know, there's no protein like the protein that I'm getting in the animal. Again, this is one of these myths that I think is propagated in part. We get some encouragement from the industry. Yeah. encouragement from the industry. It's propagated in part by the desire to rationalize a strong taste for meat. I think that will vaporize very quickly when there are great plant-based products, when there is more and more evidence that people you respect for all the qualities that you value in yourself are eating an entirely plant-based diet. And we'll look back on it and just say, what were we thinking? Well, let's talk about the industry a little bit, the big ag industry.

From a legislative and regulatory viewpoint, there's some very interesting things that are happening right now. They are not going to go quietly into the night. are manufactured and packaged and how these animals are tended to and slaughtered, et cetera, to more recent iterations of protectionism in the form of, for example, this law that just passed in Mississippi that is, from my understanding, criminalizing labeling a veggie patty, a veggie burger as a veggie burger, or you canie burger, as a veggie burger. Or you can't even use the word veggie burger to describe your product. Do I have that right?

And what is going on here? Honestly, I don't know the details of the law, but you have it close enough. The labeling law war here is super interesting. Filling law war here is super interesting. I think it's a major part of the current strategy that the industry is trying to do to throw roadblocks in the way of plant-based meats. And dairy products. And dairy products, although I think that in a way that cow has left the barn, so to speak. And I think that I expect those efforts to continue. I think that ultimately those laws will be found unconstitutional, and there'll certainly be some court battles over them.

But I think it's not, if they wanted, look, if they said you have to call it something completely different, okay, you have to just make up a name that makes no reference to meat. Well, people will not have any trouble figuring it out, right? I mean. Yeah. Well, it's preposterous that they would, the argument that it's confusing the consumers is just ridiculous. No, of course it is. That's why I think it's not going to hold up to any kind of a legal challenge. But my point is that even in the, I would say, virtually inconceivable, but exceedingly unlikely chance that they, that these laws actually hang on, it's not going to stop. Consumers are not

interested in our products and won't be interested in our products because of their name. If we have to educate consumers that this product, which we're calling amethyst or whatever, is actually identical in all the ways they care about to meat, only better, it'll be no problem. I mean, it'll just be kind of a minor short-term inconvenience. Call it what you want. It's sitting there in the meat case. You've seen chefs cook it on TV. You've eaten it at barbecues.

You know what it is. Okay. What's the problem? Big deal. Right. People don't love beef because they love the name, right? I never thought about that. Yeah. because they love the name, right? I never thought about that. Yeah.

I guess that's true, right? Well, in order to actualize this mission that you're on, you have to reach tremendous scale. And you guys are working your way towards that. And you guys are working your way towards that. You've recently had kind of hockey stick growth that was almost, I would imagine on some level, maybe unexpected because you ran into some issues with the demand was so high, like you were having trouble even fulfilling on that. And so scale is like, I would imagine,

one of your huge focuses right now. Sure. So, I mean, the fundamental problem that I think we learned a great lesson when the demand kind of surged, we were preparing to scale up production. We were already hiring for additional shifts at our production plant and designing additional production line and stuff like that. So we knew it was coming, but it just came much faster than we anticipated.

And that was obviously a big problem because the customers that are basically what we depend on for our whole mission and have been incredibly loyal and have, in many cases, taken a risk putting our product on their menu, nothing is worse than if you're in the restaurant business, which is a kind of dicey business to begin with, and a consumer comes in for a product that he knows is on your menu and you're out of it. You don't have it. You lose that revenue. You lose also the revenue for all the other stuff that you would have sold with it. You've alienated a consumer and so forth.

