You’ll soon be able to cook an Impossible Burger in your kitchen once the popular plant-based meat substitute reaches certain California grocery store shelves on Friday.
The brand will only be available at gourmet grocer Gelson’s Markets in California, but a nationwide rollout will follow. Later this month, the East Coast will join California, and the rest of the country can expect to find Impossible Foods products in their grocery stores throughout the end of this year and the beginning of 2020, according to an official statement from Impossible Foods released Thursday.
Impossible Foods will be joining its plant-based competitor, Beyond Meat, in the meat section of the grocery stores.
“We can’t wait for home cooks to experience the magic — whether using Impossible Burger in their family favorites or inventing new recipes that go viral,” said Impossible Foods’ CEO and founder Dr. Patrick O. Brown, in the company’s statement.
Up until now, the Impossible Burger was only available at restaurants. Burger King serves up the Impossible Whopper, White Castle offers an Impossible Slider, and Red Robin is the largest restaurant chain in the country to carry the Impossible Burger.
Other restaurants have jumped on the plant-based bandwagon by carrying Beyond Meat options. Subway offers a Beyond Meat Meatball sub sandwich, and Carl’s Jr. and Dunkin Donuts also serve a form of the plant-based meat substitute. Even KFC got in on the trend with Beyond Fried Chicken at select stores.
While there are many other meat substitute brands on the market, by and large, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat reign in terms of popularity. Though, in a taste test, Digital Trends is partial to the Impossible Burger.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, Digital Trends gave the Impossible Burger our Top Tech of CES award. Plant-based burgers like the Impossible Burger or Beyond Burger strive to look, smell, and taste like meat, but are made from plant-derived compounds.
The Impossible Burger has 19 grams of protein, with a majority of that coming from soy. Other ingredients include potato protein, heme (which Impossible Foods says is what makes “meat” taste like meat), as well as coconut and sunflower oils, which make it “sizzle” on the grill like a meat burger would.
Consumers are increasingly turning to plant-based substitutes to replace meat as a more eco-friendly option. According to research conducted by Midan Marketing, 70% of meat-eaters substituted a non-meat protein in a meal at least once a week.
