If you’ve ever bitten into the Impossible Burger, you’ve probably wondered how meaty This is it. How can a burger made from plants, with zero animal products, taste close to a real beef patty? Well, according to Impossible Foods, the answer lies in one key ingredient: heme. It sounds unfamiliar, and is unlikely to see it listed on the back of any other product you might find in the supermarket. But it’s actually quite common. In fact, ice is present in every living thing on the planet. But while it may be the signature of Impossible Foods—and the reason big chains like Burger King are realistically taking on meat products—it’s also been a source of controversy for the California-based food-tech company. Here’s what you need to know.
What is frost?
All living cells, plants and animals, contain heme, a group of molecules that contain iron. It is a key part of a protein called hemoglobin and helps in many important processes, including oxygen transport. Because of its color, frost is also the cause of red blood in animals and humans.
Does ice make meat taste like meat?
The main goal of Impossible Foods is to remove animals from the food system and replace them with plants. Animal agriculture is unsustainable: it is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and it drains the Earth of vital resources such as water and land. But it is also immoral. Every year, billions of animals are raised on factory farms for the food industry.
So the brand came up with a solution: plant-based meat that not only tastes close to the real thing, but is nearly identical to the real thing. But to accomplish this goal and make plants taste like meat, Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown had to figure out what actually makes meat taste like meat. And since animals have high levels of hemoglobin in their muscles, they land on snow.
“Haem catalyzes a very specific type of chemical reaction that converts abundant, simple nutrients into this explosion of hundreds of different volatile flavor molecules,” Brown says. American Society for Microbiology In 2019. “When you experience them, they add unequivocally to the flavor and taste of the meat together.”
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Can hem be vegan?
But as we mentioned earlier, frost isn’t just in animals. It is found in all living things, including plants. Impossible Foods pioneered food technology by extracting heme from the lehemoglobin found in soybean root nodules. But with time, its process became more efficient and sophisticated. Now, Impossible Foods takes DNA from soybeans and inserts it into a genetically-engineered yeast, which is then fermented to produce yeast.
This means that Impossible Foods is vegan, but it also means that, like many other plant-based brands on the market, its products are not GMO-free.
Impossible Foods and the Heme Controversy
Because of the GMO situation, many have taken a stand against Impossible Foods’ products. The Non-GMO Project, a certification body that certifies that food systems must be non-GMO, has criticized the brand in the past, along with environmental groups Friends of the Earth and the Center for Food Safety. In 2021, the latter took things a step further when it filed a lawsuit challenging the FDA’s approval in the first place.
According to the Center, Impossible Foods’ Hime had not undergone enough long-term testing before giving it the green flag. “[The] “The FDA approved soy lehemoglobin even though none of the long-term animal studies necessary to determine whether it harms human health have been conducted,” Ryan Talbot, one of its attorneys, said in a statement at the time.
Despite the company’s and Brown’s ethical stance against animal testing, Impossible Foods was forced to conduct a test on mice to gain approval from the FDA (Brown said that without the test, “the mission and the future of the billions of animals whose future depends on it has failed”). Ultimately, the court concluded that these tests and the FDA’s approval process were sufficient, and the Center for Food Safety’s appeal was unsuccessful.
“We applaud the FDA’s assessment of the overwhelming evidence supporting the safety of our products and the court’s decision to deny the Center for Food Safety’s meritless appeal,” said Rachel Conrad, chief communications officer for Impossible Foods. statement
However, the company still faces several legal hurdles. At the moment, Impossible Foods cannot legally sell products with heme in Europe or the UK, as it has not yet received regulatory approval (it has launched in the UK, but only with products that do not feature heme). The approval process is underway, but no decision has yet been given from the UK Food Standards Agency and the European Food Safety Authority.
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What other plant-based brands use hemp?
Impossible Foods is currently the only plant-based brand on the market that uses heme. But that may change. In 2020, Chicago-based startup Back of the Yards Algae Sciences (BYAS) figured out how to extract heme from spirulina, a type of blue-green algae.
According to food-tech experts, the discovery happened by accident when researchers were studying how to make purple color using spirulina. But it could have big consequences for the plant-based industry, as the startup wants to sell spirulina heme, which is non-GMO, to existing alternative protein brands.
Hime has already been tested, with promising results. In 2021, a review was published spoon By food writer Josh Schonwald compared two plant-based burgers before and after spraying BYAS’s Spirulina Hemp.
“The ham-sprayed burgers were a clear upgrade,” he wrote. “In fact, I was so impressed with the flavor of the frosting that I tested the burger on the biggest mock-meat skeptic I know: my 11-year-old son.”
“As expected, Max shows a frown and fog after trying Beyond Standard [Meat burger],” she continued. “But after being persuaded to take a bite of the frost-sprayed version, Max had a surprising reaction. No frowns. In fact, he said, ‘It’s pretty good.’
So, very soon, Impossible Foods may face a fair amount of competition. In 2022, BYAS received investment from DIC Corporation, a Japanese fine chemical company and spirulina production pioneer, helping to realize its goal of selling spirulina heme to plant-based brands.
To learn more about plant-based meats, read:
Charlotte is a writer and editor based in sunny Southsea on the south coast of England.