Trust and goodwill. It's terrible. And I can just tell you it doesn't do any good. We feel terrible about the fact that any of our restaurant customers suffered any consequences. We did everything we possibly could, which wasn't enough to try to get product to our customers while we were in this deficit situation. And then we just scrambled like wild to get out of it, including when we saw it coming. And also, the thing about the food distribution system is that the demand signals take a while to filter back to you because there's these two distribution nodes between you and the

customer. So there's these two distribution nodes between you and the customer. So there's a delay. And then you start seeing that your distributor is running out, which means the downstream distributors have been running out, which means the restaurants. And stuff like that. But anyway, when we saw this happening, I put out a call to everybody in our company that wasn't working in the factory, basically saying, we need volunteers. And what we're asking you to do, it's kind of like Shackleton. Shackleton's allegedly- All you scientists, you're going to have to go into the-

Yeah, basically, we're asking you to volunteer to go across the bay, which isn't terrible but it's an hour maybe and work 12 hour shifts that either start or end at 3am at 38 degrees Fahrenheit doing not the science that you

signed up to do but basically stacking burgers or doing something like that so that we could add additional shifts and catch up to the demand. Within 24 hours, 100 people had signed up to volunteer to work in the plant. For a time, more than half of the people who were working there over the course of a week were basically from our R&D team, not the people we had hired for the production team. And then we just geared up hiring like mad. And we have to have a high standard for hiring because we're producing food and it's no joke.

So anyway, bottom line is we managed to kind of restaff three shifts now, 24-hour production with people with, you know, experienced factory workers, people with experience in the food industry. And so now we're catching up. And in fact, we've replenished the distributors. And I think that we're not going to let that happen again. But the fundamental problem is when you're growing more than two-fold a year, like really, really growing super fast, the business of you don't know for sure the slope,

some of the growth comes kind of not entirely predictably. We didn't know whether or when Burger King would sign on as a customer, and when they did, bang, it's a big thing. Other big customers sign on. Well, we can't be producing that amount when there's no customer, but then we have to suddenly be producing that amount, so we need that agility. We need to invest ahead of the growth, meaning we need to anticipate, wow, we're going to be producing, the demand is going to be, you know, several fold greater in a year. And we have to make the investment in extra capacity, which, you know, is quite a big bet. And since we are going to be doing this, you know,

every year, on average doubling every year from now until 2035 to achieve our mission, this is going to be the challenge all the way along. What we've done is we've really changed the way we plan our business, which is very heavily focused on being prepared for a wide range of possible trajectories so that we can be agile if the demand surges. And if the demand just stays as expected, we're ready for that. And if there's some reason that demand goes down, we're ready for that. Yeah, it's a tricky equation because as you grow and scale,

the ability to be agile becomes under threat, right? So the fact that you've got to be super protectionist about the R&D that you're doing and making sure that you have avenues in place where you can iterate and innovate quickly to respond, right? Well, so some of the responses don't require R&D innovation. They just require us to do a lot more of the same thing that we already know how to do very suddenly, like just scale the existing production. But the other thing you're alluding to, I think, is that we need to make products

that can compete on an even playing field successfully against the products that have been on the market for a thousand years and win on their merits. And that's a high bar, and we need to do that for all the all the categories of products that that are made using animals in order to achieve our mission and uh and we're going to do it i mean i'm completely convinced the more i know about i love about what's required no the thing is that because we aren't in arms race and there is a ticking clock here there is no the 2035, we picked a time target because of the urgency of this, of climate change and the meltdown in biodiversity and so forth. We can't just, you know, like you could say from a business standpoint, we could do the same thing with much lower risk by just kind of, you know,

slow and steady growth and so forth. We can't. We have to take the risks to grow on the steep curve because that's our mission. From an R&D standpoint, we tell the team, okay, sometime in the next few years,

we're going to have fish and chicken and pork and bacon and melty cheeses and all these different products that we've spent some time doing basic research on and so forth, but that's still quite a step from making a product that competes on an even playing field for a consumer, not just nice try.

