The Exchanges

Q Okay, so here you are. Uh, it's the early 2000. You have this incredibly impressive career that you forged. Um, and you could have continued doing that kind of research and teaching and publishing. Uh, and, and then around, I guess, 2008, you took a sabbatical, which turned into a kind of a detour. Um, can you tell me what Like, what was the thinking behind that?

A So I had decided that for my sabbatical that, um, I was going to try to identify the most important problem in the world that I could, um, contribute to solving. And it could have been anything, but, but I was pretty confident that it was going to be, uh, something about avoiding environmental catastrophes, basically. And, uh, and I was looking at a variety of different things relatively early on. I was looking at, you know, what's the state of research in making more efficient solar energy devices and stuff like that. But relatively quickly, I would say within a month or so, I had zeroed in on what is unquestionably the most important and urgent problem the world is facing right now. And that is the Catastrophic environmental impact of our use of animals in the food system.

AI assessment note: “I was going to try to identify the most important problem in the world”

Q So you, um, you raised the money. You raised some money from, from Khosla to launch a company that would kind of reimagine a way of, of producing meat. Um, and by the way, um, how did you come up with the name Impossible Foods?

A So when I started the company, first we just had a placeholder name, Meat Two Point O. And then we, when we decided we're going to, you know, launch a product, we felt like, okay, now we need a name that actually Works as a brand name, and we engaged a naming company as an advisor, and we were, they told us, by far the most difficult clients they ever had, because they were, they would give us 20 names, and we say, those all suck. Those are terrible. And then in the fourth round, one of the names they had was Impossible. And as soon as I saw that one, I felt like, ok, We're done. It's perfect because we wanted something that was, you know, memorable, that actually looked good in type. That was a, an impactful word, a word that gets a little bit of an emotional response and that captured some of the challenger spirit of the company. And a lot of our investors thought it was a bad name because they said, wow, impossible. That's such a negative name.

AI assessment note: “we engaged a naming company... in the fourth round, one of the names they had was Impossible.”

Q obviously a lot of what you do is proprietary and patented and secret, but I'm curious, like, how do you, as you kind of improved it and got it to where it is today, how do you, is it spices? Is it, is it like, um, I don't know. Is it, is it different, like, ingredients? How do you, how do you, is that, how do you get that taste?

A It's not spices at all. I mean, and it's actually the ingredients are relatively few. I mean, it's, the flavor is almost entirely from simple small molecules like amino acids, vitamins, sugars, things that you can find in vegetables, animals, whatever. Same simple, you know, ubiquitous biomolecules. Plus, Heme as a catalyst, and that's most of what's behind the flavor. We don't put spices in. There's no, like, meat flavorance in there. It's pretty straightforward. It's, it's, the, the way that we approached the problem was we basically asked the question, how does, how does meat do it? How does meat from a cow produce that flavor? Because if meat from a cow can produce that flavor with the biomolecules that, that it contains, Which we knew at the time were extremely similar in composition to the things that are found in plant cells. If we can figure out how meat does it, then we don't have to fake the flavors. We can build in the exact same flavor chemistry into our product so that it does the same thing. And it, it literally creates the flavor in real time when you cook it in the raw form, which you can, you can actually eat it raw, which I wouldn't recommend for the cow version. The flavor is completely different from the cooked version, um, and that's unlike any plant-derived food before, and it tastes bloody.

AI assessment note: “the flavor is almost entirely from simple small molecules like amino acids, vitamins, sugars”

Q that the burger, the Impossible Burger was launched, um, and you guys sort of formed a partnership With David Chang, the famous chef in New York of Momofuku. Tell me why, why you guys decide to do that instead of like, you know, ship it to all the stores, you decide, we're going to start with this one place. How did, how did that, what was the thinking behind that?

