Ann Berry (00:00):
Lab grown meat plant-based alternatives. The past decade has felt like a cascade of companies have tried to disrupt food and especially all things cow with Beyond Meat. IPOing in 2019, followed by Oatley in 2021. This all came top of mind after I recently watched Wild Hope Mission Impossible, a documentary about Stanford Professor Pat Brown's journey from pioneering research into the AIDS virus and DNA imaging tools to how to get plant-based foods to taste like meat. That question inspired him to start Impossible Foods. In 20 11, 5 years later, its first meat analog product, the Impossible Burger launched, and in 2019, it went fully mainstream with the impossible whopper arriving in Burger Cake. Fast forward to today and Impossible has launched chicken replacement products in Whole Foods grocery stores, and the impossible Whopper is still available, although in November, 2023, burger King's parent company CEO said vegan and plant-based offerings are not a big part of the current focus.
(00:49)
Meanwhile, beyond Meat has lost almost all of its value. At share price is down from a high of $194 to under $4 and a market cap of about $250 million today, and that's despite distribution through McDonald's with mc, plant burgers and nuggets. This has led to questions of whether meat replacement investments were just another tech fed fueled by cheap capital, but dairy replacements may be set to suffer the same fate. Oatley share prices dropped from a $28 high to under a dollar today, and private competitor CFI has not yet shown signs of pursuing an overdue IPO with these sector dynamic swelling. I sat down with Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown, to see if plant-based alternatives can really scale and to learn more about his new chapter in carbon ranching. Let's get into it. Wow. Pat, you are one of the founding fathers of the meat replacement industry or the og. Tell us at what specific moment you decided to go after the worst offending factory when it comes to carbon related gas emissions on planet Earth and that's the cow.
Pat Brown (01:44):
Well, at the time I, I had a job that I loved at Stanford. I thought it was the best job in the world. Basically, my job was to follow my curiosity wherever it led me, and I started educating myself about, with an interest in doing something about them, about the biggest environmental threats the world was facing because I felt like this is something I really needed to try to do something about. And relatively early on, I came to the realization that by far the most destructive technology that humans have ever invented is the use of animals as a food technology. And it is overwhelmingly responsible for an environmental issue that people are not that aware of, but it's probably a greater threat to humanity than even climate change. And that's the precipitous collapse of global biodiversity and natural ecosystems. Just one metric of that is that for vertebrae animal populations that have been tracked for now more than 50 years, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, the average population is less than a third, what it was 50 years ago.
(03:03)
So that is just a catastrophic collapse, and it's not just about those animals flying insect populations are also dropping probably just as precipitously and since those insects and animals are a critical part of the reproductive system of the plants that keep our biosphere alive, they're literally part of the reproductive system of those plants. The next thing that I think is going to next consequence is going to be collapsing of critical plant populations and so forth. So that's a big problem, and it's almost entirely due to our use to the huge land footprint of animal agriculture, which is more than 80% of the entire land footprint of humanity. And so I realized that, and I also did some calculations, which I've subsequently published in a scientific journal, but with a colleague of mine. But that showed that if we could phase out animal agriculture globally over the course of 15 years, so suspend disbelief, but if you could do that, that it would unlock negative emissions by carbon capture as biomass recovered on this huge area of land, and also by the decay of methane and nitrous oxide, these gases from which animal agriculture is a huge contributor, those negative emissions would relatively quickly offset all projected greenhouse gas emissions for a period of 30 years. So meaning that we could get relatively quickly to net zero emissions just by phasing out that industry.
Ann Berry (04:53):
So I saw
(04:55)
In your documentary 25 pounds of feed needed to produce just one pound of edible beef, hugely inefficient. To your point, something like 75% of agricultural land on earth committed simply to raising livestock, which really brings to life the issue, the scale of the issue that you just described. Let's talk about Impossible Foods. You founded the business in 2011 and in 2019 Impossible Foods. I really remember that moment. I remember watching the news and suddenly the news splash came across that the Impossible Burger was launching in Burger King. It really felt like that moment where everything that you just focused on as a scientist had just come to life in such a profound way in the food and the CPG industry. How did that moment feel when all the science and the problem that you just described in great detail suddenly looked like it was in reach of capturing the public imagination, the lay person's imagination because Burger King was suddenly embracing it?
Pat Brown (05:52):
Well, obviously that was an important moment for us and it was to some extent a vindication of the core idea of impossible foods. But for me at the time, I thought, well, this is just one important moment in the process, the critical thing, the job is very far from done, but what it showed was from a technology standpoint, okay, from a being able to do it standpoint that we had proven that it's possible to produce in that case beef, but we've done the same for chicken and pork that can actually match or exceed the performance of the animal product in deliciousness as judged by mainstream meat consumers and obviously beat it by in nutrition and so forth, the critical. So I just thought, okay, that's an important moment. It's a vindication, but look, we got a long road ahead because we have to continue to develop the technology until it's just no contest and then expand it globally. So that's still a work in progress.