And that's why we're beefing up our R&D team. But the people who have been in this for a while, and the more you know about it, the more confident you are. Because you can see the space of possibilities, space of possible solutions. You know better what are the problems you need to solve and what's likely to be entailed in solving them before you've solved them completely. But it's, you know, it's a big climb. Yeah. It's got to be exciting though. I mean, this trajectory that you've been on

from academia to now sitting atop this $2 billion company and having, you know, being responsible for hundreds of people has put you in a position where I would imagine you had to go on a crash course learning about leadership and management and all of these things that were not part of your professional

experience prior. Yeah. I mean, there's, what have you learned about how to run and build a company? I mean, you know, I haven't, I haven't actually taken a course. And one thing I've, I would say one thing I've learned or one thing I did that I, in retrospect, I think was an important thing to do was recognize right away, there's a whole bunch of things that I don't know how to do well. And I don't have time to learn how to do them.

So you get Dennis Woodside in. So I get someone like Dennis. And suddenly, I don't have to. I know this whole part of the company is in the best possible hands. When I first formed the company, I felt like, well, I don't know anything about the legal issues and the basic blocking and tackling of building a business. But I know where to find people who do. And I hired someone straight out of Stanford Business School, a very smart guy, still working at the company. He's head of our international growth. And he was basically responsible for doing all the basic, doing very well all the basic stuff of running a business and managing the finances and managing all the business operations.

I know how to kind of lead an R&D team. kind of lead an r&d team um but one thing i hadn't done even there was so my my lab's research has always been very kind of like basic discovery driven sort of research it's it's um a lot of the thought processes are similar but when you're when when when you're on a on under time pressure, having to solve specific practical problems, okay? It's a different set of things. When we were first operating, I ran the R&D like an academic lab, basically, which was the only thing I really knew how to do. But it was the right thing, I think, by and large, because mostly what we needed to do first was to study the problem and understand what we needed to do and do the kind of discovery research that is like what I used to do.

all that, but now we're trying to figure out how do we extend shelf life and solve this packaging issue or whatever. It's got an R&D-ish component, but it's much more practical and it's got time pressure. And that's something that I wasn't initially that, you know, I was never in a position where the R&D team needed to do something on a timeline. Yeah. Because that's just not part of the academic experience. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And that's something that, but fortunately, again, there are people who are good at that that could both help educate me and bring that expertise there.

In terms of leading a team, the thing is that the company is successful, I think, because the basic premise of the company is right. There's huge potential there. I think if you hire great people, literally, I would say the make or break thing you need to get right is to hire great people, like literally, I would say the make or break thing you need to get right is to hire great people. And if you hire great people, then they want to hire other great people.

And if you hire great people who are not just smart, but great, like they're kind, they're great collaborators. You can build a team and a culture that's incredibly strong and without a lot of micromanaging by me can grow itself. Right. And you attract those great people by having a huge mission

and giving people interesting problems to work on. That's it. You can hire mediocre people by offering them a big bucket of money, but to hire great people, you have to give them a hugely important problem that's challenging. And that's what great people... Right, and have them feel empowered, like they actually have the agency to work on it. Yes, exactly. And I mean, this is for the people working at the company, their opportunity to be part of the most important mission in the world right now and arguably the most important mission in history because the fate of the planet is in the balance

and we're not going to solve climate change or this biodiversity meltdown any other way. And actually, I'll just say one thing about climate change, even though you didn't ask me about it, but there's a very interesting aspect about the land footprint of animal agriculture, which is the opportunity cost in terms of climate change mitigation.

People are talking about, you know, here's this very complicated technology for carbon capture, okay? There's a lot of work on carbon capture and so forth. Very capital intensive. Very hard to imagine how it will ever scale. We have the most scalable, the most highly evolved carbon capture system in the world

right at our disposal. And it's basically, all it requires is land, water, and sunlight. Okay? And we got water and sunlight. Fifty percent of Earth's land area is being used to raise animals for food. The amount of biomass on that land, and it's actually been research on this, represents about 17 years' worth of fossil fuel emissions.

