A California-based company whose meatless burgers are being served at a growing number of restaurants nationwide aims to achieve the seemingly impossible: eliminate the use of animals in food production by the year 2035.

Impossible Foods claims its Impossible Burger has been eaten by about 6 million Americans since it made its stake in New York in July 2016. Today, the burger is served in at least 3,000 restaurants in the U.S., Hong Kong and Macau, up from 40 last year.

Michaela Ritcey, owner of Ritcey East in Watertown, said she heard that other local chefs were beginning to serve the Impossible Burger, “and when a customer asked for it by name, it really reinforced there was a demand for it.”

Earlier this summer, Ritcey began offering the burger as a weekly special for between $16 and $17 with the choice of a side dish, but it quickly began to sell out each week.

Now, it’s one of the restaurant’s top five dishes, she said, so she plans to make it a regular menu item, beginning next month.

“I’ve tried almost every veggie burger around,” said Josh Trota, 31, a regular from Revere, “but when you’re really craving something that tastes like meat, the Impossible Burger is where it’s at.”

The burger is the brainchild of Patrick Brown, a Stanford University biochemistry professor emeritus who was on sabbatical in 2010 when he began to consider how he could help tackle climate change. He decided to come up with an alternative to meat and dairy production, which he said produces one-seventh of global greenhouse gas emissions and requires more than a quarter of the world’s freshwater.

In order to be successful, though, that alternative couldn’t taste like a veggie burger; it had to taste like meat.

The key ingredient, Brown found, was heme, the molecule that carries oxygen in blood and that makes meat uniquely delicious and craveable.

By genetically engineering and fermenting yeast, Impossible Foods produces soy leghemoglobin, a heme protein that is naturally found in plants but is identical to the essential heme humans have been consuming for hundreds of thousands of years in meat.

And while the Impossible Burger delivers all the craveable depth of beef, it uses 75 percent less water, generates about 87 percent less greenhouse gases and requires 95 percent less land than conventional ground beef from cows, said Jessica Applegren, a company spokesman.