Google offered $200 to $300 million to acquire Impossible Foods, a startup business, developing plant-based meat and dairy products. The company that wanted to beat the meat industry didn't agree on the price.
The search engine giant, Google, attempted to purchase Impossible Foods, a startup company developing meats and cheeses made from plants. A statement from The Information said the offer started around $200 to $300 million. But the plant-based food company declined it, asking for a higher bid.
Impossible Foods was founded in 2011 by Patrick O. Brown, a biologist and a physician at Stanford University. According to the company's LinkedIn profile, Impossible Foods has 51 to 200 employees. Their aim is to improve a meat-like food which is inexpensive and healthier than the real meat.
Brown along with the team of 50 scientists, engineers, chefs and farmers are currently improving the new technology to surpass the quality of meats and dairy products with a much lesser effect for the environment. This term is called 'impossible foods technology'.
The biologist knew that people will not relinquish their favorite foods unless they found something that is more scrumptious and rewarding.
"Our target market is not vegetarians. It's not vegans. It's not fringy health nuts. It's not food-fad faddists. It's mainstream, mass-market, uncompromising, meat-loving carnivores." Brown said in a statement from Grub Street.
The company had raised $75 million with the support from Bill Gates, Tony Fadell of Google and Khosla Ventures. They studied animal products in a microscopic picture and pick nutrients and proteins from leaves, seeds and grains to reproduce meats and dairy products.
The plant-based meat was discovered in Silicon Valley. In an experiment, a lab technician stocked up brown threads into a Tupperware container to imitate meat fibers and tissues. It has proteins from liquefied soy, spinach and wheat.
After that, the same proteins from the three crops were drudged into the meat grinder to replicate the muscle of the meat. One protein from the pink bunch is called RuBisCo. It comes from the legumes that appear to be very similar to myosin, one of the main proteins of the muscle. Thus, the bunch firmed up.
The synthetic blood was formed out of broth from amino acids, meat aromas and other ingredients heated in a plate.
In an interview by The Wall Street Journal, Brown said that heme can be extracted too another protein found in legumes which is leghemoglobin. Heme has iron, which turns red when exposed to oxygen. It is almost the same with hemoglobin, the red pigment in the blood.
"Heme is basically 99 percent of the secret to meat flavor. Heme is the molecule that makes meat taste like meat. It's the reason meat tastes like nothing else. It's the reason why red meat, which has more heme, tastes meatier to people than white meat", Brown detailed.
The biologist has high hopes about this food technology. But initially, they would be needing a lot of funds to afford its manufacturing and distribution.
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