In this edition of The Gigaton, we interview a climate icon who needs no intro – Pat Brown founded Impossible Foods in 2011, revolutionizing the plant-based meat sector and changing the way we think about the climate impact of animal agriculture.
About Pat Brown and Impossible Foods
Pat Brown began his career as a biochemist, serving as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. After ~25+ years as a researcher - during which time he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor – he took a sabbatical to decide how he could create the most impact on the world. He decided that fighting climate change was the answer. And specifically, finding a solve for the disastrous impacts of meat production.
Impossible meat was his answer – meat created from plants that mimics the taste, texture, and properties of meat from animals. Previous meat substitutes hadn’t successfully replicated the sensory qualities of meat. Pat Brown and team identified heme as meat’s hallmark and found a way to create it from plant ingredients. This was the breakthrough that led to Impossible Foods, which since 2011 reached a ~$7B valuation and secured a historic partnership with Burger King to sell the Impossible Whopper.
We were honored to hear from him about the realities of factory farming, the economic, climate, and health opportunities that plant-based meat presents, and what problems he’s tackling next.
Key takeaways
Relying on animals for food production is environmentally destructive on many levels: the GHG emissions from the industry, the water and resources consumed in the production process, and the land and biodiversity lost from deforestation.
Reducing factory farming represents a double emissions win – the eliminated emissions from the production process and the potential for carbon capture and storage from reforestation.
Impossible and next-generation alt meat companies have differentiated from predecessors by designing for meat-lovers, aiming to replicate the sensory experience of meat without using animals to produce it.
Meat-eating consumers are not fundamentally tied to the idea that meat has to come from animals; in fact, many aren’t thrilled with the reality of where meat comes from. That means plant-based meat companies might have an easier sell to meat-eating consumers if they can prove equivalency on other factors, primarily taste, convenience, and cost.
Plant-based protein is an under-engineered field; there are promising plant-based protein sources that haven’t been used in alt meat products because the supply chains don’t yet exist.
Repurposing land dedicated to cattle could be an economic opportunity if the land were repurposed for carbon sequestration and monetized via carbon markets.
What we learned
[Interview responses condensed / paraphrased]
Why did you decide food was the right place to start when tackling climate change?
I didn’t decide that food was the right place to start, I decided that the use of animals as a food technology is the right place to start because it’s the most destructive technology on earth. It’s not just me saying that – actually, more than 10 years ago, there was a study (see Figure 16, bar chart on the right) that looked at all the industrial centers in the world and concluded that, by a large margin, the most environmentally destructive was animal products. I had actually come to the same conclusion myself and then realized I didn’t even need to, because this was a pretty good study. But anyway, the goal I set for myself was to have an impact on the biggest environmental threats the world is facing – which are the biggest that humans have faced in human history. These threats are extremely acute – as you know, by the end of this decade we’re going to exceed the upper limit target that was agreed on at the Paris climate conference for global average temperatures, wild animal populations are less than 1/3 of what they were 50 years ago – things have to happen fast. Making that industry and that technology [animals raised for food] go away was my goal.
The most effective way to do that was to recognize that the problem isn’t people’s diets, it’s that we’re using the wrong technology to produce the foods that people want and will continue to want. This technology [animals] is not only incredibly destructive, but it’s extremely inefficient economically, extremely inefficient resource-wise, and it’s fundamentally unimprovable. And if you switch to a new technology, which has happened many times in history, including prior animal-based technologies [think horses for transportation vs cars!], you open the possibility of making the products better in every way that matters to consumers. And if we can do that, and then let the market do its thing, that’s probably the most powerful and rapid way of getting rid of the world’s most destructive industry. Within a couple of decades, if we did nothing else (and let’s hope we do other things too), this would create a 30 year pause in atmospheric GHG levels, which we urgently and desperately need. As well as immediately start to reverse the collapse of global biodiversity.
So I didn’t set out because I care about food, I set out because I care about the planet and it just happened that the answer involved food.
What are your thoughts on the size and growth of the alt meat market? What do you see as the biggest challenges to continued growth and penetration?
I’m not a student of the “alt meat market” – I don’t actively ignore it, but I don’t make a point of trying to follow it because I’m not trying to compete against other people in that space. I think the market is great and there’s a lot that’s encouraging about it. But for context - most companies / products in the market are using old-school technology that can’t realistically deliver what many consumers want from the products. I applaud them for what they’re doing but you have to raise the game – it’s not good enough to make something that’s only kind-of like meat. One of the main things that was distinctive about what Impossible did was we only cared about hardcore meat lovers. And we made it our mission to make their lives better because that’s the way you’ll achieve our goal [of replacing animal agriculture]. And that sets the bar for product performance higher.