Ann Berry (07:15):
There was also, it wasn't a road without a couple of bumps, and particularly I remember the moment when beyond meat went public and suddenly there was a lot of focus on what was going on. There was some press that came out, pat that actually started to question the healthiness of some of the meat replacement burger patties in particular, looking at the fact that it was highly processed, that when you compare the nutritional value of some of the burgers with lean beef, it looked as though there was more saturated fat in some of the impossible burgers than in that same amount of ground beef. What was that like for you? Did you agree with the assessment that the media was presenting to you? Did you think it was just a moment in time and the product has since evolved?
Pat Brown (07:58):
There has been a very well financed disinformation campaign being run by the slaughter cartel to plant-based meats and milk and other basically plant-based meats and milk, and a lot of it is basically focused on labeling the products as processed. Well, there have been now a couple of papers and more coming out from what I would say are the most highly regarded nutrition scientists in the world that have basically made the blunt statement that this notion that processed foods is inherently a bad category, is naive and bogus, that what's important is the nutritional content, not whether they were processed, because frankly, if you cook your own dinner, it's processed. I mean, it's of a ludicrous concept.
(08:58)
And in fact, also saying that there have been scientific publication that have said that the plant-based products are actually from nutritional standpoint, superior to the animal products they replace. So the Impossible Burger, for example, has lower calories, lower saturated fat than 90% of the ground beef sold in the us, lower total fat, same protein, same iron, same micronutrients, higher fiber, and based on what we know about nutrition science, it's just, there's no argument there. This is just disinformation from the slaughter cartel trying to marginalize plant-based products and confuse consumers. Just as the same strategy was done about secondhand smoke and fossil fuel emissions and so forth, confused consumers, raised doubts, but it's just a bump in the road. I mean, in the end, the truth wins out. So that's not at all unexpected. I mean, it's exactly what we would expect from them.
Ann Berry (10:11):
What do you make of the advancements that have taken place, pat in lab grown meat? On the flip side of the equation, you've been focusing on replacing meat, then we've seen cellular technology meat grown in a Petri dish. Fascinating. Actually, I thought of you because I read a biography of Churchill, Winston Churchill, and turns out he had this vision that chicken would be grown in labs as early as the 1930s. Do you think the consumer is going to adopt to lab grown meat? Do you think they're going to be grossed out by it? Do you think it solves any of the problem that you are trying to address?
Pat Brown (10:43):
I think it's irrelevant. Basically, it's irrelevant and it's a distraction. There is no lab grown meat. Okay. It's pure hype. Anyone who has looked scientifically at the economics of producing any kind of anything that's a replica of an animal tissue from cultured cells has concluded that it's not even close to being able to be economically competitive. On top of which we're very far from being able to grow from animal stem cells, any kind of reasonable replica of any kind of complex animal tissue, like muscle, for example. And if we were, and people have spent billions of dollars on that, and they should because it's got a lot of medical potential. But if we were able to grow a reasonable replica of any kind of complex animal tissue and culture, our first move would not be to eat it. Okay? It would be to use it therapeutically and not sell it for $5 a pound, but to sell it for a hundred thousand dollars a pound as a medical therapy. But that industry basically doesn't exist because there's hype about cultured meat is just nothing but hype. I mean, it's never going to be an industry, and so who cares what consumers would think of it because they're not going to get it. I wish that weren't true, but it's just true and I just can't lie about it.
Ann Berry (12:20):
Well, let's take a little bit of what you've said, pat, which is what is going to fly in the future when it comes to consumer food preferences and what's not? And you've just said lab grown meat isn't one, just given the economic likely to get there. Let's roll forward 10 or so years. Let's imagine together that we're in 2035. What does the food sector look like and what is the role of companies like impossible in food at that point in time?
Pat Brown (12:47):
Well, I think, as I said, I don't think there's any credible environmentalist that believes that we can avoid the disastrous consequences of global heating without drastic reduction in the scale of animal agriculture. So let's be hopeful and assume we're not in a complete disaster, and there has been a drastic reduction. Consumer demand for the foods we get from animals, particularly meats, is not likely to go away by talking people out of what foods they like. It's going to go away because there are better choices that are made without using animals. And we at impossible foods have proven that it's possible to produce meat that outperforms not only in nutrition and at scale affordability. We can talk about that, but in deliciousness and obviously an environmental impact. So I think that the progress of this technology is only going to go in one direction. There's a lot of work being done. I'm going to be continuing to work on the technology platform at Stanford to continue to improve it. And I think what you can say is this. There will be abundant meat, milk, fish, the foods we get from animals today that will be delicious and will give consumers exactly what they're looking for. They'll be more affordable and they'll be made from plants.
Ann Berry (14:32):
Let's talk about affordability
Pat Brown (14:34):
And scale of the animal. Agriculture industry will be vastly smaller and the world will be on a much better trajectory from a climate biodiversity perspective.
Ann Berry (14:45):
Let's talk about affordability, pat. Here in the US the challenge has been to make meat alternatives more affordable for people. If you look at other nations, animal protein continues to be a luxury good. It's an aspirational product. And as population growth continues overseas relative to stabilization, some would say decline in the us, which one of those dynamics do you think wins out in terms of demand for animal protein?
