Impossible Foods plans Australian foray

The Silicon Valley plant-based ‘meat’ company backed by Bill Gates and Google is working on plans to launch in Australia.

A plant-based mixture for burgers is prepared at an Impossible Foods facility in California. PHOTO: JANE LANHEE LEE/REUTERS

The Silicon Valley-based plant-based meat company backed by Bill Gates, Google Ventures and the Singapore government’s investment arm, Temasek, is working on plans to launch its products in Australia.

The company, founded in 2011, boasts its Impossible Burger 2.0 has as much iron and protein as a conventional hamburger, while having zero cholesterol.

The burger is served in about 30,000 restaurants and more than 11,000 grocery stores across America and last month Canada became its first international market outside Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau.

Impossible Foods’ Senior Vice President for International, Nick Halla, said Australia was viewed as “a very important market” for the firm’s global expansion plans.

“It’s a very large meat producing market which aligns with our mission. Our mission is really to go all the way from the farmer, to build a whole ecosystem down to the consumer. And I think Australians can be a big part of that just based on the meat culture that’s been there for a long time. And then also the awareness in Australia continues to increase the awareness of the ties between food, agriculture and the environmental impact of the future of our world in our land,’’ Mr Halla said in an interview with The Australian from his Hong Kong base.

“We have different regulation processes that we work through and we’re working through that. And a lot of places in Australia, I think everything’s going very well. Now is not the time to announce anything but we’re quite excited about the market with Australia.”

Impossible Foods launched its products in the American retail market in 2019 after receiving the green light from the Food and Drug Administration to use heme as an ingredient. Heme is a protein the company sources from soy leghemoglobin, which is found naturally in soybean roots.

While heme is the key ingredient that allows Impossible Foods’s burgers to taste like beef, until mid-last year, the FDA did not approve it for sale unless it was already cooked.

“It goes to the same process of cooking just like meat from an animal does. And that is really that uniqueness and that diversity of cooking properties that it has that we can replicate,’’ he said.

Amid criticism of the high sodium content of its products (real, unprocessed meat has very little sodium), Mr Halla, who was the company’s first employee, says it will continue to refine the ingredients in its burgers.

“Nutrition is an extremely important topic that we’ve all looked at . . . We’re not a high sodium product. We are higher sodium than an animal [but] that difference really is very little. You’d have to eat more than a pound and a half of Impossible every day to hit in your sodium limit. And so we’ll continue to pull that salt down as we scale our processes and systems. As we learn how to make products that consumers absolutely love, which is number one, we’ll make the nutritionals better.”

Mr Halla said while plant-based meat had its critics, it was actually meat eaters — not vegetarians or vegans — who were flocking to the product.

Financial services firm UBS predicts it will grow to be worth $85bn by 2030, while Barclays is forecasting it will be worth $140bn within a decade.

In August Impossible raised $US200m ($284m) from its investors in a Series G round, just months after its $US500m Series F raising..

The new funding brought to $US1.5bn the total funding raised by Impossible over the past nine years.

Mr Halla said a public listing was not currently on the agenda. Impossible’s rival, Beyond Meats, was one of the hottest IPO’s in America last year when it raised $US240m through a listing on the NASDAQ.

“We have the capital that we need to grow and really invest in growth, we are quite aggressive in investing in growth,” Mr Halla said.

“And so for right now, we’re really happy with operating the company as we are as a private company. We operate to a standard of any public company because that’s the right way to do it. But there are no (IPO) plans. We’re very happy with our investors and our financial situation.”