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Impossible Foods, the six-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company known for its "juicy" meatless burgers, quietly announced $75 million in funding late last week, led by Temasek, with participation from Open Philanthropy, as well as earlier investors Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures and Horizon Ventures.
The company says it isn't providing further financial details but the round brings Impossible's funding to nearly $300 million, including earlier rounds that have included GV, Viking Global Investors and UBS.
Impossible's burgers are made with soy leghemoglobin, a protein that carries heme, an iron-containing molecule that occurs naturally in every animal and plant.
The company has said it wants to replace a number of animal products with goods engineered from plants, but for now, it seems squarely focused on getting more of its burgers into the world. Part of that strategy involved opening a factory in Oakland, Ca., in May, where it expects to be producing 1 million pounds of ground "plant meat" each month.
Thought the race was on to have us eat insects.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday August 04 2017, @11:16PM (1 child)
You can achieve efficiencies in either direction. Locating the plant near the inputs saves shipping costs for production. Locating the plant near the customers saves shipping costs on the finished goods plus allows faster delivery cycles to make just in time inventory systems work better. Add in the fact that it is much easier to get venture funding if your investors don't have to deal with "flyover country" and it does make economic sense to put that first trial plant in CA, taxes, unions and other expenses included. But do the math, that plant only expects to toss out something on the order of one 1/4lb patty per second. That ain't full scale production of the sort that will ever repay the money already sunk into this project. If they end up with a product that actually sells (none of the previous attempts have) they would more than likely locate a full scale plant somewhere with much cheaper expenses all around, i.e. a red state in flyover country.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 05 2017, @03:28AM
You can, but when it comes to food, you really want to be as close to the source as possible. That way you can get things processed and frozen as quickly as possible. The moment that fruits and vegetables are picked they typically start the process of degrading. But, if you pick and do whatever processing you want to do near the source, you can greatly reduce that degradation. It's one of the reasons why canned fruits and vegetables can be better than the ones available in the produce aisle.