A I think it was something that was pretty obvious under the circumstances. So we had been in contact with a number of chefs that we would give, um, samples of our product to, just to get feedback because, you know, again, the thing is we were not interested in launching a veggie burger. If, if it didn't satisfy a very hardcore meat lover, it wasn't going to move the needle on our mission. So we were Setting a high bar for ourselves. So we were giving samples to chefs to get their feedback and had been doing that for quite some time. And my CFO at the time, current CFO too, um, David Lee, uh, belonged to some Korean American organization that Dave Chang also belonged to. And he was going to that event in New York and he brought a sample in case he could see Dave Chang to have him test it out. So he brought it to Dave Chang's kitchen restaurant and he cooked it on his stove. And then just like Immediately started, uh, tweeting like, my mind is blown.

AI assessment note: “we were not interested in launching a veggie burger. If, if it didn't satisfy”

Q you had the meat industry saying, you can't call this burgers. There's states in the U.S. where I think you can't call it Unless it comes from an animal, you can't call it a burger. And, you know, other groups saying, you know, you know, you're, this is, uh, frankenfood or lab, all this stuff. When you hear people say, hey, you know, this isn't healthy. What do you say?

A I would say from a health and nutrition standpoint, we have been extremely deliberate and conscientious to make a product that we believe is substantially better for the consumer than what it replaces, and it has the same protein bioavailability, the same bioavailable iron. People make a big deal about the fact that the sodium content is higher But you could say, yeah, and the sodium content of a pear is higher than a peach. But the fact is that the sodium content in a four ounce impossible burger is, I think, one sixth of the sodium allowance in a sodium restricted diet. Okay. So this is not a kale salad. It's a burger. And it's targeted at someone who would otherwise be buying the animal version.

AI assessment note: “we have been extremely deliberate and conscientious to make a product that we believe is substantially better”

Q And how did you, by the way, how did you know about that? I mean, lots of people know about it, but not, not everyone knows about it. How did you come to that understanding that, that agriculture, particularly raising livestock, was so damaging to the environment?

A I mean, I'm kind of embarrassed that I wasn't more aware of it ahead of, ahead of this. I just, I was basically reading about environmental problems and what are the contributing factors and so forth. I became aware of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are, which are huge. They're greater than All forms of power transportation combined. And because of its huge land footprint, it is responsible for a catastrophic meltdown in global biodiversity. And, um, the other thing that relates to land footprint is if you could snap your fingers and make that industry go away, which I would do in a heartbeat if I could, the recovery of biomass Trees and shrubs and grasses and so forth, whose growth is suppressed by animal agriculture, would immediately start pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, because the, the ultimate carbon capture technology is photosynthesis. That's the opportunity cost of using all that land for animal agriculture. So bottom line is, there's, Nothing even comes close in terms of its destructive impact on the environment.

AI assessment note: “I was basically reading about environmental problems and what are the contributing factors”

Q saved a lot of money to do this. And you've attracted investment from people like Bill Gates and celebrities and athletes and tons of different venture firms. But, um, why is it so expensive? Like, is it, is it just like all the equipment you need and all the sorts of labs and the resources and the materials? Like, why is it so expensive? Why does it cost so much?

A I would say a large fraction of the expense. So, you know, we have an R&D team that's probably a 120 people, really just as good a group of scientists as any company. Pretty much ever in history. But the work they do isn't insanely expensive. But we have to scale up production of a physical product that, you know, we sell on the scale of tens of millions of pounds a year. We had to build a supply chain for our heme protein. And, and those things are relatively expensive. There's, you know, uh, just the, the capital investment in building a manufacturing facility and all that capacity. And, um, that's a big part of it is that, and the thing is that you have to invest ahead of growth and, and, you know, betting on your success basically. So if we're going to increase our volume by several fold this year and several fold the next year, Well, we need to be building capacity right now. That's like 10 X what we're selling. It's very different from if we were building an app or something like that, where You know, it's, it's, it's just, you're just paying for coders, basically.

AI assessment note: “capital investment in building a manufacturing facility and all that capacity”

Q lot of friction, because the academic publishing world is a for-profit industry, and they don't want everyone having access to their, um, papers unless they pay for it. Um, you, you basically, uh, created this new model, um, and had a lot of people saying, hey, what are you, Pat, what are you doing? You're an academic, and what are you, what are you wasting your time with publishing for?

