Prediction Not checkable as stated
Brown: Matching beef industry scale will be game over for meat producers
“When we get the economies of scale that they have, and, ah, when we've, you know, expanded our suite of products and so forth, that it's going to be game over for them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brown: The beef industry asked lobbyists to shut down Impossible before launch
“Even from before we had our first product, I know from a direct source that a representative of that industry actually reached out to a lobbyist and basically Said to, you know, ask that, ask the lobbyists to get Congress or the USDA to shut us down.”
Assertion Contradicted
Brown: Livestock emissions exceed all global transportation emissions combined
“I became aware of the greenhouse gas emissions from the livestock industry, which are huge. They're greater than all forms of power transportation combined.”
Opinion
Pat Brown: Solving animal agriculture requires a for-profit business
“The only way to solve this problem involves competing in the marketplace, and that requires starting a for-profit business.”
Disclosure
Pat Brown: Impossible Foods Will Not Risk Its Mission by Selling to Acquirers
“The mission is to eliminate the need for animals as a food technology, and by doing so, to save the planet from an environmental catastrophe. Nobody cares as much about it as I do and my colleagues do. And I don't want to put the mission at risk by putting it …”
Insight
Brown: Meat eating is purely aesthetic and cannot justify animal suffering
“If I don't need meat to be completely healthy and well nourished. Then I'm only eating it for aesthetic reasons. There's no physiological reason why I need to do is purely the aesthetics. And I felt like that was, I just couldn't justify the killing and making…”
Insight
Brown: Education and nagging cannot persuade people to cut meat consumption
“You're not gonna be able to persuade people by education or nagging to change their diet significantly, to significantly reduce meat consumption or consumption of animal products. Look at how well people follow nutrition recommendations for their own health as…”
Insight
Pat Brown: Meat's core biomolecules can be replicated from plants
“Really what it comes down to is the components that are in meat, you know, the amino acids, the other small molecules lipids, many of the proteins are extremely conserved. They're found in plants as well as animals and so forth. It seemed to me that if we coul…”
Insight
Brown: Plant meat must outperform cow meat among meat lovers
“Prefer it to what comes from a cow. Because otherwise, we're not going to outcompete the incumbent industry.”
Prediction Held up
Brown: State bans on plant-based meat labeling will fail constitutional tests
“The smart money is that they're not going to pass a constitutional test.”
Insight
Brown: Biomedical research offers higher leverage than clinical practice
“If you're a clinician, you keep coming up against problems that you don't know how to solve, and it's just incredibly upsetting, you know, when you're taking care of a sick kid. And you just don't know how to help them. And so I felt like that's much higher le…”
Insight
Pat Brown: Founders must bet on their success by investing ahead of demand
“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 growth.”
Disclosure
Pat Brown: Impossible Foods must double production volume annually for 15 years
“And since our mission requires us to, on average, double in volume every year for the next 15 years, we're gonna have to be making that big bet on our success again, again, again.”
Insight
Brown: Being made from animal corpses is not part of meat's value proposition
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Brown: Yeast Fermentation of Leghemoglobin Scales with Strong Economics
“Then basically you just, Grow giant fermenter tanks full of the yeast, and break open the yeast cells, and extract the leg hemoglobin, and it's very scalable, the economics work well.”
Insight
Brown: Chef menu placements are the most valuable product endorsements
“There's no More sincere and valuable endorsement than to put our product on a menu, for a chef to put it on the menu, because every, when a chef puts a dish on the menu, they're putting their livelihood and their reputation on the line.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Impossible Burger flavor comes from simple biomolecules catalyzed by heme
“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 …”
Assertion Supported
Pat Brown: PLOS became the highest-volume scientific journal in history
“Well, 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.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Global meat market was worth $1.5T in 2011
“And then practically my last slide was, oh, by the way, this is a 1.5 at the time, trillion dollar global market.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: U.S. soybean root nodules contain enough heme to match all meat
“So anyway, I did some calculations and concluded that there's as much heme in the root nodules of the U.S. Soybean crop As there isn't all the meat consumed in the U.S.”
Assertion Supported
Brown: Impossible Foods sells tens of millions of pounds annually
“We sell on the scale of tens of millions of pounds a year.”
Insight
Pat Brown: Diffusion of responsibility prevents valuable innovation from happening
“I think that's the most important thing, and I feel like it's the one thing that, that keeps a lot of valuable things from happening, is people feel like, you know, someone else must be, this is someone else's job to solve. You know, why would I be the person …”
Pat Brown