Meaning that if you could snap your fingers and make that industry go away, the recovery of biomass on that land, just without doing anything, will immediately start lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations. You don't need fancy technology. You just need to kick the cows off the land basically and not at the same time you're going to be solving this biodiversity meltdown because

it's all about habitat destruction and degradation and if you allow if you just if you just get the feed crops and the cows out of the equation you basically get back about half of earth's entire land area to capture, capture carbon from the atmosphere automatically and, and rebuild healthy ecosystems. So, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's incredibly compelling. Uh, and, and it seems unassailable to me, but what I find interesting is, you know, in is in the same way that big food, big ag will not go quietly into the night, and there's a couple more things I want to say about that, we're seeing this sort of small groundswell of people who are adopting this carnivore diet and it goes hand in hand in some respects, I guess, loosely with the regenerative agriculture movement, which I think there's a lot that's great about that. So I'm interested in how, yeah, you're shaking your head. I want to hear about this, like how, what you're saying kind of squares with people who are trying to, you know, reclaim what the farm is and can be as a means of regenerating the soil.

Okay, so I've spent a lot of time looking at the literature. I've dug into the data and so forth surrounding regenerative agriculture. It's a longer conversation, but what I can say is there is zero evidence. It's a longer conversation, but what I can say is there is zero evidence. So what happens is that people are extrapolating from the wrong kinds of experiments to say the best thing we can do is put more cows on the land. If you take land that has been depleted by farming and you convert it to growing grass, how do you do that? Well, first of all, it involves putting a ton of fertilizer on the land. And then you have cows grazing on the grass. What has worked is putting fertilizer back into the soil,

the depleted soil, and letting grass grow on it. They give the credit to the cows. There's zero evidence for that. The core idea being that the cows being on the land is what's regenerating the soil. Right. And honestly, you just have to look into what the raw evidence is that's cited in favor of that.

And there's lots of scientific literature on this in many, many ecosystems that have looked at whether this works. And there's just no evidence for it. The other thing is that the experiments are asking the wrong question, which is the question they're asking is, is this system, instead of growing soybeans or whatever was growing on the land, planting grass and putting cows on it, is it better from a carbon capture standpoint than continuing to grow those crops? The real question is, is it better than a healthy ecosystem that would otherwise exist on that land and support biodiversity and store biomass not just in the soil but above ground? these claims being made that ecologists have no respect for okay but they're claims being

made by people who are in that business um and they're just being uh repeated over and over again and a lot of people just think okay well i well, I keep hearing about this. It must be a good thing. But the scientific foundation for it is essentially nil. And if you think that we'd be better off with instead of having 10 times the total biomass of every wild vertebrate on earth, 15 times as cows, I mean, you're smoking crack. It's just a completely ridiculous idea. Now, one thing I just want to say is there are people who are doing this. I'm not questioning their good intentions. A lot of people who are in the farming and ranching business, they care deeply about protecting the planet and taking care of the land they farm and so forth. So it's not a question of bad intentions. It's just a question of there's no data to support this.

Yeah. So this is something that I think was initially launched into mainstream awareness by Alan Savory. I believe he did a TED Talk on this. He has a lot of people that are following him. into mainstream awareness by Alan Savory. I believe he did a TED Talk on this. He has a lot of people that are following him. But on a very elementary level, when I look at it, I just can't get around the idea that it's incredibly land intensive.

Like it's not scalable. Like we're not gonna be able to feed 10 billion people on the planet in this way. There may be a place for a very high end, you know, like the Joel Salatins and people want to, you know, spend a premium amount of money for meat. But in terms of feeding the planet, you need an unbelievable amount of land for these cattle to graze. And we're already at 50%, right? There isn't that much more land available. And where are, like, where's the water coming from? Like, I don't know that it accounts for everything and maybe I'm missing

something here, but it just doesn't seem to make sense as a solution that's going to work at scale for, you know, a quickly escalating population of people where we're already struggling to meet the demand. Well, I think that you hit on the main thing, which is that, yes, it's incredibly land intensive. Forgetting about whether there's any evidence that this is better than- Even if you presume it is. Virtually anything else. But here's the thing. If instead you allowed the original biomass that existed on that land before it was cleared for farming and grazing and stuff like that to recover. And there are lots of publications that address what happens when you take a land that's being used to raise cattle and you turn it into a national park or a state park and so forth.