A Well, I mean, that's, the way that I saw my job, or, you know, my purpose, I guess, um, It wasn't defined in terms of some particular scientific problem I was working on. You know, it's, if you see something that you can have a positive impact on, um, I was in the very fortunate position that I could do it, and it was kind of like understood to be part of my job. In that case, I realized that to most of the world, if, uh, you know, if a parent gets sick and they want to read the best current medical literature on the subject, As many people do, I mean, many people who are not physicians, when they have a family member who has a medical problem, they'll go and, and try to read it. Well, you can't. You have to pay, you know, 30 to 50 bucks to read a crappy paper.

AI assessment note: “the way that I saw my job, or, you know, my purpose”

Q you came to the conclusion that, that you basically wanted to make meat, but not from animals. You wanted to, uh, basically you, you accept the fact that many people still want to eat meat. They're going to eat meat. It's going to be hard to get them to stop eating meat. So I want to just give them meat, but Don't make it from animals. That was your conclusion?

A It was exactly the conclusion. And here's an interesting fact about meat consumers. Pretty much around the world and all across the U.S., they don't actually like the fact that it's made from the corpses of animals. That is not part of the value proposition of meat to pretty much anyone. They love it because they love the, you know, special kind of deliciousness they get from it. They like the, you know, high protein and iron and familiarity and convenience and so forth. They like it in spite of the way it's made, and it stands to reason. Why would anyone actually feel like, you know, what I particularly like about this product isn't so much that it tastes good, it's that it's made from the corpse of a, you know, cow that had a miserable life. Nobody wants that. So that basically means that it just comes down to a simple thing. Give meat lovers the things they do love about meat, which is the, the very particular kind of sensory experience and the sensory pleasures, the nutritional value, protein and iron primarily, other micronutrients, and convenience and affordability, and you win.

AI assessment note: “It was exactly the conclusion. And here's an interesting fact about meat consumers.”

Q Right, right. Fair, fair point. Yeah. Um, Pat, obviously, um, you know, we have to talk about everything that's going on right now in the world, um, with, with the effects of the pandemic and the economy. Um, and I mean, has it, has it affected your business?

A Um, well, definitely we have to operate differently. I mean, I think, you know, The, the workspace, our workspace is deliberately designed to be effectively one large space where people are in visual contact with a lot of their colleagues. It's very, uh, it's very interactive environment. So it's quite compromising to the, to a lot of the things that are important to us. And of course, our R&D labs, the, the ability to do actual wet lab work, um, you can't do because, um, Even though it's essential to the future of the planet, it's not immediately essential to day-to-day life for us to be operating, so we're, we're So the R&D operations is basically, you know, the people are still getting work done, planning experiments, analyzing data, stuff like that, but it's compromised. Manufacturing, um, yeah, it's complicated.

AI assessment note: “well, definitely we have to operate differently.”

Q Yeah. I think that was in 2001 when you founded, founded it, the public, co-founded the public library of science, and how, just, just by, you know, give us a sense of scale, how big is it today? Because it's, there's tons of, like, plus PLOS one, and there's a bunch of, like, PLOS medicine, right? I mean, how big is it?

A Well, when, when that journal was launched, within a couple of years, it was by far the highest volume scientific journal in history, in terms of publication volume. But the thing I learned was, I believed it would be super successful, and the lesson I learned is, which is Something I repeat all the time at, um, Impossible Foods. You have to bet on your own success. If you expect and intend something to be super successful, even when it's not, you have to make that investment that you're betting on your, your growth. It's just for Impossible Foods, the analogy is, if we believe we're going to be as successful as we intend and do believe, we have to make huge investments in production capacity and A couple of years in advance that are predicated on the idea that our volume will be 10 times greater. You know, in a year and a half.

AI assessment note: “But the thing I learned was, I believed it would be super successful”