Q&A: Impossible Foods' Nick Halla
Nick Halla became the first employee at Impossible Foods in 2011. Now leading the rollout of the PE-backed company’s plant-based meat substitute products, he explains the strategy for Asia
Q: Impossible Foods launched in Hong Kong relatively recently [in April]. How long has Asia been part of the plan?
A: We launched our first product in New York in July 2016 and then opened our first real production facility in Oakland in September 2017. That took us from an output of thousands of pounds of products a month to four million pounds. With that, we have expanded in the US from about 40 restaurants to 3,500. We wanted to start building internationally very quickly and Asia has been a big focus for a while from a strategy perspective. About 34% of meat consumed worldwide is consumed in Asia and the total is growing quickly. There are also food safety and security issues that must be addressed. Horizons Ventures [an investment firm controlled by Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing] led our Series B and then Temasek and Sailing Capital led our $114 million Series E earlier this year. We targeted Asia-based investors because we knew we wanted to enter Asian markets.
Q: How do you go about marketing a meat replacement product?
A: The best way to sell a new product is to have an amazing product. We spent our first two years on research, not even product development. We were looking at new ways to understand what makes meat, fish and dairy foods what they are and building a platform to create the best foods the world has ever experienced. We knew we wouldn’t be able to sell this just on the story – the product had to perform. David Chang [owner of Momofuku Nishi in New York, where the Impossible Burger was launched] had said he would never put a vegetarian product on his menu because they couldn’t meet the standards his customers demanded. When he tried Impossible, he was so blown away, he said he had to serve it.
Q: You are taking a similar approach in Asia?
A: We wanted the centers of cultural influence and Hong Kong is a prime example of that. You have Western and Eastern cuisines and cultures coming together, great chefs and restaurants. When we launched in Hong Kong, we worked with two of the top chefs – May Chow of Little Bao and Happy Paradise and Uwe Opocensky of Beef & Liberty – and most of the top hotels as well.
Q: What plans are there for the mass market?
A: Working with brand name restaurants and chefs is about building awareness and communicating that this is a premium product. It’s not where you build volume. You go from there to more mainstream places – and we are now in Cali-Mex, which has 16 units in Hong Kong, and we will go more mass market over the coming months. Our goal is to produce everything we have today for meat, fish and dairy foods and sell them in every place people want them. In the US, we have gone from working with David Chang to working with White Castle, the first fast food burger restaurant in the US, which now serves the $1.99 Impossible Slider.
Q: How do production costs compare to those for traditional meat products?
A: We are early in our scale, but we are selling in markets where our partners and customers can make money and we can make money.
Q: What has been the main challenge in developing the Impossible Burger?
A: The flavor structure is complex with meats. If you look at that flavor of ground beef as it is cooked, you aren’t smelling ground beef – you are smelling hundreds of thousands of different compounds. When we dug deeper, we learned there is one protein in meat that drives almost all the flavor chemistry when you cook: heme. It is found in hemoglobin, but we used leghemoglobin from soy plants. That was one of the big discoveries.
Q: How far advanced are other products?
A: The Impossible Burger is a good fit for the US market because most ground meat is consumed in burger form. In Hong Kong, there is such a mixture of cuisines. It’s really the same raw ground meat product we supply and chefs and can make all kinds of dishes from that. We have prototypes for many meat, fish and dairy foods, but the core focus is on scaling ground meat first.
Q: How do you use the knowledge accumulated in the development of one product on others?
A: Moving from ground beef to steak, there are larger structures and different consumer applications. You have flaky layers, different textures and colors, transformation in appearance as you cook. You must look at the key properties that dictate why consumers like a product and then find ways to do that. When we first started prototyping in 2013 the results were mediocre at best, but within a year people couldn’t tell the difference between Impossible meat and meat from a cow in blind taste tests. Animal products haven’t changed much in terms of efficiency or taste and quality for a very long time. This is new, but we are catching up. We expect to pass animal soon in terms of what we can do, and then we hope more people will convert to a much more sustainable system.
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