It actually can recover over a relatively short period of time. A lot of it's native flora and park and so forth it actually can recover over a relatively short period of time a lot of its native flora and wildlife and so forth but the amount of carbon that gets stored there okay instead of just a little layer of grass that's being continually grazed and so forth that you have you know trees and tall grasses and all this biomass. That's how you pull carbon out of the atmosphere, not by having cows, you know, tromp the grass into the soil. And anyway, I don't even want to get into,

you know, this is one of these debates where it generates a lot of heat, and it's, I'm always kind of, even though there's nothing nothing to that um you know i got your culture thing i don't want to get too much into it because it it it it alienates people who are trying to do the right thing but but um and uh the way that we achieve our mission is not by winning arguments it's by focusing relentlessly on making the most delicious meat in the world and letting it speak for itself. Right.

On that subject, I think it's safe to say that Wall Street is paying attention. The Beyond Meat IPO was massive, and now we're seeing big players move in to the sector. massive. And now we're seeing big players move in to the sector. We've got Nestle, Tyson, Purdue, all of these giant conglomerates are recognizing that this is the future and they're stepping in to, they're starting to enter your space here. here's how i think about it if if someone who uh is a current meat eater decides that um they would rather eat something made by nestle or whomever um a plant-based product my feeling is congratulations that's great um Keep eating that. We're going to go after the people who are not satisfied with that product because that's where the action is. And I think that it will be up to them to make a product

that really reaches into the meat consumer market, which is vastly greater than the veggie burger market, let's say. And those consumers are not looking for another veggie burger. They're looking for meat that delivers what they get from meat. Yeah, there's a big distinction there. And so if those guys can come up with something that really performs for meat lovers, then my feeling is thank you for doing this. It feeds your mission. Yes, exactly.

What it does is, the problem is something else, which is that if there's a lot of hype and the products don't deliver, which is kind of my concern, it reinforces the biggest obstacle to trial of our product, which is the strongly held notion that nothing made from plants can possibly be good as meat. And if a bunch of these big companies put a lot of hype behind a product that's basically just a glorified veggie burger- Makes your job harder. It just makes our job harder. But we are not interested in competing with them. That's the most important point, is that their success, we don't want their customers. We want the customers who are not satisfied with their product. You're making a Maserati and they're going to churn out a Toyota Corolla.

I think it's more like a Tesla, but yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I get that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on with McDonald's? Why are they like the last, all these fast food chains are getting on board here one by one. McDonald's seems to be biding their time here. Do you have any sense of what's going on with them?

I don't know what's going on in their heads. I think historically they move at a very deliberate pace in making any kinds of decisions. They're so big at scale. For them, I think the robustness of your supply chain is really important. They need to have guaranteed access for product at scale, at a very large scale, and so forth. So there's a lot of things that are a bigger deal for them than for almost anyone else. Well, Burger King is pretty close, but they're actually incredibly agile.

They've really impressed me. They make decisions quickly um they make them well they do they really do their homework um they're very analytical um and uh and i think they recognize that um this was a big opportunity that that uh they didn't they wanted to get it right. They were very methodical in looking at the alternatives when they were deciding to put a plant-based product on their menu. But once they did, they moved very quickly.

