Web Summit 2021: Impossible Foods CEO on the company's global expansion

Yahoo Finance's Editor-in-Cheif chats with Pat Brown, Impossible Foods CEO about the science behind the company's plant-based products and plans to expand the business at 2021 Web Summit in Lisbon.

Video Transcript

PAT BROWN: In order for us to achieve our mission, again, obviously, it involves selling our products in every country where meat is consumed and just competing in that marketplace. So that's been part of-- of course, it's been our strategy from year one. And yeah, we're steadily getting into new markets.

Everywhere we've launched, we've been successful. The barrier to entering the UK and the EU is that we have a new ingredient that actually is the magic ingredient in our products. We discovered basically what the secret that makes meat flavor completely unlike anything from the plant world. It's a molecule called heme or proteins containing heme.

It's what makes meat. Heme is what carries oxygen in your blood, makes your blood red and so forth, your lips pink. And it's found in every living cell on Earth, plant or animal. And just an amazing molecule. It's responsible for what makes meat red, as I said. But more importantly, it is the chemical catalyst in animal muscle tissue that converts the simple ubiquitous molecules in cells amino acids, sugars, fats, vitamins, stuff like that, through chemistry and cooking, into this explosion of flavor and aroma that only happens when you cook meat.

If you cook broccoli, it gets warmer and mushier. If you cook meat, you trigger this chemical explosion basically. It's all catalyzed by heme.

So we had to figure out a way to produce heme at scale as an ingredient. We do that by fermentation. And although it's found in every-- actually, it's found in spinach as well as meat. You're consuming heme proteins all the time. No one has ever used it as an ingredient to make food.

And when you do that, you need food safety authorities to review that. So they've done that in the US, the FDA, and Canada, FDA, Hong Kong, Singapore, UAE. Now Australia and New Zealand have approved it. And as soon as we get that clearance, which we will everywhere in the world because it's abundantly clear this is totally safe, we launch.

So we got the clearance five months ago in Australia and New Zealand. And yesterday, we launched commercially there. And I'm sure it's going to be a huge success. Those are huge meat-eating countries. So exactly the place where we want to be.

ANDY SERWER: So I can infer, perhaps, that Europe is down the--

PAT BROWN: Oh, yes.

ANDY SERWER: OK.

PAT BROWN: Yeah. We've already started the application process for the EU. We expect to be done within maybe a year or a year and a half.