While there are vegetarian burgers that can be supplemented for the ubiquitous hamburger, these burgers taste like the constitute vegetables with the added flavour of which ever oil has been used. For strict vegetarians this is fine, but it doesn’t necessarily create the most mouth-watering stepping stone for those who enjoy eating meat.
To overcome this a burger has been created that looks like meat and which tastes like meat, but which is not made from meat. The burger comes from Impossible Foods, a California-based company. This is a plant-based patty that bleeds and sizzles when it cooks.
The company was founded in 2011 and the startup is headed by Chief executive Pat Brown, who is a Stanford biochemistry professor and former paediatrician. To launch, the company raised $400 million, including funding from Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
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The Impossible Burger has been available in local restaurants since 2016, and it has proved popular. Based on this success the startup are planning to expanding their market throughout the U.S. and on a big scale. This is linking up with Burger King to create the Impossible Whopper.
The Impossible Whopper is being test marketed in 59 locales in St. Louis. If this goes down well, the aim is to market the burger throughout the U.S. The Impossible Whopper includes a flame-grilled, plant-based burger patty, which comes with lettuce, tomato, pickle and onion toppings.
Burger King’s chief marketing officer Fernando Machado says that customers and employees cannot tell the difference between the original Whopper and the new one, noting: “People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which.”
As to how the burger has been produced, the Impossible Burger is made from an ingredient extracted from soybeans which is called leghemoglobin, a hemoprotein found in the nitrogen-fixing root nodules of leguminous plants. The protein, according to Inverse, has a blood-red color. Leghemoglobin is very similar to animal myoglobin which is found in muscle and hemoglobin in blood.
It is the additional protein that provides the Impossible Burger with the ‘meat like’ qualities: the appearance, the smell once cooked, and taste, which is said to resemble that of beef.