One thing I need to ask you about is something you've been transparent about, which is that you use GMOs in your product. So how do you speak to that or speak to the person who has wariness around that issue, which is a sensitive issue for a lot of people? I think the most important thing is we do speak to them about it and we engage in any conversation, answer any questions they have about it. We are extremely candid even to the point of

you know kind of being out there about making sure that people know that we have product you know products in our ingredients in our product there that are produced by genetic engineering. And what I found is that basically consumers, when they understand what's actually being done, and I've had probably a thousand of these conversations where someone has this concern, is there something I should be worried about? And if you just talk them through it and they understand exactly what we're talking about here and why we made this decision and why it's the best decision we could make, it's taken off the table as an issue. Now, I mean, I think there are some people for whom

they're absolute fundamentalists. It's basically, it doesn't matter what the scientific evidence says, GMOs are bad inherently, and I'm not even interested in listening. But for most consumers, that's not the case. And the other thing to keep in mind is that products made by genetic engineering are ubiquitous in the food system. I mean, you know, more than half of all the cheese in the U.S. is produced using rennet, which is normally an enzyme in the stomach of baby cows. But it's actually produced by yeast that have been engineered with the cow gene for that protein. And that's been true for 25 years.

And a very large fraction of products made from grains are made from genetically engineered crops. If you drink sodas, that corn syrup comes from genetically engineered corn. I think sodas, that corn syrup comes from genetically engineered corn. So the genetically engineered aspect of what you do has to do with the yeast, correct? I just want to understand. No, there's two components. So at first, we made the decision very long before we launched commercially that we would use genetic engineering to produce our

heme protein because it was by far the safest most scalable um uh economical way to produce it and we needed it it was the essential ingredient for mead so that was a no-brainer um and um And recently, because of the surge in demand, basically, we initially been using non-GMO soy. Right. Well, there wasn't enough non-GMO soy. So in order to scale, you had to pivot to GMO soy. Yes. Now, is there a reason to be concerned about that? No, actually, there's not.

to be concerned about that. No, actually there's not. The reason we were using non-GMO was because that was, for the leg hemoglobin, we had no choice. That was the only way to produce it scalably and safely and affordably by genetically engineering yeast. There was this, for the soy protein, we didn't need to use the GMO soy and we felt like, well, we don't want to pick any fights need to use the GMO soy and we felt like, well, we don't want to pick any fights we don't need to pick. So we'll just use the non-GMO soy that's existing on the market. And we don't need any additional controversy. But now we needed to scale up and we needed the GMO soy. So the question is, and we have a blog post on this where you can read all the details. But we had actually, even before we made that decision, we looked hard at it in terms of what are the real issues. So in terms of, you know, I think the reasons that people are concerned about,

unless you're a GMO fundamentalist where you basically just feel like genetic engineering is bad, is the main genetic modification of soy is resistance to glyphosate right and um and so the reasons for concern are is this causing more glyphosate use with greater exposure in the environment or to workers and so forth to this herbicide and are there residues on the on the food that would pose a health risk to the consumer? Okay, so the total amount of herbicides used on soy, you know, the non-GMO soy gets treated just as heavily with herbicides and actually more toxic herbicides than Roundup, it's not like the non-GMO soy doesn't get herbicides on it. Absolutely not. There's

good data on that. And the total burden is very comparable, possibly greater than for the GMO soy. Second thing is, if you care about that issue, in our case, the question you should ask is, if I buy an Impossible Burger, will I be worsening or improving the problem to the extent it exists with herbicide use? improving the problem to the extent it exists with herbicide use. Well, our herbicide footprint is about 10 times lower than the herbicide footprint of beef from a cow because those animals are fed corn, soybeans, alfalfa, all these feed crops that are treated with herbicides. And in fact, a lot more of them than are soybeans. So from an environmental standpoint, you're way ahead. From a residue standpoint, the glyphosate residues, well, we've measured glyphosate. We're just going to have a blog on this, but we've measured the glyphosate residues in our product.

and many times in our earlier version we've done it, since we switched to the GMO soy we've measured twice, there's no detectable pesticide residues of any kind with a detection limit that's like thousands of times lower than the dose at which there's any health risk. Thousands of times lower. I mean, that would be my concern. Am I ingesting glyphosate? I do have some concerns about that.

