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Biotech Businesses

Impossible Foods In Talks To Go Public (reuters.com) 47

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
According to Reuters, Impossible Foods is preparing for a public listing which could value the U.S. plant-based burger maker at around $10 billion or more. From the report: This would be substantially more than the $4 billion the company was worth in a private funding round in 2020. It would highlight growing demand for plant-based meat products, driven by environmental and ethical concerns among consumers. Impossible Foods is exploring going public through an initial public offering (IPO) in the next 12 months or a merger with a so-called special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), the sources said.

The Redwood City, California-based company has worked with a financial adviser to help manage discussions with SPACs after receiving offers at a lucrative valuation, the sources said. Going public through a SPAC could dilute existing Impossible Foods shareholders, however, by a greater extent than an IPO, the sources added. The sources, who requested because the discussions are private, cautioned that the deliberations are subject to market conditions and the company may opt to pursue another private fundraising round.
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Impossible Foods In Talks To Go Public More

Impossible Foods In Talks To Go Public

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  • Plant-based meat products? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @08:23PM (#61253468)
    There's a word for that: plants.

    • Stopped by to say exactly that. I am also curious what sort of sorcery they have to put these plants through to make them taste like meat.
      I suspect some massive chemical manipulations, making 'processed foods' look as healthy as raw organic spinach in comparison.

      • Re:Plant-based meat products? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @10:36PM (#61253750) Homepage

        I am also curious what sort of sorcery they have to put these plants through to make them taste like meat.

        No need to speculate, the truth is out there [washingtonpost.com]. It's heme [wikipedia.org], a substance that is present in meat and contributes greatly to making meat taste like meat. Impossible Foods has found a way to extract heme from soy and they mix that into their product.

        I suspect some massive chemical manipulations, making 'processed foods' look as healthy as raw organic spinach in comparison.

        You're right, Impossible Burgers aren't healthy -- but neither are the beef burgers they replace, so they are a faithful imitation in that sense. At least with the plant-based burgers you won't have to worry about bovine fecal matter and e.coli being included in your burger.

        • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

          by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 )

          Burgers are not healthy because of the bun that it's wrapped in.

          The bun made of wheat that messes up the stomach lining and causes leaky gut, which leads to allergies and inflammation.

          Follow the papers linked here for the full details : http://high-fat-nutrition.blog... [blogspot.com]

        • At least with the plant-based burgers you won't have to worry about bovine fecal matter and e.coli being included in your burger.

          They are probably working on that right now.

        • Compare a Burger King Whopper with a BK Impossible Whopper. The nutritional data is clear: The Impossible burger is worse for you than beef.

      • That's funny, I stopped by to see all the people raging at people hypothetically one day in the future doing something which the imagine may threaten to take their meat away.

  • They are just trying to get out before the financial bubble bursts. Lots of overhyped tech IPOs have fallen pretty flat recently, so our glorious friends in the financial industry came up with the innovation that is a SPAC. This essentially allows them to avoid having to disclose how crappy their actual business is during an IPO (it's not an IPO, it a SPAC buyout!), and further allows investment banks to avoid losses from underwriting these hype-fests.

    Why on earth people invest in SPACs is beyond me, but t

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Lots of overhyped tech IPOs have fallen pretty flat recently, so our glorious friends in the financial industry came up with the innovation that is a SPAC.

      SPACs aren't something new the financial industry just came up with because recent IPOs have fallen flat. SPACs have existed for decades.

      SPAC Pioneers Reap the Rewards After Waiting Nearly 30 Years [wsj.com]

      The flashiest trend in finance traces back three decades to a pair of old law-school buddies. Now, they are finally cashing in.

      Investment banker David Nussbaum and lawyer David Miller invented the special-purpose acquisition company in 1993 to give private firms another way to access everyday investors. SPACs we

      • The innovation is the use of them to get around the requirements for a normal IPO listing. A really good example of that was WeWork, where the pre-IPO process exposed all the dodgy commercial arrangements between the business and the CEO's private assets. They basically bypass all the regulatory controls placed on IPOs to protect investors from this sort of shenanigans.

        While I'm all for letting the idiots who blindly invest in these SPACs take their own risk, the trouble with these things is they tend to ha

        • Okay. But what does all that have to do with your claim that the financial industry came up with SPACs because "lots of overhyped tech IPOs have fallen pretty flat recently"?

          Nothing.

