Impossible's new sausage prototype took about three days to develop, Brown said. The tweaks from the beef formula are subtle: the same heme in smaller quantities, no potato protein, a slightly modified cocktail of amino acids and vitamins. "The basic architecture is the same," Lipman said. "It is a descendant. It's evolutionarily related." In Impossible's test kitchen, I watched the sausage patty sizzle into a brown sear as realistic puddles of pink liquid pooled on top. Dolled up with fennel, onion, garlic and nutmeg and wedged within a breakfast muffin, it had the slight funky richness of sausage. Like the burger, the taste was shallow. It had the right bouncy texture, but buried under the seasoning I couldn't get a clear lock on the inherent meat flavor. I could easily say the same about fast food animal meat. Partnerships like Burger King and White Castle are a turning point for Impossible in terms of its mainstream adoption, but it's well-armed for the competition. To become a staple consumer product in 2019, Impossible's major hurdle is not flavor but scale. To deliver to 7,000 Burger King restaurants across the country -- as well as supermarkets -- requires a sophisticated, precise supply chain.

To become a staple consumer product in 2019, Impossible's major hurdle is not flavor but scale.

"If a restaurant does not get delivery that day, they lose that whole day. It's gone, and it has a significant impact on their bottom line. Now extrapolate that into a company of this size," said Dan Altschuler Malek, managing partner at Unovis Partners, which manages New Crop Capital, a VC fund that invests in rival Beyond Meat. "They cannot promise their consumers that and not deliver. And for them to deliver, it means 'OK, I have a set of manufacturing facilities, they're already plugged into my distribution network, there are redundancies in place, there is enough on the back end to make sure that the raw supplies are available.'"

Funneling perishable products across the country daily is a challenge for any food company. Beyond noted the same issues in its IPO prospectus, pointing out that it's dependent on a limited number of vendors for raw materials.

Right now Impossible only has one manufacturing plant, a former Just Desserts building in Oakland, California, that opened in September 2017. (The heme is made at a separate facility, but Impossible declined to discuss where.) More than 70 employees at the factory churn out 1.5 million pounds of fake meat per month, but that will have to increase by an "order of magnitude" by the end of the year, said Chris Gregg, Impossible's now-former chief supply chain officer. "We are scaling as absolutely fast as we can and continuing to add capacity and people and looking at alternatives."

Brown says that the inherently lower resource costs of making Impossible meat versus raising a cow mean that it's only a matter of time before economies of scale kick in and Impossible's product matches the price of a supermarket patty. On its current projections, said Brown, that's "very plausibly within two or three years."

Impossible is not yet profitable because, executives say, of the amount of money it ploughs back into the highly research-driven organization. "We definitely make money at the plant level. We are choosing to spend a great deal for our expansion and to continually improve our R&D," Lee said. "Could we be profitable? Absolutely. We could be cash flow positive by the end of year if we wanted to."

According to the company, about one in three of the 330 employees are scientists, and it's spent more than $100 million (of some $475 million in funding until the latest new injection) on research and development alone. "The future of our business is in the hands of the R&D team," Brown said. "We'll never compromise on R&D."

After the novelty, must-try factor has worn off, what would make you choose the Impossible over animal meat on a menu?

Research and development, along with long-term strategy, has become Brown's main role too. This March, Dennis Woodside, a former COO of Dropbox and CEO of Motorola Mobility, was announced as president under Brown to steer the company's operations, including manufacturing, supply chain, sales, marketing and HR. He's a tech old hand who took Dropbox public. "He knows how to operate at a Fortune 500 public company scale," said Lee.

Despite their outsize cultural cachet, Impossible and other meat alternatives still only occupy a carpaccio-thin slice of the meat industry, even as the global market for meat substitutes is estimated to hit $5.8 billion by 2022. Impossible can strike up restaurant deals across the country, sharpen its delivery mechanisms and tweak its formulas. But after the novelty, must-try factor has worn off, what would make you choose the Impossible over animal meat on a menu?

Decent taste, price and convenience is a given. The company is also savvy at making the customer feel healthy, morally satiated and part of a desirable brand -- reasons that won't win an eater over by themselves but shore up the essential criteria. Perhaps this string of nebulous, well-meaning cultural factors can serve as a tiebreaker when picking between almost-equal products. Like certain e-commerce companies (Away, Casper), Impossible's product may not be absolute best of class, but it's competing in a product category -- fast food -- that I personally don't care to spend undue time optimizing for.

Brown's arguments that superior tech will evolve our romanticization about animal meat are not unfounded -- the same way we now mostly read off screens, not paper, and travel by car, not horse. But while Brown is probably glib about how quickly people will divest their emotional attachments to food -- foodie culture is very much alive in 2019, potentially more than ever -- I've yet to see why culinary exceptionalism will hold out much longer than those other technologies. The march of technology is that of the natural being replaced by the efficiently synthetic.

In that kind of world, perception matters the most. As the company with first (or second) mover advantage, Impossible is the force currently at the wheel, trying to guide us through this collective transition from real meat to realistic replicas. Its bet -- and hope -- is that we're ready and willing for it, and that Impossible can create the food of our times.

If that's the case, the rise of Impossible Foods says a lot about what, today, can make food exciting. It's food that makes us feel like we're saving the planet while still pandering to the caveman by simulating animal gore. Food that's processed to the point of sensory deception but inspires more trust than a 100-percent beef burger. Food that can at once signal virtue and indulgence. Which is to say that the rise of Impossible Foods says a lot about us.

Credits

Features editor: Aaron Souppouris

Copy editor: Megan Giller

Illustrations: Koren Shadmi

Photography: Impossible Foods (product shots); Katy Perry (Instagram); David Chang (Facebook)



Video

Writer and presenter: Chris Ip

Camera: Brian Oh and Kyle Maack

Editor: Brian Oh