Replay: Plant-based foods need a makeover, with Peter McGuinness
In this special holiday replay, we share another standout conversation from 2024 featuring Impossible Foods’ Peter McGuinness. This year, sustainability initiatives rolled back across industries and meat alternatives struggled more than ever before on sales. McGuinness tells host Bob Safian where plant-based brands made big missteps, and why the industry’s marketing should evolve – potentially away from climate change messaging. McGuinness also shares how Impossible leverages retail partners like Starbucks and Burger King, lessons he learned from scaling oat milk for Chobani, and why Impossible see’s other plant-based players less as competitors and more as collaborative “frenemies.”
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Rapid Response: Waging a $1.4 trillion food fight, w/Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness
What’s the difference between an activist brand and an active brand? Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness says that acting on your values defines a business — from climate change to Roe v. Wade. To unleash the next wave of growth for plant-based meat purveyor Impossible, McGuiness is rethinking how the whole category presents itself, taking aim at what he calls “safe and lame” approaches, partnering with the likes of Billie Eilish, and targeting the $1.4 trillion global meat industry.
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VP Sales Impossible Foods, Dana Worth: From Gourmet to Fast-Food: How He Built Impossible Foods’ Go-To-Market
Impossible Foods has a mission to eliminate the use of animals in the food system by 2035. With the growing success of the company’s plant-based meat products, such as the Impossible Burger, this vision is becoming reality.
Feeling as though the company was “aligned with my own personal mission,” Dana Worth, former VP of Sales at Impossible Foods, joined the company in 2015 before it brought any of its plant-based meat products to market. Now, Dana has moved on from Impossible Foods, taking a position as SVP, Commercial at Plenty.
On this episode of Go to Market Grit, Joubin and Dana talk about how Impossible Foods’ go-to-market strategy changed as the company grew, as well as the company’s history.
In this episode, we cover:
'What makes meat, meat?': Why Impossible Foods is working towards eliminating the use of animals in the food system by 2035. (3:28)
The factors behind Dana's decision to join Impossible Foods in 2015. (9:22)
Partnerships with high-credibility and meat-forward chefs: Impossible Foods' early go-to-market strategy. (13:11)
‘True believers’: The benefits of having a unifying mission as a company. (23:13)
How Impossible Foods analyzed its organizational structure as its products became more commercially successful. (28:32)
The supply and demand challenges Impossible Foods faced when the Impossible Burger 2.0 became a massive success in 2019. (31:28)
Impossible Foods’ current strategy for selling its product direct-to-consumer — and why its main competition isn’t other plant-based meat companies. (39:18)
How Dana defines grit. (45:33)
Links:
Connect with Dana WorthLinkedIn
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: gtmg@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
Impossible Foods: Pat Brown
When he was nearly 60, Pat Brown left a dream job to pursue an ambitious mission: to create delicious meat from plants. As a biochemist, he'd become alarmed at the destructive impact of meat production on the environment, so he set out to make a burger so juicy and flavorful that even meat-lovers would crave it. After some painstaking research, Pat's team created the Impossible Burger, and famous chefs started to feature it in their restaurants. In 2019, the Impossible Whopper launched at Burger King, and today Pat's company, Impossible Foods, is valued at nearly $4 billion.
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Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown on a new kind of meat
Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown about Impossible's mission to replace animal-derived meat worldwide and what that would mean for our climate and culture.
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a16z Podcast: Reinventing Food
It's surprising that how (and what) we eat has actually changed very little over the ages, despite how much we’ve advanced as a species. Now, however -- driven by globalization, environmental factors, and other considerations -- the way we move, taste, and make our food is moving forward too.
From countering the limits of seasonality and global transport to re-thinking our species’ dependence on meat to optimizing nutrition to distilling the essence of taste, this discussion with Bryan Crowley, President of Soylent;
Ooshma Garg, founder and CEO of Gobble;
David Lee, COO and CFO of Impossible Foods
; and James Rogers, cofounder and CEO of Apeel Sciences -- and moderated by a16z Partner Kim Milosevich -- is all about the future of food... including how we define what “food”really is.
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