“The foundational interest is to be a good company that makes money and that’s around for another 50 years.” That’s a legacy that Tetrick seems more than willing to embrace. “The foundational interest isn’t to pack animals into small cages,” he insists. These are family businesses, Tetrick says, passed down from generation to generation. “He said his dad started just by collecting eggs, collecting eggs around town and selling them to people,” Tetrick recalls. At a dinner in Bologna, Italy, he asked an executive how his company got started. It was the longevity of these companies that really made an impression, however. Tetrick stopped looking at egg distributors like Euronovo as an entity “pumping out a lot of animal proteins” and instead started to see the potential for “infrastructure.” With these partnerships in place, Tetrick believes JUST can expand in about half the time it would take them on their own. Could the JUST team find or build all of that on their own? Sure, but it would take them a lot longer to get there. They have tens of thousands of trucks,” explains Tetrick. “They have access to hundreds of millions of points of distribution. It took lots of discussions over dinner and wine, Tetrick says, but he eventually saw an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up. From then on, the two started talking regularly, and Ernst eventually nudged Tetrick towards a partnership with the very people Tetrick once railed against. It was a surprise then when former egg industry executive Morten Ernst reached out to Tetrick and asked to visit the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.Īfter the visit, Ernst and Tetrick got to talking, which is when Ernst said he could see the industry was changing, and he wanted to be a part of that change. Eat JUST, Inc.įinding that flexibility was a little more complicated for Tetrick, once the target of a secret campaign waged by egg industry executives and the American egg board.
To get Impossible in the hands of meat eaters, restaurants and grocery stores simply can’t risk relegating the plant-based patties to the “vegan ghetto.” So the company has to be flexible, explains Konrad.īags of mung bean flour at Eat Just, Inc.'s new Appleton, Minnesota plant-based protein. “We love vegans and vegetarians,” she is also quick to say, “but the reality is we don’t market to them.” Vegans and vegetarians are already “doing the right thing” by omitting meat from their diets. When a company like Burger King wants to serve plant-based Impossible meat with mayonnaise or cheese, “we’re not precious about that,” Konrad says. For anyone who wonders why consumers aren’t inspired to trust the GMO industry, consider this bizarre rant from Impossible Foods Chief Communications Officer Rachel Konrad in defense of the Impossible Burger, a veggie burger made more meat-like via genetically engineered yeast. Ridding the food system of meat may be a radical idea but the company’s strategy has always been more pragmatic than ideologically pure, says Konrad. Impossible also announced a partnership with OSI Group, a huge food manufacturer based in Aurora, a suburb just outside of Chicago, Illinois. According to Konrad, the company worked from May to December of 2019 to quadruple its production capacity. “Last summer was the great Impossible burger shortage of 2019,” says Konrad, with demand for Impossible beef growing so intense that the company fell behind on its orders. Shares of Beyond, which has a market value of $7.93 billion, have risen 67% in the last year.On the other hand, the rate of growth for the industry has been impressive-18% for plant-based meat in 2019 and 11% for the plant-based category overall, according to a recent study commissioned by The Good Food Institute, an organization that advocates for the plant-based industry. This summer, it sold frozen value packs of its meatless burger patties. Rival Beyond Meat has also been working toward cutting its prices as more competition enters the market. The company asked that distributors pass along the savings to restaurant operators, who have largely been struggling to stay afloat during the coronavirus pandemic.
Since 2019, production has increased by six times at plants owned by Impossible and those of its manufacturing partners. The privately held company said it's hitting monthly production records, helping it achieve greater economies of scale. With the latest round of price cuts, the lowest possible wholesale price for the Impossible Burger is $6.80 per pound, company spokesperson Rachel Konrad said. Department of Agriculture's national retail report. 1, the average price of beef patties was $5.32 per pound, according to the U.S. Makers of meat substitutes like Impossible are striving to undercut the price of animal products as part of their broader strategy to persuade consumers to choose their products instead.