Impossible burger illegal in Europe?! (2024)

FAQs

Impossible burger illegal in Europe?!? ›

Heme has kept Impossible Foods away from the EU

Impossible Foods, which is based in California, used precision fermentation to create this “heme,” which gives the burger a “bleeding” appearance reminiscent of meat. While the Impossible Burger is not yet cleared for sale in the EU, this news means it has passed the first round of approval hurdles.

With that definition in mind, some people do not regard the Impossible Burger as suitable for a vegan diet. The plant-based heme was tested on laboratory rats, and while Brown says every care was taken to make the trials humane, animal testing of any kind is explicitly a form of exploitation.

However, the brand's burger is not yet available in the UK because of a key ingredient, soy leghemoglobin, which is classified GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) in the US but which does not yet have regulatory approval in the UK or the EU.

You can find Impossible™ products in the United States, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Macau, New Zealand, Oman, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Our mission is to feed the entire world with delicious meat made from plants, so we still have plenty of ground to cover.

Plant-based meat in Europe

Despite a downturn in US retail and foodservice revenues for the third quarter of 2023, Beyond Meat continues to perform in the UK and European markets, with many products that are unavailable in the US.

Impossible Beef,* Impossible Ground Sausage, and Impossible Sausage Links are Halal certified by the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA). Impossible Beef,* Impossible Ground Sausage, and Impossible Sausage Links are Kosher certified by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America (OU).

The bad news: Meatless burgers are heavily processed and high in saturated fat.

It eventually settled on something called soy leghemoglobin, found in the root of soy plants. To make it, Impossible inserts synthetic versions of sections of soy DNA into yeast so the yeast produce soy leghemoglobin during fermentation.

"This product is highly processed," she says. "Ultra or highly processed foods are foods that have additional artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives to promote shelf stability, preserve texture, and increase palatability. They usually undergo several processing steps using multiple ultra-processed ingredients."

Does Bill Gates have anything to do with Impossible Burger? ›

After confessing his love for cheeseburgers, Gates discussed the advancements in plant-based meats. The tech billionaire was an early investor in several alternative meat companies, including Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Upside Foods (a cultivated meat company focusing on chicken).

The Impossible Burger is made from soy protein concentrate, coconut oil, sunflower oil, potato protein, methylcellulose, yeast extract, salt, gums, and water and additives, including vitamin B12, zinc, vitamin B6, thiamin (B1) and niacin. The ingredient that gives an Impossible Burger the taste of meat is heme.

Sales plateaued in 2021, and some of the plant-based-meat darlings — including Beyond Meat and Impossible — began to dip. Beyond Meat's stock price has fallen almost 80 percent in the past year; Impossible conducted two rounds of layoffs in 2022, letting 6 percent of its workforce go in October alone.

“Our whole focus is on making products that deliver everything that meat lovers care about.” Therefore, if you believe that the animal testing performed on soy heme renders Impossible Foods' products non-vegan, you'll want to skip these products.

Patrick O'Reilly Brown (born 1954) is an American scientist and businessman who is the founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University.

It's made using an ingredient called haem (or heme, an iron-containing compound that's abundant in animal muscle) and aims to mimic that basic moreish meaty flavour. Since it's made from plants, it has a much smaller environmental footprint than its classic beef counterpart.

Learn more about all the Beyond Meat products here. You can find Beyond Meat products in over 190,000 grocery stores, restaurants, hotels, universities and beyond in over 80 countries worldwide! !

Is Impossible Foods publicly traded? Impossible Foods remains a privately held company and cannot be accessed on major public exchanges such as NASDAQ or NYSE. Accredited investors can invest in the top private companies like Impossible Foods before they IPO via secondary marketplaces such as Hiive.