While reports of COVID-19 outbreaks have shut down factories or disrupted supply chains for the traditional meat industry, plant-based meat company Impossible Foods has found itself expanding its reach -- this time through a new partnership with Starbucks.
The coffee chain announced this week it will be featuring the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich on its summer menu.
"Something like one-third of all the 18- to 29-year-olds in the country hit a Starbucks at least once a quarter," David Lee, Impossible Foods' chief financial officer, told Cheddar. "And so for us to be available in this way, to have nearly 20,000 locations serve our Impossible Sausage products, is a wonderful milestone for us."
Lee explained that Impossible's co-manufacturing partnerships, such as the one it shares with food supplier OSI Group, provides enough scalability to supply the market for its meat alternatives.
"It means that we can meet the large demand we expect from Starbucks, Burger King, many other partners, but also a really rapid rollout in grocery stores, which we began to speed up sometime around March or so this year," he said.
The CFO was also confident the company was addressing challenges from the coronavirus pandemic by selling Impossible Burgers that can be delivered straight to customers' homes. He reported that grocery sales of its products had grown 30 times over since March when most stay-at-home orders began, in addition to the orders made directly to Impossible.
"The theme has been scaling to meet unprecedented demand. As a result we feel relatively well-prepared to handle how this current pandemic has changed the way meat-eaters like to get their meat," he said. "We're seeing folks order it directly from us to be shipped to their home, which is why we created our direct-to-consumer business."
Still, Impossible Foods has had to weather the pandemic like many other businesses, including the meatpacking industry. According to Lee, however, the stark differences in the businesses give plant-based meat an advantage.
"Unlike many of those unfortunate meat plants, we bypass a lot of the problems they face," he noted. "We don't grow animals, slaughter them, transport them, process them, so we don't have the same challenging conditions the meat industry faces."
Lee also agreed with Impossible Foods founder and CEO Pat Brown, who predicted on Tuesday that the meat industry will be facing its own extinction in just 15 years.
"I believe in the meat-eater," Lee said. "We meat-eaters are pretty sophisticated. You give us a better product that hits the spot, that's better for our health, that's better for the world -- we vote with our stomachs."
"I think the consumer will determine the future and will determine it pretty quickly."
In March, Impossible raised $500 million in Series F funding but despite the aggressive scaling and partnerships Lee described, he said there are no current plans to join fellow plant-based meat company, Beyond, as a public company.
The saga surrounding Elon Musk's bid to buy Twitter has made its way to Washington, DC. A group of 18 House Republicans are calling on the social media platform's board to preserve all records and documents related to the company's response to the offer from the Tesla CEO. Caleb Silver, editor in chief of Investopedia, joined Closing Bell to discuss. "This is a long term play, but it's just a shot across the bow by congressional Republicans, who probably will end up taking the House, that they're going to be tough on Big Tech and they're going use Musk's bid for twitter to take it private, so that he can get the platform to be open source and remove its censorship."
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a bill dissolving Walt Disney World’s private government after the entertainment giant criticized a measure that critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
Removing carbon from our atmosphere has become a goal for scientists and entrepreneurs around the world, and while many have begun to develop promising technology solutions, a few big names in tech, including Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta and McKinsey, are committing nearly $1 billion dollars to fund carbon removal technology through 2030 through a new initiative called Frontier, an advanced market commitment to incentive following through on development. Hannah Bebbington, the head of strategy for Frontier, joined Cheddar News to discuss. "What Frontier aims to do is help get this market on track by sending that strong demand signal such that we can scale up capacity really significantly in the next couple of years," she said.
The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
Jonah Goldman, the managing director at Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy, joined Cheddar News to talk about the promising growth in the climate change-conscious investments the organization has made over the years. ”I mean when we're looking at some of the hard to abate technologies and cement and steel and aviation fuel, all of those have promising pathways that weren't there again just a few years ago," he said. "We invest across all of the technology areas that are driving emissions, greenhouse gas emissions and there really are exciting products and technologies coming out in almost every one of those sectors.”
The Golden State Warriors a new affiliate company called Golden State Entertainment to create sports-related original content, documentaries, and musical collaborations. David Kelly, chief business officer, joined Cheddar News to discuss “We think it's a great time to step off into this area. I think the better question maybe is why this hasn’t been formed previously?” he said. "There's a lot of synergies between sports, music, and film, and so we think that the timing is right to bring those worlds together into this venture." He noted that projects aren't limited to Warriors-only content, pointing to the documentary "38 at the Garden," about former New York Knicks player Jeremy Lin.
