The plant-based meat craze is consumers 'catching up to the future': Impossible Foods CFO

Myles Udland
·Head of News
Updated

The hottest trend among investors and consumers right now is plant-based meat.

Shares of Beyond Meat (BYND) have risen more than 240% since their public market debut just two weeks ago.

And earlier this week, Impossible Foods announced another $300 million funding round, counting among its newest investors celebrities including JAY-Z, Trevor Noah, Alexis Ohanian, Kal Penn, Katy Perry, Serena Williams, and will.i.am.

The company has now raised more than $750 million since 2011.

Impossible Foods CFO David Lee joined Yahoo Finance’s daily live show The Final Round on Wednesday to discuss the company’s latest fundraiser and the future of the business. And Lee said that in his view at least part of the recent excitement around the plant-based meat space is consumers “catching up to the future.”

“At Impossible Foods, what we’ve seen [are] huge increases in demand across our 7,000 locations we have today,” Lee said. “But importantly we’re also seeing large, important players in the industry, like RBI (QSR), which owns Burger King, announce on their own earnings call that they’d like to see Impossible Burgers across all 7,200 of their locations in the U.S.

“In Asia, in Hong Kong and Singapore and Macau, our business has increased something like 3x since March. And a lot of it is this offering that we’ve gone to the market with, this Impossible Burger 2.0... But some of it could be that the rest of the world is catching up to the future.”

The Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger containing wheat protein, coconut oil and potato protein among it's ingredients. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)
The Impossible Burger, a plant-based burger containing wheat protein, coconut oil and potato protein among it's ingredients. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File)

Earlier this week, Lee told the Financial Times that demand for the company’s products has been “unprecedented.”

And while Lee told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday that Impossible Foods’ manufacturing process was designed from the outside not to be constrained by any one input, it has still be difficult for the company to predict “in what week, in what month, the surge in demand would come.”

“Syncing global demand with supply, I think that will be an ongoing challenge for any company serving the global meat market,” Lee said. “It such a huge consumer movement that we will continuously have to try to plan ahead.”

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Myles Udland is a reporter and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter@MylesUdland

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