What Plant-Based Burgers Can Teach Us About Saving the Planet

PAT BROWN, THE Stanford biochemist who founded Impossible Foods, was trying to be patient, as if he were addressing a dim sophomore. This was eight years ago, and his company's signature product—a bona fide burger made from plants and animated by a molecule from soy plants that's bio-equivalent to mammal blood—hadn't yet found its way to Burger King and White Castle. I'd come to his office in Redwood City, California, to talk to him about whether consumers really would start eating a beef simulacrum.

Now this was a startup. In identifying heme, that blood-like molecule, Brown had a galvanizing innovation. And his company had a crystal-clear reason for being: to meaningfully reduce livestock farming, the industry that produces 14.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Yet Brown seemed to invert the priorities of other CEOs. He was a reticent marketer and eschewed the founder showbiz routine, which sometimes seems to represent the whole enchilada at other startups.