THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 55
zyme from indigestible cellulose. How
ever, Brown said, “for a year, our pro
totype burgers used RuBisCo, and it
worked functionally better than any
other protein, making a juicy burger.”
He folded a napkin smaller and smaller.
“ We will build a system for producing
protein from leaves.”
T
hough Brown longs to transmute
leaves into loaves and fishes, the
more immediate concern is the drive
through at fastfood restaurants. Chi
potle and Arby’s have declared that they
have no plans to serve plantbased meats,
and Arby’s went so far as to develop a
mocking rejoinder: the “marrot,” a car
rot made out of turkey. Other chains
have lingering concerns. One is price:
Impossible’s burgers, like Beyond Meat’s
products, cost about a dollar more than
the meats they’re intended to replace.
At White Castle, the Impossible Slider
sells for a dollar ninetynine, one of the
highest prices on the menu. “Honestly,
that’s the biggest barrier to the new
product for college kids, and for our cus
tomers who can only afford to pay three
dollars for a meal,” Kim Bartley, White
Castle’s chief marketing officer, said.
Early on, Brown believed that his
burger would be cheaper than ground
beef by 2017. His original pitch claimed,
in a handwaving sort of way, that be
cause wheat and soy cost about seven
cents a pound, while ground beef cost
a dollarfifty, “plant based alternatives
can provide the nutritional equivalent
of ground beef at less than 5 % of the
cost.” But establishing a novel supply
chain, particularly for heme, proved ex
pensive. The company has increased its
yield of the molecule more than seven
fold in four years, and, Brown said, “we’re
no longer agonizing over the impact of
heme on our cost.” He now hopes to
equal the price of ground beef by 2022.
Plantbased meat won’t become a
shoppingcart staple unless it achieves
price parity, and some observers worry
about how long that’s taking. Dave
Friedberg, the founder of the Produc
tion Board, an incubator for alterna
tiveprotein companies, noted the ex
pense of heme and texturized soy
protein. “I’m concerned that we’re never
going to get to the price of ground beef,”
Friedberg told me. “And to sell people
a product that’s not meat, and charge
more for it, won’t shift the world to a
new agricultural system.”
Shifting the world to a new agricul
tural system is not part of a fastfood
chain’s business model. So the chains
question whether plantbased will prove
to be a trend, like spicy food, or merely
a fad, like rice bowls. Lisa Ingram, the
White Castle C.E.O., told me she was
agnostic on animal ag. Eradicating it by
2035 “is Pat’s view of the world,” she
said, “and every customer gets to decide
if they agree. If they do, then in 2035
we’ll sell the Impossible Slider and the
Impossible Chicken Slider and the Im
possible Fish Slider. If they don’t, then
we’re going to sell the Impossible Slider
as part of our menu just as long as peo
ple want to buy it.”
Right now, they do. In July, Impossi
ble announced that, after tripling pro
duction at its Oakland factory and sign
ing a deal to make its burgers at plants
belonging to a meatprocessing behemoth
called the OSI Group, it was no longer
restricting deliveries to any of its distrib
utors. The company planned to increase
production fourfold by the end of the
year. It was once more blasting ahead.
Yet, the greater its progress, the wider
the gap between what Brown hopes to
do and what his investors expect to
gain—between idealism and market
value. Vinod Khosla, at Khosla Ventures,
has assured Brown, “If we never make
a penny from our operations in Africa,
I’m fine with that.” But you won’t find
this promise in any of Khosla’s contracts.
Bart Swanson, who sits on Impossible’s
board, suggested that any potential
conflict is not imminent, adding, “By
the time we go into Africa, I hope I’m
alive.” Swanson is fiftysix. Brian Loeb,
an investor at Continental Grain, a large
agriculturalproducts holding company
that invested in Impossible in 2016, said,
“The industrywide conversation now
is around ‘Can plantbased meats get to
five per cent of the market?’”
During my last visit to Impossible
Foods, Brown admitted that he was
somewhat at the mercy of his investors.
“I was more naïve than I wish I’d been
early on in terms of how my control
gets affected by repeated rounds of fund
ing,” he said, as we sat in Yam, a small
conference room near his desk. “I don’t
have the hard power to say no, if some
one wants to buy us. I have a reasonable amount of soft power, to the ex
tent that I can convince our investors
that they’d be missing out on contin
ued growth if they sold. The best de
fense we have is doing well—and if we’re
not doing well then who cares if we get
sold to Tyson Foods?”
“Do you, deep down, believe that no
body else is approaching the problem
correctly?” I asked.
“I’m worried about how it sounds,
but yes,” he said. “Nobody else has caught
on to the fact that this is the most im
portant scientific problem in the world,
so their results are just a reheated ver
sion of veggie burgers from ten years
ago, maybe with a little lipstick on them.
And cellbased companies are just tak
ing the same technology cows have used
to grow meat for a thousand years and
making it less efficient.” His impatience
was plain. It struck me that while, as a
scientist, Brown welcomes searching
questions and alternative ideas, as a mis
sionary he believes that searching ques
tions and alternative ideas waste time—
time we simply don’t have.
I wondered whether it had occurred
to him that he had essentially devised
a tortuous workaround for human
selfishness. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I do
find that interesting. Strategically, a ham
burger is hugely symbolic. But it’s also
completely trite and ridiculous. If you’d
told me ten years ago that I’d be totally
focussed on burgers, I’d have thought,
Well, that’s not a life I want.”
After a moment, he returned to the
question of whether he had any true
partners. “I’m aware of our investors’
feelings, and to some extent disappointed
by them,” he said. “People aren’t used to
doubling in size and impact every year—
that’s a very steep and unrelenting curve,
and even venture investors are incredi
bly conservative. They realize that some
thing far short of our goal is a massive
investment success for them. If they
were completely confident, they would
be backing trucks up to Impossible
Foods loaded with billiondollar bills.”
He grinned, and went on, “But they’re
wrong! Kodak and the horseandbuggy
industry thought they’d just coexist with
the new technology, too. I only picked
2035 because it seemed like something
you could plausibly achieve, something
that other people could at least see a
path to. I would have picked sooner.”