Since that time, there are now quite a number of companies – I don’t actively track them but I regularly talk to entrepreneurs who are getting into this – and I encourage them because I feel like the more the merrier, this is a big problem and we need as many people working on it as possible.
My feeling is – this is going to work. There’s no question about it. In fact, a scientific paper came out a few weeks ago, which we had nothing to do with actually, it was funded by the EU, wherein a bunch of scientists compared 4 burgers in terms of consumer preferences: a conventional cow burger, a cow burger with mushrooms, another plant-based burger, and an Impossible Burger. The Impossible Burger was ranked #1. And the same is true for internal Impossible testing – our pork product, our chicken product both beat the animal products with meat-eating consumers in taste tests, which is the hardest part of the job. Nutrition is no contest, environmental impact is no contest, at scale, cost will be no contest.
This is not an advertisement for Impossible, but rather, why I know this is going to work. But there’s a lot more to be done – there’s getting good at marketing, there’s getting good at distribution, there’s getting into international markets, there’s the whole gamut of other animal-based products to develop. But we’re going to win. And the more people that get into it, the better.
And in terms of the economic opportunity, the market for animal-based food products at the wholesale level is worth something like $2T. So hopefully people aren’t getting into this just for the money, but if they are, at least if they’re good at it, good for them. It’s a big economic opportunity as well as climate and biodiversity and everything else.
Something that’s interesting to know about meat-eating consumers – people who love meat are always going to want meat. They love it first because of the sensory experience, they love the familiarity and convenience, they value the protein and iron and other micronutrients, and those are all purchase drivers, taste particularly. But the fact that it’s made from the corpse of an animal is not at all part of the value proposition. We’ve done a whole bunch of conjoint studies where you effectively look at what people are willing to trade off, and the results overwhelmingly say that if the products performed identically on the things that matter to them (deliciousness, nutritional value, convenience, cost), consumers would prefer – and in fact would be willing to pay a premium for – a product that’s not made that way. Nobody likes the fact that meat comes from an animal corpse, but they live with it, because they like meat so much. A lot of people think the fact that these products aren’t made from animals will be a barrier – but that’s absolutely false. It just has to be delicious, it has to be nutritious and healthy and affordable. And the fact that it’s not made from an animal is actually to your advantage.
What are the main challenges or barriers preventing plant-based products from reaching greater market penetration?
Most meat consumption in the world does not take place in the US. The barrier for us is that – in order to make a product that delivers the flavor and aroma of meat, we need a heme protein, which makes muscle tissue pink or red and it turns out it’s also overwhelmingly responsible for the unique flavors of meat. We needed to produce that protein at scale and it’s never been used as an ingredient before – even though every day, you eat hundreds of different heme proteins in your diet, like in spinach. But when you use it as an ingredient, it has to be approved by the FDA. Getting FDA approval – we did that, and we did the same in Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Singapore and other countries – it takes at least two years. And that is a painful delay for getting into international markets. Anyone who’s working on this needs to realize that to really make a product that delivers, you’re going to have to use completely safe ingredients, but they’ll need to be reviewed for safety.
Apart from that, a lot of it is building a business – if you’re building a business that delivers physical stuff, it’s capital intensive and that brings a slowness to the business. You also have to build production capacity and distribution capacity.
And another present but less significant rate-limiting factor is that you’re starting in a situation where nobody expects a product made from plants to be able to deliver what they want from meat. And you’re fighting a problem which is that historically, most meat consumers in the US have tried some plant-based product and they found it to be terrible. It’s widely assumed in the general population that any plant-based product is going to be a bitter disappointment to a meat consumer. So it’s not just ignorance we have to overcome, it’s preconceived notions. We have a very high repeat rate, but getting them to try it for the first time is hard. And only 5% of the US population has ever tried our products. So, we need to get good at marketing and convince people to give this a shot.
What’s next for you in your career?