Well, I think it's legitimate to be concerned and aware of it, but I think the thing to consider is, for example, the detection limit of the assay we use, if it detected something, it's like, I think, a couple of hundred times below the level that's allowed in organic soybeans. is and and by the way i'm one of the good reasons for doing what we're doing is reducing the herbicide the pesticide footprint of the food system so our our you know pesticide footprint so to speak is like tenfold lower than than the cow okay um so it's not that you know um uh we're indifferent to it. But in terms of consumer exposure, a quite high fraction of organic foods have measurable levels of glyphosate just because it's kind of ubiquitous.

But it's far below the level at which there's any toxic effects, like maybe 10,000 far below the level at which there's any toxic effects, like maybe 10,000 times below the level at which you could be exposed to it every single day for your entire life without any health consequences. So, again, I'm not advocating for the herbicides, but people freak out about these things when, if they actually knew what the data said, they wouldn't worry. Yeah, I got you. So good. Well, I'll link that initial blog post you mentioned. We posted on our blog post.

If there's another one, let me know and I'll put that up there as well. The soy, the nun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, cool. Well, I got to let you go here in a few minutes, but walk me through, okay, it's 2035. We've eradicated cows on the planet. We have introduced plant-based meats and meat alternatives and dairy alternatives to the global population. What does the world look like? Walk me through the successful vision of this mission. So if we don't succeed, if it's business as usual, we are going to be in the basically late stages of biodiversity meltdown and catastrophic climate change and so forth.

If we achieve our mission, which we will, we will be far along in restoring healthy ecosystems that support biodiversity because the 50% of Earth's land area that's being used to raise animals for food can recover its biomass and its wildlife and biodiversity. Secondly, we will have turned back the clock on climate change. We'll have reduced ongoing emissions by at least 15% and we'll have turned back the clock on climate change by at least 17 years. So how far in the future is 2035?

It's less than 17 years. It's like 16 years. So basically, we will have put a significant halt to progression of climate change. And this may sound like hype, but you can just do the math. This is not a made-up scenario. is not um uh you know a made-up scenario the recovery of biomass on the land that's being used for agriculture will pull 17 years worth of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere just by photosynthesis and growing the plants and um yeah so i think we'll'll have a more livable planet. We'll have averted climate catastrophe. We'll vastly reduce the demands on the water supply,

water security, because it's like a third of all water use. Waterways will have much less nutrient pollution. We won't have dead zones in river deltas, which is all due to agricultural runoff. dead zones in river deltas, which is all due to agricultural runoff, and lower risk of foodborne illnesses, lower risk of influenza epidemic, because those influenza epidemics that are the biggest fear of public health professionals, almost invariably start in poultry farms or pig farms and get rid of those farming situations. The risk of a new epidemic strain

of influenza goes way down. Also the antibiotic intake of all the people that are eating these animal products right the antibiotic it's not the antibiotic intake because you don't get much antibiotic residue from meat the problem is that the massive amount of antibiotics that are being fed to livestock select in in those animals uh bacteria many of which are can infect humans that are resistant to those antibiotics so we're breeding the super bugs you're breeding super bugs and um yeah so that is kind of like the system that is sort of like the optimal thing you could possibly do create this huge culture of bacteria where you're selecting for antibiotic resistance on a massive scale. Yeah. You'll get rid of that. You'll reduce the risk of multi-drug resistant bacteria getting

into the human population. It's a pretty good list. It's one of these things where, I mean, to me, it almost sounds ridiculous when you list all the advantages of it. Like, how could that possibly be? That, well, it's because we're so used to this system that we don't realize how catastrophically bad it is for public health, for the environment. It's hard to telescope out and see it for what it is. It's almost like

you have to be, if you were, I've said this before, but if you were an alien and you landed on planet earth and you said, take me to the people who make these decisions about how you're making your food and it was explained to them and they looked around, they'd say, what are you, you're insane. Yeah. Well, I, the way I think about it is that in 20 years, we and particularly kids will look back on what we're doing now and just think, how could you possibly have thought this was a reasonable thing to do? Like, what? Yeah.