    • Unlike other overhyped IPOs they actually have a pretty good product that they can sell profitably. You could probably fool the vast majority of people into thinking it is actual beef. Currently it is somewhat more expensive than beef, but has been going down in price. I think it could easily get down to the same price, and if we ever manage to tax greenhouse gas emissions it would be even cheaper. The environmental benefits of eating processed soybeans directly instead of feeding them to cattle would be s

  • It actually tastes good. If you want to kill animals because you are a sadistic sicko lacking genes for empathy and emotion control, thatâ(TM)s fine. But killing for food is unnecessary.

    • If you want to kill animals because you are a sadistic sicko lacking genes for empathy and emotion control, that's fine. But killing for food is unnecessary.

      We've found the looney Vegan. Do you also not own a TV? [theonion.com]

    • > But killing for food is unnecessary.

      Plants aren't alive? /s

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I may have purchased a venus flytrap for a vegetarian relative. A meat-eating plant is what I'm talkin' about.

      • We need full synthetic foods. The total chemical synthesis of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins isn't too far out of reach. In fact, many of their building blocks can be synthesized already. I never said we should kill plants either. Although plants have no nervous system, so it's reasonable to assume they can't suffer. Just because our ancestors did it doesn't mean it's right. Basically, you're saying that kids of criminals should commit crimes because their parents did? What kind of logic is that?

        There is

    • Eating animals is exactly what we did for two million years of our evolution.
      That's why we are well adapted to it.
      We are not well adapted to plants.

      https://www.pnas.org/content/1... [pnas.org]

    • It actually tastes good. If you want to kill animals because you are a sadistic sicko lacking genes for empathy and emotion control, thatâ(TM)s fine. But killing for food is unnecessary.

      Stop killing ALL animals on this planet for a year and see what happens. You'll quickly find out what "balance" means. I wonder how you would feel when we're killing animals to not do anything useful with them except stop them from becoming even more of a nuisance due to ever-increasing numbers. There are still tribes who hunt animals to survive. And you want to outlaw their way of life too, essentially killing humans as a result?

      Amazing how you have the gall to label others sadistic. The reason people

      • Huh? Most animals that are killed die in farms. That doesn't affect the animal population outside farms. I'm not saying to let them loose .. most farm animals are domesticated, it'll be unfair to release them to the wild with zero survival skills or traits. The population of wild animals will be unaffected if humans stopped eating meat. The number of people that hunt is tiny, they're not having any effect on populations. The only justification for torturing animals is that your own convenience is worth it,

        • Huh? Most animals that are killed die in farms. That doesn't affect the animal population outside farms. I'm not saying to let them loose .. most farm animals are domesticated, it'll be unfair to release them to the wild with zero survival skills or traits. The population of wild animals will be unaffected if humans stopped eating meat. The number of people that hunt is tiny, they're not having any effect on populations.

          We have gaming and fishing licenses, catch/bag limits, and restricted hunting seasons and areas. We literally have dozens of laws on the books limiting and preventing humans from hunting, because of the effect on populations. And then, when restrictions become too much, you create the opposite problem, such as the snake problem in the Florida Everglades, where they are gladly paying hunters to kill as many large snakes as they can. Same with feral hogs tearing up farmlands. Kill them off. Why? Because

  • It's good but not impossible... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday April 08, 2021 @09:34PM (#61253632)

    To me all the Impossible stuff taste a bit like tomato, but I guess they do a decent job with texture. I'd still prefer meat if possible generally but some of the stuff I've tried with Impossible in it has been fairly good.

  • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Why not? There's interesting chemistry behind out they extract and use heme to give it a meaty taste so that's news for nerds. They are a major up-and-coming company, and if products like this take off, it can help substantially with issues of climate change and other issues, so it is stuff-that matters. So this fits both of the two classic Slashdot goals.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Because contrary to your apparent beliefs food doesn't have to be stuck in time, repeating, and doing it in the same way as we have done for hundreds of years.

      It turns out that we can make food better with technology, that we can modernise farming, that farming didn't stop evolving with the invention of the hedgerow centuries ago. Who knew?

      Even MIT Technology Review and so forth regularly cover fake meat, because it's one of the biggest revolutions in food technology in a long time. Essentially we're in the

  • Impossible Burgers are basically soy, coconut fat and some seasoning & binders. Similar to almost every other soy based veggie burger ever made. Their only innovation is putting crap in it that makes it look pink until it's cooked. And for that they're suddenly valued at $10 billion. I assume that is because they are the darling of the hipster demographic, something that could easily change if other companies start copying their pink schtick.

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