Patrick Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, said just yesterday that the meat industry is in the midst of a reckoning. More and more consumers are looking for healthier food options, and news about farming methods intensive are increasingly terrifying.
The meat industry, paradoxically, tends to standardize men and animals with a curious law of retaliation.
Men and animals
On one side cattle in conditions of disgusting captivity and full of drugs, with such a density as to authorize everyone to think that part of the latest transmissions of zoonotic diseases arise from this sick relationship with humans.
On the otheras we learn from the latest news on the spread of Covid-19, workers in the sector begin to be treated in almost the same way. Working conditions in many slaughterhouses literally made safety measures impossible. Not only Germany, with its recent infections: also in the USA, Canada and Holland there have been outbreaks from slaughterhouses. One striking involved 180 plants in a production chain.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Brown is convinced that the animal market will be obsolete within the next two decades.
To a switch
“Nutritionally, our products match the quality and protein content of the animal products they replace,” says Brown. “That's why I think people will become more and more aware and plant-based food products will completely replace animal-based ones within the next 15 years. This is our mission! This transformation is inevitable".
Decisive agreements
Impossible Foods has announced a partnership with Starbucks to supply all the locations of the international chain with its products. And this is a key deal in the evolution of an “alternative meat” company like Impossible Foods.
A third of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 visit a Starbucks restaurant at least once a month.
The strength and ubiquity of the brand make Starbucks the perfect system for 'putting' these products into circulation.
Two standard bearers of the new food
The market that opens up to the sale of these plant-based products is really wide: it's not a question of taking a few heads of cattle and making sausages out of them, which is all in all a replicable thing. Alternative meat is a high-tech product, and is not the prerogative of everyone, especially small commercial businesses. This is why there is already room for two players who will become huge in just a few years.
One is really Impossible Foods: produces meat, dairy products and fish products with patented plant-based ingredients, mainly marketed in the food service sector, food services.
The other is Beyond Meat, if possible (sorry for the quarrel of words) even more recognizable than Impossible, which focused on the consumer sector, with an important sortie also in the world of fast food: remember the record sale of his nuggets in the KFC chain?
