Impossible Foods Details Extraordinary Impact of COVID-19 and Publishes All-New Sustainability Data in Annual Report
December 04 2020 - 12:00PM
Business Wire
- Impossible Foods’ 2020 Impact Report details how COVID-19
provoked the largest operational expansion in the startup’s 10-year
history
- Annual deep-dive describes how the top environmental
startup’s workforce evolved amid a global pandemic, climate crisis
and social justice movement
- Titled “Turn Back the Clock,” paperless post explains how
animal agriculture is ruining Earth -- and how the tiny
environmental footprint of sustainable foods such as ImpossibleTM
Sausage Made From Plants can save the planet
In a new report published today at Web Summit 2020, Impossible
Foods is serving up fresh insight on COVID-19’s extraordinary
impact on the company’s operations and workforce.
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Titled “Turn Back the Clock,” Impossible Foods’ 2020 Impact
Report opens with an intimate retrospective on how the top
environmental startup concurrently coped with COVID, the climate
crisis and the social justice movement. Amid unprecedented
challenges, Impossible Foods’ retail footprint increased nearly
100X in 2020 alone -- by far the biggest operational expansion in
the company’s 10-year history.
The mission of Impossible Foods is to turn back the clock on
global warming, halt biodiversity collapse and fix our public
health crisis by making our global food system sustainable.
Impossible Foods’ scientists’ best known achievement to date,
Impossible Burger, tastes like beef and is hailed as a triumph of
food engineering -- the result of nearly a decade of basic science
and hard-core research and development in the company’s
headquarters in California’s Silicon Valley. (These Texas ranchers
can’t tell the difference between Impossible Burger and ground beef
from cows; a beef lobbyist called it the “real deal” and a “wake-up
call” for the livestock sector.)
Barn burner
Few companies’ annual sustainability tomes generate buzz -- but
Impossible Foods’ 2019 report prompted bellows from the livestock
sector. Following suit, the 2020 update opens with a manifesto from
CEO and Founder Dr. Patrick O. Brown on how to reverse global
warming and halt the planet’s extinction crisis.
The Stanford University Professor Emeritus calls the elimination
of livestock the “magic wand” to solve the climate and extinction
crises -- and mitigate our public health emergency.
“What if you could wave a magic wand and make the animal-based
food industry disappear? We could turn back the clock on global
warming, reverse the global collapse of biodiversity and halt
species extinction, deforestation, water pollution and our public
health crisis,” Brown asks. “Our planet needs that magic wand. So
Impossible Foods is inventing it -- a new technology platform for
transforming plants into delicious, nutritious, affordable meat,
fish and dairy foods, replacing the old animal-based technology in
the global food system.”
Best of the wurst
In addition to skyrocketing retail growth of Impossible Burger,
2020 marked the debut of Impossible Foods’ first products in an
all-new category: Impossible™ Pork Made from Plants and Impossible™
Sausage Made from Plants. TIME named Impossible Pork one of the
best inventions of 2020.
Impossible Sausage is now available in more than 15,000 US and
Asian restaurants, making it Impossible Foods’ most successful
product rollout.
The 2020 Impact Report provides a first look at the first Life
Cycle Assessment for Impossible Sausage, which requires vastly less
natural resources and greenhouse gases than sausage made from
swine. Compared to its animal counterpart, Impossible Sausage:
- Generates 71% less greenhouse gases
- Requires 41% less land area in a year
- Has a 79% lower water footprint
- Generates 57% less aquatic eutrophication
Authored by third party experts, the study is available in full
on Impossible Foods’ website.
“The greatest problems facing humanity are rapidly progressing
global warming and a catastrophic global collapse of biodiversity.
Replacing the use of animals as a food-production technology is by
far the most impactful solution to both -- and the most feasible,”
Brown said. “So that’s what Impossible Foods is doing, and we’re
well on the way. Impossible Burger is rapidly displacing
animal-based foods, and we are confident that Impossible Sausage
can address the environmental impact of pigs, the world’s most
widely consumed animal.”
About Impossible Foods: Based in California’s Silicon
Valley, Impossible Foods makes delicious, nutritious meat and dairy
products from plants — with a much smaller environmental footprint
than meat from animals. The privately held food tech startup was
founded in 2011 by Patrick O. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., Professor
Emeritus of Biochemistry at Stanford University and a former Howard
Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Investors include Mirae
Asset Global Investments, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google
Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek,
Sailing Capital, and Open Philanthropy Project. Impossible Foods
was Inc. Magazine’s company of the year and one of Time’s 50 Genius
companies.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201204005115/en/
Jessica Appelgren pr@impossiblefoods.com