An ‘impossible’ burger: Redwood City’s Impossible Foods creates plant-based ‘meat’

This is not so for the team at Impossible Foods, the Redwood City-based company attempting to build a new burger by deconstructing the quintessential experience for meat lovers and putting it back together again — but this time with plants.

Made up of biochemists, molecular biologists, materials scientists and other academics, the team at Impossible Foods is primed to closely inspect what makes people crave a burger, and find materials in the plant kingdom that will create the same sensory experience.

For Celeste Holz-Schietinger, a biochemist and principal scientist at Impossible Foods, zooming in on the individual elements factoring into a burger’s flavor comes naturally.

“How I solve problems is I take something very complex and I look at what are each of its components at the molecular level,” she said.

Holz-Schietinger oversees the company’s efforts to include the right composition of plant-based flavors that match the flavor of burgers made from ground beef. Since the company got its start in 2011, it has honed in on heme, an iron-rich molecule carrying oxygen in blood that is also found in the root nodules of soy plants. Holz-Schietinger said the dark red molecule drives the Impossible Foods burger’s flavor and cooked-just-right red color.

The molecule is combined with wheat and potato protein, coconut oil, water and a thickening agent derived from yams, and lends the Impossible Foods burger the same blood-based taste as burgers made from cows.

Larger mission

Though recreating the unique components of a burger from plants may sound like a cool science experiment, the company’s efforts to create a burger from plants — one that is appealing to those who enjoy ground beef burgers — are part of a larger mission. As the team has found a way to deconstruct and rebuild a burger, they are highlighting issues involved with raising cattle as a source of meat. For founder and CEO Pat Brown, disrupting a food system heavily dependent on raising animals requires a similarly scientific approach — where cows can be seen as an inefficient engine taking years to convert calories from plants into energy for those consuming them.

“We are optimizing for deliciousness and nutrition in a way you cannot do with animals,” he said.

Brown and his team have chosen beef, and ground beef in particular, as the food to optimize given the meat’s pervasive use in restaurants across the world. It’s taken the company five years to develop the burger, which the company claims uses 25 percent of the water, 5 percent of the land and 13 percent of the greenhouse gases used to make a burger from cows. Just last year, the burger hit select restaurants and is currently served at 11 restaurants, including several in the Bay Area such as Cockscomb Restaurant in San Francisco and KronnerBurger in Oakland.

If the plant-based Impossible Foods burger, credited for its high fidelity to cow-based burgers, sounds too good to be true, it is the result of thousands of hours of scrutiny and testing that continue to chase the subjective nature of human taste today.

Mouth feel, and taste

Sergey Solomatin, a materials scientist, uses instruments testing how meat proteins found in the ground beef respond to stresses like high heat to identify the properties that make up a meat burger’s texture. He also tests how a burger’s fat plays into the way it feels in one’s mouth, measuring how much is melted under the average temperature of a human mouth. Once he identifies these characteristics, Solomatin works with other scientists to identify plant proteins with similar traits, which can be used to recreate the texture of a meat burger. For Solomatin, the exact numbers produced by his instruments in the lab can only bring him so close to the truth of how a real burger feels in one’s mouth, which vary from person to person.

“Each of these instruments is much better than a human taster in, for example, how reproducible it can give you a number for chewiness, spreadability,” he said.

So Solomatin and the rest of the Impossible Foods team depend on human testers to taste their many burger prototypes. In the lab’s sterile industrial kitchen, the deep pink of the raw Impossible Foods “meat” pops against the white walls and gray metal tables where several team members mold it into patties and meatballs for testing. Though the company has a small production plant at its Redwood City headquarters at 525 Chesapeake Drive, it is set to open a production plant in Oakland by the summer, which is expected to increase the company’s production capacity by 250 times.

Future plans

Though biochemist Ranjani Varadan, who leads the company’s protein discovery team, wears a lab coat, she hopes those skeptical of eating a burger composed in a lab recognize Impossible Foods’ work comes in a long history of food processes.

“What people don’t always realize is, humans have been manipulating proteins for thousands and thousands of years,” she said, citing bread and cheese as examples.

Varadan is convinced the company can go much farther than burgers and tap plant proteins to recreate other types of meat like chicken and pork and dairy products like cheese and milk.

But for now, the company will remain focused on perfecting its plant-based burger with the hope of cutting into the impact of animal agriculture, which the company estimates to be responsible for 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. For Holz-Schietinger, the wide-reaching impact of just one burger is the reason why she has devoted her skills to Impossible Foods.

“A lot of us focus on and think about how much we need to solve transportation and oil issues, but that’s actually only a fraction of the issues that animal farming has,” she said.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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