My whole career has been very unpredictable. I never feel like I know what I’ll be doing in a few years. I have a very low activation energy barrier to do something new and I’m always reassessing what’s important and interesting, what’s the biggest impact I can have, and so forth. Right now, I’m working on a couple of early-stage projects that are incubating. One has to do with the fact that the supply chain for ingredients used to make plant-based foods is a legacy of a thousand years of mostly animal agriculture. The main plant sources of protein were never developed for that purpose. Soybean is the most abundant protein crop in the world – this year’s soybean crop contains more than twice as much protein as all the meat consumed globally – it’s a great source of protein from a nutritional standpoint but the protein has pretty poor characteristics in terms of formulating a food that has the right flavor and texture. And the other plant protein ingredients have never really been optimized for this purpose. I know there are some better proteins out there, we found some at Impossible Foods, but there’s no supply chain for them, they have to be scaled. So that’s a problem I might take on – it involves agriculture, the process for isolating proteins, monetizing the coproducts from those proteins so you’re not throwing everything else away.
Another one is on the supply side of animal agriculture – how to create economic incentives and opportunities for farmers that are currently in the animal ag business to leave that business and make it financially rewarding for them to do so. And to make it compelling to do something good with the land they no longer need to use for cows, which is by a huge margin the #1 use of land in the world. That’s a huge opportunity from an environmental perspective – to restore native ecosystems and capture a bunch of carbon. From a carbon capture standpoint, there’s no way we’re going to meaningfully bend the curve of climate change without not only a massive reduction in animal agriculture but without reforesting and restoring the land. The amount of carbon that could be captured from doing that is equivalent to half the CO2 emissions from fossil fuel in human history. We have to enable farmers to do that. And it’s an economic opportunity for farmers – they’re the perfect people to do it. First of all, many of them own the land they farmed, but secondly, they’re used to managing it and they’re poised to be financially rewarded for turning back the clock on climate change, but they don’t know how. So I’m working on a project to unlock that potential. It will have the paradoxical effect that switching away from animal agriculture will be a huge opportunity for farmers who are currently in that business.
If you were advising a recent graduate wanting to fix climate change, where would you suggest they start?
There are so many opportunities, the biggest is the one we’re working on which is phasing out animal agriculture and also phasing out fishing, which is almost equally destructive. But there are so many others – so pick the one you feel excited and motivated to do, and don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. If you can tackle something that will be a humungous opportunity, do that – but if you have ideas that will have an impact but won’t be game-changing – that’s still an impact. For any given person, the thing that will be the most impactful is the thing that you can really get excited to do.
What gives you hope in the climate crisis?
I’m wired to be optimistic and problem-solving oriented, and so I do have hope, because I feel like #1, climate change is solvable and there are many solutions to this problem that from a purely economic and technical standpoint are implementable. It’s just a matter of mobilizing the resources and the people to do it. But climate change is a solvable problem, as is biodiversity collapse. #2, people, especially in your generation and the next generation, are highly motivated to do something about climate change – and there’s a lot of energy behind that. That also makes me optimistic.
So I’m optimistic because I think it’s a solvable problem and there’s a lot of energy behind it – therefore, I think it will be solved.
Talking about food production, replacing meats, while under the immense strain, unpredictability, and extremities of our current weather and climate on planet Earth? So not to bring Debbie Downer to this party. I like the approach and your ideas Pat you're passionate but the impossible mission really is on our doorstep now. How to slow down or stop runaway climate change. Last I checked we are deep into disaster mode all over the globe. It might not matter how much food we have if we lose our home or lives to possibly endless fires, floods, and unsurvivable temperatures.
With great respect Gigaton and your efforts to help our climate, but now growing season, precipitation, temperatures for many regions use to be predictable. Afterall a definition of climate appears to be at least: An enduring stable predictable series of weather patterns that have established themselves in particular regions and one can usually expect certain outcomes within a predictable parameter. What appears now both nationally and worldwide is weather patterns are anything but stable and predictable.
We’re all thinking a lot about the weather these days. Is it more unpredictable? more extreme? or is it just something that we have always thought of as “normal"
Lately news reports state that for 1st time in history of keeping weather data that the Earth has experienced some of its hottest days on record. News folks are routinely telling us that much of the South central and Southern parts of the US are sitting in triple digit heat. We’re hearing high temp 105-120 degree F. . Why is there increased frequency of extreme weather events? Temperature and precipitation data is now beginning to break all historical weather records .
We believe that the public needs to come to grips, face to face, that we are in an emergency situation, and all levels need to take immediate action. The real possibility exists that we likely have passed some key climate tipping points and have now launched into uncharted dangerous weather territory for good. If Gigaton and Pat you could do anything please Sound-The-Alarm bell to the public.. Thanks again for your efforts
I liked your article and appreciate what you have been through and what you have done. I will definitely try out a vegan burger in the next few weeks.