What? You were literally covering the planet with cows so you could kill them and eat them when you can just make better tasting, healthier, more nutritious food directly from plants? Like what? Yeah. I think that's a good place to end it. Yeah. Thank you, Pat. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm talking to you. Yeah. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed that. For even more on Pat and Impossible Foods, check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com and let the people at Impossible know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with them directly on Twitter or Instagram,

at Impossible Foods. And you know what? Before we end today, I want to shout out my friend Colin Hudon at Living Tea. Tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world, but chances are you've actually never had a real cup of tea, living tea. Less than 2% of the tea in the world can actually be called living tea. So what makes living tea living? Well, it's the fact that the leaves are sourced from something called old-growth trees, some of which are up to 1,200 years old, if you can imagine that. These leaves are chemical-free and harvested from trees with room to grow in their naturally biodiverse environment versus monocropping.

And this is just about a few reasons why living tea is the only tea I will drink. is the only tea I will drink. If you're an avid listener of the show, then Living Tea should ring a bell for you because Colin, who is a physician of traditional Chinese medicine, as well as a gifted tea master, he's been a guest on the show a couple times. Aside from the divine taste,

the healing properties of these leaves are phenomenal. This Eastern antidote to Western stress inhibits free radicals more effectively than vitamin E. And it also contains polyphenols, which are powerful antioxidants that can ward off diabetes, cancer, and many other things. Right now, Colin and the folks at Living Tea are gifting my listeners a 15% discount on your order of Living Tea. All you got to do is go to livingtea.net, not.com,.net, livingtea.net forward slash richroll to take advantage of this awesome offer. That's livingtea.net forward slash richroll. And while we're at it, if you're struggling with your diet, if you really

are trying to master your plate, but feel like you don't have the skills in the kitchen or the time or the budget to really manage this appropriately, I highly suggest you check out our Plant Power Meal Planner. It really is an amazing product we worked very hard to create that solves a basic problem, which is how to make healthy eating delicious, nutritious, affordable, and accessible. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you get access to thousands of delicious and easy-to-prepare plant-based recipes. Everything's totally customized based on your personal preferences. You get unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, and access to an incredible team of nutrition coaches who are basically at the

ready to guide you to answer all your questions seven days a week. And you get all of this for just $1.90 a week, literally the price of a cup of coffee when you sign up for a year. So to learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us. Tell your friends about your favorite episodes. on the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps us. Tell your friends about your favorite episodes. Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

And you can also support us on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I appreciate my team that helps put on this show every week. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, and show notes. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for videoing the podcast. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Allie Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, theme music by Annalemma. Appreciate the love, you guys. I will see you back here in a couple days with four-time obstacle racing world champion, ultra runner, attorney. Does that sound familiar? Amelia Boone, really looking forward to this.

A lot of anticipation about this conversation. It's great. Can't wait to share it. And here's a little sample of what you're in for. Until then, eat plants, save the planet. Peace. Plants, namaste. Eat plants, save the planet.

Peace. Plants, namaste. When I've thought about, you know, talking about my eating disorder, it was in the back of my mind is like, you can't unring that bell when you do finally talk about it. And I've had multiple people tell me that, and it's not so much. I think that a lot of, is that disorder thrives in shame. The disorder thrives in kind of, you know, holding it close and not, not being open about it.

But at the same time, you also worry about how is everybody else going to view you now, now that they know this and are they going to treat you differently? And it is very much something that has been, you know, this difficult dance to kind of figure out. Like, I don't want to be, like, the eating disorder recovery girl. I don't want to be the athlete. I don't, like, this is just me. Like, I'm super flawed. I'm super complex, just like everybody else out there.

And this is just another piece, you know. So I'm just trying to live authentically and stumbling through and figuring this all out. Thank you.