As Beyond Meat watches its share prices slide, competitor Impossible Foods appears to have had a remarkably good week.
The plant-based meat alternative company — best known for its signature, plant-based "heme" ingredient — announced the nationwide expansion of Burger King's "Impossible Whopper," winning FDA clearance to sell in supermarkets, and a new manufacturing partnership that should help the company meet growing demand.
The Burger King deal follows a trial period for the "Impossible Whopper," the fast-food giant's take on the plant-based burger, at 59 stores in St. Louis in April. Now the product will be introduced at every U.S. Burger King — that's 7,300 locations — for a limited time.
"Not only did it serve well for their existing clientele, but it brought new customers in," Sheetal Shah, Impossible Foods senior vice president of product and operations told Cheddar. "What we've seen in our studies is that over 90 percent of the users and the consumers that are eating our product are actually meat-eaters. And that's exactly what our target market is."
On Wednesday, the company won clearance by the Food and Drug Administration to begin selling its meat alternatives in supermarkets. It marks a pivot for Impossible Foods, which has largely stuck to introducing its product at restaurants and fast-food chains.
Shah says customers should expect to see Impossible Foods on shelves in "the September time frame."
But in grocery stores, the company will face Beyond Meat, which has pursued an opposite strategy to Impossible Foods, beginning in supermarkets and only just recently introducing its plant-based meat products in restaurants (Beyond Meat recently announced a new sandwich collaboration with Dunkin' Donuts).
Beyond Meat is still the only plant-based meat alternative company to go public, and has seen one of the most successful public offerings of 2019. While it's raised nearly $700 million, Impossible Foods has committed — for now — to stay private.
"I think Beyond Meat's IPO is a great validation that both investors and the mass meat-eater market really want a better way to serve a global demand. We have a $1.5 to $1.7 trillion global market for meat that hasn't had the level of innovation it deserves," CFO David Lee told Cheddar back in May.
Impossible Foods' biggest hurdle has been supply chain challenges. In recent months, the company has faced multiple rounds of shortages.
"We didn't necessarily anticipate the level of demand, originally, so we're starting to think about what flexibility can we think about today that will allow us to react to higher consumer demand in the future," said Shah.
On Wednesday, the company announced a new partnership with OSI, a meat manufacturer that's worked with McDonald's for more than six decades, a move that should help Impossible Foods better adapt to demand.
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: Restaurants are struggling with record-high U.S. egg prices, but their omelets, scrambles and huevos rancheros may be part of the problem. Breakfast is booming at U.S. eateries. First Watch, a restaurant chain that serves breakfast, brunch and lunch, nearly quadrupled its locations over the past decade to 570. Fast-food chains like Starbucks and Wendy's added more egg-filled breakfast items. In normal times, egg producers could meet the demand. But a bird flu outbreak that has forced them to slaughter their flocks is making supplies scarcer and pushing up prices. Some restaurants like Waffle House have added a surcharge to offset their costs.
