This week at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Impossible Foods is serving up Impossible Pork Made from Plants and Impossible Sausage Made from Plants—the startup’s first all-new products since the blockbuster Impossible Burger debuted in 2016.
Impossible Pork
Impossible Pork is a gluten-free, plant-based ground meat that can be used in any recipe that calls for ground pork from pigs. The company says its Impossible Pork offers:
- Taste: Impossible Pork can be used in any ground meat dish, including spring rolls, stuffed vegetables, dumplings, wontons or sausage links. Impossible Foods says like ground meat from pigs, Impossible Pork is characterized by its mild savory flavor, adding delicate depth and umami richness without being gamey or overpowering.
- Nutrition: Impossible Pork contains no gluten, no animal hormones and no antibiotics. It has 16g protein, 3mg iron, 0mg cholesterol, 13g total fat, 7g saturated fat and 220 calories in a 4-oz. serving. Conventional 70/30 pork from animals contains 17g protein, 1mg iron, 86mg cholesterol, 32g total fat, 11g saturated fat and 350 calories in a 4-oz. serving.
- Versatility: Impossible Pork can be cooked in the steamer, oven, charbroiler, flat-top grill or sauté pan. Chefs can use Impossible Pork in recipes from stir-fry to meatballs to dim sum or links. Impossible Pork is designed to be eligible for kosher and halal certification if produced in a kosher- or halal-certified plant.
Impossible Sausage
In addition to providing an exclusive first taste of Impossible Pork at CES, Impossible Foods is launching Impossible Sausage, a plant-based, pre-seasoned product can be used in any recipe or dish that calls for animal-derived sausage.
Impossible Sausage contains no gluten, no animal hormones and no antibiotics. A raw, 2-oz. serving has 7g protein, 1.69mg iron, 0mg cholesterol, 9g total fat, 4g saturated fat and 130 calories. A 2-oz. serving of conventional Jimmy Dean’s raw pork sausage made from pigs contains 7g protein, 0.36mg iron, 40mg cholesterol, 21g total fat, 7g saturated fat and 220 calories.
Impossible Sausage will debut in late January exclusively at 139 Burger King restaurants in five test regions: Savannah, Georgia; Lansing, Michigan; Springfield, Illinois; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Montgomery, Alabama. The all-new, limited-time-only Impossible Croissan’wich features a toasted croissant, egg, cheese and a seasoned plant-based sausage from Impossible Foods. This test makes Burger King restaurants the first restaurant to sell Impossible Sausage in a breakfast sandwich.
Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage are the only new foods showcased at CES 2020 and the first all-new products from Impossible Foods, Inc. Magazine’s company of the year and one of Time Magazine’s 50 Genius companies.
The food tech startup launched its award-winning Impossible Burger in 2016. Impossible Burger is now available in more than 17,000 restaurants in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau.
“Impossible Foods cracked meat’s molecular code—starting with ground beef, which is intrinsic to the American market. Now we’re accelerating the expansion of our product portfolio to more of the world’s favorite foods,” said Impossible Foods’ CEO and founder Dr. Patrick O. Brown. “We won’t stop until we eliminate the need for animals in the food chain and make the global food system sustainable.”
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, animal agriculture is a primary driver of the accelerating collapse in diverse wildlife populations and ecosystems on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes.
While cows and chicken are America’s favorite protein sources, pigs are the most widely eaten animal in the world, accounting for about 38 percent of meat production worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The FAO also says the world is home to about 1.44 billion pigs; with an average weight of about 112 kg, total farmed pig biomass totals 175 billion kilograms. That’s nearly twice as much as the total biomass of all wild terrestrial vertebrates.
In order to satisfy humanity’s demand for pork, 47 pigs are killed on average every second of every day, based on FAO data.
Industrial pork production releases nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment, and the high doses of copper and zinc fed to pigs to promote growth accumulate in the soil. Feces and waste often spread to surrounding neighborhoods, polluting air and water with toxic waste particles.
Because antibiotics are prophylactically added into pig (and cow and chicken) feed to protect and fatten the animals, pork consumption promotes antibiotic resistance, which the United Nations says could cause 10 million deaths a year by 2050 and trigger a global recession. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drug-resistant infections now kill 35,000 people in the United States each year and sicken 2.8 million.
About 2.5 billion people reject pork and pork-derived products based on dietary and religious restrictions. Pork from animals is forbidden in interpretations of Hinduism, Judiasm, Islam and some Christian sects.
“Pork is delicious and ubiquitous—but problematic for billions of people and the planet at large,” said Dr. Laura Kliman, senior flavor scientist at Impossible Foods and one of the company’s researchers on Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage. “By contrast, everyone will be able to enjoy Impossible Pork, without compromise to deliciousness, ethics or Earth.”
Impossible’s footprint
Based in Redwood City, California, Impossible Foods says it uses modern science and technology to create delicious food, restore natural ecosystems and feed a growing population sustainably. The company makes meat from plants—with a much smaller environmental footprint than meat from animals.
To satisfy the global demand for meat at a fraction of the environmental impact, Impossible Foods says it developed a far more sustainable, scalable and affordable way to make meat, without the catastrophic environmental impact of livestock.
Shortly after its founding in 2011, Impossible Foods’ scientists discovered that one molecule—“heme”—is primarily responsible for the flavors that result when meat is cooked. Impossible Foods’ scientists genetically engineer and ferment yeast to produce a heme protein naturally found in plants, called soy leghemoglobin.
Impossible Foods says the heme in Impossible products is identical to the essential heme humans have been consuming for hundreds of thousands of years in meat.
Impossible’s Vegas debut
Impossible Foods became the first food company ever featured at CES one year ago, when the startup launched Impossible Burger 2.0—the first major product upgrade since Impossible Burger’s 2016 debut. Impossible Burger 2.0 won prizes at CES 2019 and received Popular Science’s 2019 grand award for engineering.
Impossible Foods remains the only food company featured in CES’ 2020 roster of world-changing technologies.
On Jan. 8, Impossible Foods’ CEO was set to headline the Consumer Technology Association’s Leaders in Technology Dinner, an invitation-only address to 600 technology VIPs. Brown, the first person from the food sector to take the main stage at the tech industry’s seminal event, was scheduled to conduct an unscripted on-stage interview with Fox Business Network journalist Liz Claman.
During the public show days Jan. 7-10, Impossible Foods will give away about 25,000 samples. Impossible Foods’ pop-up restaurant will operate 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. from Jan. 7-9 and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Jan. 10 in the Central Plaza of the Las Vegas Convention Center—the crossroads of CES.