Pat Brown (15:09):
Well, first of all, I think that the demand is not for animal protein. It's for this category of foods, meat and dairy products and so forth that consumers love. And I think that demand will continue to exist, but it's not going to be satisfied by covering the world with more cows. Right now, the cows living on earth outweigh every remaining wild mammal, bird reptile amphibian by more than a factor of 15. Okay. It's just you cannot continue to scale that way. It's ridiculous. So I think that the demand will continue to grow, but the foods will be plant-based. The meat fish and dairy foods will be, they'll be more affordable. And again, you want to ask about that. I'm happy to answer it, and it'll be way better from a global nutrition and food security standpoint because of the incredible wastefulness. You touched on the fact that a huge amount of feed goes into a cow To produce a small amount of, it takes 30 grams of protein in a cow's diet to make one gram of beef protein.
(16:18)
When you talk about food waste, the vast majority of the food waste of the waste in the food system is the food we waste by feeding it to animals so that we could eat the animals. So anyway, I think that that's going to be the situation in 2035. There'll be plenty of meat, fish and dairy food. It'll be more affordable to consumers. It'll improve food security in the poorer countries where right now, anyone, pretty much everyone's on plant-based diet anyway, and hopefully to the extent that it still exists, the use of animals as a food technology will be vastly diminished.
Ann Berry (16:55):
Let's talk pat about your latest chapter, which seems to be focused on reversing some of the damage that's been done or proving that there's a different way in agriculture. Talk to us about carbon ranching.
Pat Brown (17:05):
The basic idea is that to realize the benefits of we have to phase out the use of animals in the food system. I think every environmentalist would agree to that, but to realize the benefits of it, we need to restore robust, healthy ecosystems that capture and store carbon on the land that's freed up from its current use, and we don't know how to do it. I started thinking about, okay, what do we need to do? Well, it's a couple of things. Number one, we need to think about the livelihoods of the farmers and ranchers who are currently dependent on that industry for their livelihood. They're not the bad guys, they're just trying to do a very difficult job and make an honest living and feed their families. And secondly, we need to think about, okay, what's actually involved in restoring a functioning ecosystem on land degraded by animal agriculture?
(18:03)
And it turns out, and I've talked to ecologist experts in this field, we don't know how to do it. That experiment has really never been done. I mean, there have been lots of anecdotal cases of people planting trees on farm agricultural land and so forth. But when it comes to having, knowing for any given piece of degraded land, how to make a self-sustaining native ecosystem recover on that land, there is no playbook. And so the Carbon Ranch Project is a project I started with a colleague of mine and with a grant from Impossible Foods, basically by buying initially a thousand acre ranch in southwest Arkansas and setting up an experiment where we look at a bunch of different ways to restore it, to capture carbon and recreate a healthy native ecosystem. And it's an experiment in progress, but the goal is to give a playbook to farmers and ranchers so that they can choose to manage their land in this way. And when there is a functioning carbon market, let's hope make a much better living being paid for the carbon they capture on their land.
Ann Berry (19:36):
And Pat, we are entering into a new phase of policy here in the us. We've got a new administration coming in January. We've got a department of government efficiency potentially being set up, being led by the senator from Iowa, the great farming state of the United States. As you think about where you are right now, you've got this really unique position where you can observe the art of the possible in the science that you are working with. You are also able to see the policy framework that will either support it or not over the next four years, given the new administration, given the new setup that we are seeing coming in around it, do you think that US public policies are going to support farmers in that transition to sustainable cattle farming in the near term? Does it matter?
Pat Brown (20:21):
Well, I think yes, of course. If we have policies that are not at least permissive and hopefully supportive of that transition, the job is going to be a lot harder. I think an interesting thing about it though is that actually this kind of transition is a huge opportunity for states, Iowa, that are currently dominated by animal agriculture, and it's a huge opportunity because they have the earning potential of that land. Right now, the earning potential of that land is realized by growing feed crops for pigs and chickens and basically supporting the meat industry. It's not extremely lucrative. I mean, don't see a lot of those farmers are struggling. That same land has huge potential to capture vast amounts of carbon because for the very reason that it's good for farming, it's highly productive, it has reasonably reliable rainfall, pretty long growing season, et cetera, et cetera. And much of it used to be forested.
(21:39)
So it's just a question of, in other words, the people who are making a living from the land could actually, most of 'em make a better living from the land. In fact, the people in the beef cattle industry are doing terrible in the US right now, and at any reasonable carbon price, if they were being paid for capturing carbon on their land, they'd be much better off financially. So ironically, I think that once this fact kind of sinks in, those rural states are going to be the strongest advocates for robust climate policy and attaching a dollar value to carbon because basically they're sitting on a gold mine for carbon capture.
Ann Berry (22:22):
Pat Brown, we're going to stay tuned to see the data coming out of this latest project of yours. You really are at the forefront with this idea of carbon ranching. So as that information comes through, love to have you back to catch yours up on it. I am Anne Barry. Thanks for tuning into After Addings the show that brings you up close and personal with the executives behind the world's most interesting publicly traded companies. If you learn something today, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share with your friends, and I'll see you next time.
