Impossible Foods’ $300 Million Haul Ahead Of IPO Good News To Former Meatpacking Laborer

Embracing the products that companies like Impossible Foods are making in the IPO world doesn’t mean we’re barreling toward an apocalyptic meatless society.

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Impossible Foods Inc. has been getting a lot of attention lately. The company’s flagship product is a meatless, plant-based hamburger patty that is supposed to be indistinguishable from the real thing. Recently, the Silicon Valley-based startup rolled out the Impossible Whopper in St. Louis area Burger Kings to apparent success. The burger chain now plans to make the Impossible Whopper available nationwide. I tried an Impossible Burger myself the other day at a local restaurant. Quite good, in my opinion. I’d recommend it.

I’m not the only one giving the thumbs up to the Impossible Burger. On May 13, Impossible Foods announced that its latest round of fundraising yielded a healthy $300 million from private investors. That brings their total fundraising haul to $750 million ahead of a “possible” initial public offering from Impossible Foods. The company has flirted with the idea of an IPO, but CFO David Lee told Reuters reporters that there is no particular rush and that the organization intends “to be operating at the highest level of rigor” before announcing any IPO filing.

Impossible Foods competitor Beyond Meat went public in early May with the best IPO yet of 2019. Beyond Meat had an implied market value of $1.46 billion for its IPO, but its market capitalization quickly surged beyond $4 billion. According to a 2018 study by Grand View Research, the global market for meat substitutes will reach $5.81 billion by 2022. This market was worth only $3.71 billion in 2016.

So far, Impossible Foods and the plant-based burger industry in general have focused more on the many human health and environmental benefits of eating crops as opposed to livestock. I’m sure the not-having-to-slaughter-creatures-with-nervous-systems aspect of the product is floating around in the back of the minds of executives at all of these companies, but it’s a pretty savvy marketing strategy to put that on the back burner for now.

After I tried out an Impossible Burger for myself, some people I discussed it with scoffed. They insisted that it couldn’t possibly be as good as beef and said they’d never abandon the real McCoy. But my follow-up question, which none of them had a good answer for, was, “Why not, if you can’t taste any difference?”

Excessive displays of affection for meat have become a cultural tribal signal. It’s not just about the taste of the burger. But stick with me here: I’m not coming for your bacon. I hunt. When I ride my motorcycle, I’m encased in more leather than a Queen tribute band. Before I went to law school, I even served a stint at the meatpacking plant in my hometown.

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Working in the meatpacking industry was a good experience. I liked the guys — and it was pretty much all guys — who I worked with. My job was actually on the maintenance crew, so I got to see every part of the plant, from the brutal cold of the blast freezer to the sweltering heat of the compressor room. My favorite place was up on the roof, where you could watch truck after truck come in to offload a cargo of live steers. But every once in a while up there, you’d hear a shot ring out from the barn. That made me paradoxically sad. That meant an animal was not healthy enough to walk to its own death, and therefore had to be put down outside. It only got a few minutes less time than the others, was humanely killed, and was treated with dignity right up to the end. Still, seeing the heads of those great beasts hanging limply from the bucket of a skid loader on the way to the rendering plant was not particularly uplifting.

Working in a meatpacking plant didn’t put me off of meat. It damn sure did make me appreciate what goes into every delicious bite of an all-beef burger though. Somebody killed, and something died, for those burgers. I don’t want people to swear off meat, but I wish they’d have a little more respect for where it comes from. Keep an open mind about better ways of slaking our societal meat-lust.

Now that I’ve depressed myself and probably you too, go cheer yourself up by trying out one of these new meatless burgers. They really are good. And don’t worry, embracing the products and the splash that companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are making in the IPO world doesn’t mean we’re all barreling toward an apocalyptic meatless society. But maybe it does mean we’ll all do just a little bit better, one small step at a time, when it comes to what we eat.


Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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