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Five months after the launch of a pilot program with the iconic White Castle fast food chain, Impossible Foods is taking its meatless burger substitute to every restaurant in the company.
With the roll-out, White Castle becomes the largest fast-food chain to include the Impossible Burger on its menu and the largest customer of the beef-type meat substitute supplier.
At a low and low cost of $ 1.99, the Impossible Slider does not offer consumers a processed vegan diet option at an affordable price for all.
The company unveiled for the first time Impossible Slider at 140 locations in New York, Chicago and New Jersey, and the burger is now available in 377 restaurants in 13 states.
"White Castle teaches us how to popularize herbal meat and become a menu item and a mainstream cultural icon," said Impossible Foods. founder and CEO Dr. Patrick O. Brown, in a statement.
Since its first appearance at David Chang's Momofuku Nishi restaurant in 2016, Impossible Burger is now available in 3,000 locations, including restaurants, corporate cafeterias, universities, and dining establishments in the United States. Hong Kong and Macau.
It's been seven years since the company raised its first $ 7 million investment from Khosla Ventures . Since then, Impossible Foods managed to raise another $ 443 million in financing – including a convertible note from Singaporean investment giant Temasek (which is supported by the Singaporean government) and Chinese investment fund Sailing Capital (an investment fund) state-owned Chinese financial services company, Shanghai International Group).
The company built its first large-scale manufacturing plant in Oakland, California, last year and plans to add a second station to the plant to double production.
As we wrote earlier, the heart of Impossible Burger's technology is the heme molecule and the ability to make its plant material as bloody as a medium sized hamburger.
Heme is present in most living things and, according to Impossible Foods, is the molecule that gives flavor to meat. The company says that it is the presence of the hemic molecule in the muscle that makes the meat taste like meat. Impossible Foods designs and ferments yeasts to produce this hemic protein naturally present in plants, called soy leghemoglobin.
"It's the iron-containing molecule that carries oxygen in the blood … so that the meat is red or pink … It's essential for all living cells on Earth," says Brown. "What we have discovered is that almost all the flavor of meat that sets it apart from all other foods is due to heme. The heme transforms fatty acids into aromatized odorous molecules and, when you cook meat, the protein that keeps the meat at a certain temperature unfolds and detaches itself.
Brown says the Impossible Foods product can give fish flavors, chicken aromas and pork flavors, but it will continue to stick to ground beef for the foreseeable future.
The next step for the company is to manipulate the flavor profile of its meat substitute so that its hamburgers can win blind tasting tests compared to any other combination of meat patty.
"The company's mission is to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035," says Brown. "The only way to do it is to do a better job than any other animal to produce the most nutritious, the most delicious, the most affordable and the most versatile food. And it will be a very interesting proof of concept when we have a burger that, for its flavor and delicious taste, will be the best hamburger on the planet … that will send a very important signal to the world.
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