Governments should introduce meat taxes to encourage people to reduce their impact on climate change, according to Patrick Brown, chief executive of meat-free burger firm Impossible Foods.
The former biochemist at Stanford University started his California-based company in 2011 and five years later launched plant-based burgers designed to taste, smell and bleed like meat. found that its burgers emit 87 per cent less greenhouse emissions than ones made from cows.
Brown’s goals are anything but modest: he wants to end global beef production by 2035. He isn’t alone in wanting to curb . The UK’s climate change advisers recently said individuals will have to eat a fifth less meat by 2050, and one study last year suggested a meat tax could save lives and billions in health costs.
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“To me it makes a tremendous amount of sense,” Brown says of a meat tax, during an interview at the ASM Microbe conference in San Francisco. “Using taxes… has worked for a lot of things. It was a significant factor in cutting tobacco consumption in the US. If they can get away with it politically, that will be a useful thing.”
But he is sceptical that government intervention will be enough. He points to China, which, in 2016, , but insteadĚý. “That experiment has been done,” says Brown.Ěý
Key to winning people over will be a meat-like product, he says. The firm is making good progress on flavour, texture and juiciness, says Brown, who claims his burgers will soon consistently beat the cow version in taste tests. A real tipping point will be becoming cheaper than beef burgers, which he says could be two years off. Next on the product list is steak: prototypes have been made, but need more work.
Meaty molecules
The key to the meatiness of the company’s burgers is the heme molecule, part of the protein that gives blood its red colour. The heme is extracted from US-grown soy. While soy production in some countries is , Brown argues that much soy production now is for animal feed, so it would be more efficient to just use the soy. He hints that the firm may use other plants to get heme in future too. “We very well may be using other ingredients,” he says.
Brown’s company isn’t the only player in the meat-free field, but he says he wants to take customers from the incumbent beef industry, not from rival firms such as Beyond Meat, .
He is critical of lab-grown meat, saying it is “garbage” and will “never be remotely economically feasible” because the cells grow so slowly and texture will be a challenge.
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Impossible Foods’ rapid growth, with revenue up 50 per cent since January, and deals to supply Burger King, has recently led to shortages. When żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ tried to buy the burger at San Francisco International Airport, staff said there had been shortages for months.
“It’s called the Impossible Burger because it’s impossible to buy,” they said. Impossible Foods, which has just one production facility, in Oakland, has apologised to customers. A spokesperson says it faces “short-term manufacturing challenges”, not “insurmountable supply-chain constraints or fundamental bottlenecks”.
Given the growth, it would be surprising if multinational food firms aren’t eyeing the company for an acquisition. Can Brown rule out selling? “Yes,” he says. “Nobody, nobody on Earth cares as much about making this work as I do.”
