Impossible Foods

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Bill Gates owns, like, that Impossible Burger and all that stuff.

Oh, yep.

Yeah.

Indeed.

It hit a real high with the Impossible Burger and lots of things like that just a couple of years ago.

What do you think happened after that?

I don't know.

Uh, uh, let me shift the subject though-

Wait, be- before you go from that, though, uh, sorry, I wanna also say it was really good news this week for the people who make Impossible Burgers, those, uh, burgers that are meatless.

Why? Because we learned that Donald Trump met in the Oval Office with a Brazilian billionaire who has given him money, who's close to his family, who unloaded, uh, 30,000 pounds, tons of, uh, of beef, which it turned out had been rejected by the European Union because it didn't meet any of their standards for food safety.

And it turns out apparently that a lot of this, uh, beef had been frozen for years, was being mixed with others.

And again, I am not against plant-based protein.

I think that there are some high-quality options, but so much of these plant-based protein sources, such as the Impossible Burgers, which are just a total abomination to food, or other things are being promoted as vegan and whatnot, there are so many just sketchy ingredients and so many of the ultra-processed oils and all of those things.

So, um, could you...

C- are, are you able to speak to that, like some of these, you know, um... 'Cause again, I also have worked with clients that are plant-based because of a religious preference, so of course, you know, we're always respectful of things like that.

And then the questioning around the environmental impact.

So even for some people, they're going, oh, maybe these products like the Impossible Burger, for example, use a lot of water.

So there's all these really like interesting tensions, which we like to unpick when we talk to consumers in communities you know, one-on-one interviews or use through like qualitative apps, getting them to like take photos of the grocery shop or their, you know, packaging waste.

So there's some really cool things that we can do to interact with people to try and understand why and how they are or like are not changing their behavior.

It adds up to impact and it also can start to change the zeitgeist, I think, in really useful ways.

And it points toward people starting companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods and Upside Foods.

All of these were started by people who were moved by the argument to shift in the direction of a vegetarian or a vegan or less meat diet.

So I think I think overall it ends up being not just a powerful statement and not just living your values, but also having an impact.

To read those results and other essays by the team, visit replications.clearerthinking.org.

It seems like plant-based meat underwent a really interesting trajectory where there were suddenly, at least from my point of view, maybe this was sort of hidden from people like myself who weren't paying too much attention.

There seemed to be suddenly tons of innovation where you go from having these kind of old school companies producing sort of, you know, okay kind of imitations to suddenly having impossible foods and beyond meat with much better imitation meat products.

They're much closer to the real thing.