🍏 "Waging a $1.4 Trillion Food Fight"

Masters of Scale

Host: Bob Safian
Guest: Peter McGuinness | CEO | Impossible Foods
Category: 🍏 Sustainable Food | Plant-Based Meat

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[0:04] “I want to be the number one plant-based meat, but that's small ball. We want to actually take some of that $1.4 trillion opportunity away from the animal products. If you take a position on something that's important, and you piss a few people off along the way, they probably weren't the people that were going to buy your product anyway. […] So you got to have a point of view, you got to have a soul, gotta have a heart and you got to have some judgment too.”

[4:56] “It's really interesting that [the] plant-based [market] […] is so under penetrated. You're talking under 10% household penetration in the US, under 15% unaided awareness, $1.4 trillion addressable market. Impossible makes food that mirrors and mimics the animal product to the point where it's as good if not preferred. And then of course, it's better for you, because it's zero cholesterol, and zero trans fat. And it does amazing things for the planet in terms of water, and greenhouse gasses, and less land use.”

[6:13] “43% of the Earth's usable landmass is related in some way to animal agriculture. […] 2.5 billion burgers are eaten in the UK. And if you just reduce that by 1 million burgers a year, it's 25 million less gallons of water, and you're gonna save 382,000 trees. So the linkage between the food choices we make, and the planet are powerful.”

[6:53] “When we think about climate change, most people think, recycle, or use less water, or turn the lights off, or drive an electric car. Those are all really good things. The biggest, most impactful thing to reverse climate change, and help protect the planet is food. And that's something I didn't understand. And I'm not really sure where it's going. And I'm not sure how fast it's going to happen. But one thing for sure that's undeniable is the world is moving in this direction and I want to be part of that.”

[11:27] “There's a competition problem, not a category problem. […] I look at the category and the category is flat. I don't like a flat category. But it's self-inflicted wounds. There's a lot of new folks that can't scale. There's a lot of old legacy brands that are not great products. And then there's companies like Impossible that are technology based, that are making products that are as good if not better than animal products. Our chicken nugget is preferred to the animal chicken nugget 70 to 30. Our beef is like 50-50, which I still think is amazing considering how much people love their burgers.”

[12:22] “The category has done an awful job of articulating the benefits. And we at Impossible, also have not done a great job of what that value proposition is. So I don't want to compromise my taste. I don't want to compromise my texture, the smell of the product, how satisfying the product is. And then I want to know, is it better for me, because I care about my health. […] And then it's better for the planet. And that becomes a quite a interesting value proposition. Now, none of this has been articulated. None of this has been done in a compelling way.”

[12:58] “The animal industry has done a great job of like a coalition of the willing lobbying the government and spending half a billion dollars a year in advertising. Our category is full of a bunch of small players and some legacy players, we haven't gotten the narrative down. And Impossible’s very young too. We've only been in retail grocery store shelves for a year and a half. So we got to do a better job of communicating the benefits of plant-based meat to consumers in a mass way. And it can't live on the coasts. It can't live in academia. It can't live among wealthy, educated people only. This has to become mass. You're starting to see HEB in Texas and Publix and Florida and Meijer and Michigan and Target and Walmart and Kroeger […]. So it's starting to get mass distribution, but it does not yet have mass awareness, understanding and adoption.”

[15:09] “We've almost done no paid advertising up until now. And I think it is time to introduce the world to Impossible Foods. Also sampling. Our food tastes great. In many ways, this is kind of just fundamental stuff. Go get some more distribution, go tell the world from a communication perspective about Impossible, because we have 14% unaided awareness. Then go get more people to try it because the perception is lagging the reality. 9 out of 10 people have an aha moment [of] like, that is way better than I thought it would be.”

Rating: 🍏🍏🍏🍏

🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 32 min | 🗓️ 07/14/2022
✅ Time saved: 30 min