The new Impossible Sausage
Following on from the success of the “Impossible Burger”, Impossible Foods has a brand new food item: the Impossible Sausage.
Based in California’s Silicon Valley, Impossible Foods makes delicious, nutritious meat and dairy products from plants — with a much smaller environmental footprint than meat from animals.
The flagship product, Impossible Burger, was named top plant-based burger by the New York Times and received the Food and Beverage (FABI) Award from the National Restaurant Association.
The privately held food tech startup was founded in 2011 by Patrick O. Brown and investors include Bill Gates, Google Ventures and Horizons Ventures.
Plant-based outperforms animal analogues
Impossible Foods is experiencing unprecedented demand for Impossible™ Sausage Made From Plants, the company’s first all-new product, since the 2016 debut of Impossible Burger.
The leading food tech startup launched Impossible™ Sausage in January. Within six months, the savoury patties have become available at more than 20,000 locations throughout the United States.
“We launched Impossible Burger in 2016, when consumers were just starting to get a taste for Impossible products and few realised that plant-based meat could outperform animal analogues in taste, nutrition and convenience,”
said Brown
Best of the Wurst
Winner of the 2020 Food and Beverage Award, Impossible Sausage is a pre-seasoned, pre-cooked savoury patty. A versatile item for drive-through, pickup or dine-in service, Impossible Sausage outperforms conventional sausage from pigs for nutrition and sustainability.
Compared to the leading brand of pork sausage, Impossible Sausage has:
the same amount of protein
60% more iron
45% fewer calories
60% less total fat
50% less saturated fat
0 mg cholesterol.
Impossible Sausage has none of the negative effects of the animal analogue, and it has no antibiotics or slaughterhouse contaminants.
Eating pigs: why bother?
All the buildings, roads and paved surfaces in the world occupy less than 2% of Earth’s land surface, while more than 45% of the land surface of Earth is currently in use as land for grazing or growing feed crops for livestock.
Raising animals for food makes up the vast majority of the land footprint of humanity.
Populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have, on average, declined in size by 60 percent in just over 40 years.
Animal agriculture is a primary driver of the accelerating collapse in diverse wildlife populations and ecosystems on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes.
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world is home to about 1.44billion pigs; with an average weight of about 112 kg, total farmed pig biomass totals 175 billion kg. That’s nearly twice as much as the total biomass of all wild terrestrial vertebrates.
In order to satisfy humanity’s voracious demand for pork — from Polish kielbasa to breakfast links — 47 pigs are killed on average every second of every day, based on FAO data.
Do the right thing: eat plants
Using pigs as a protein production technology comes with a high environmental cost – on both a global and local scale.
Industrial pork production releases excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment, and the high doses of copper and zinc fed to pigs to promote growth accumulate in the soil.
Faeces and waste often spread to surrounding neighbourhoods, polluting air and water with toxic waste particles.
In addition to the environmental toll, human’s reliance on animals for food has been a public health disaster for at least a century. Consuming animals has been the root cause of a disproportionate number of viruses and pandemics, including:
The 1918 “Spanish flu” (from swine viruses)
HIV/AIDS
SARS
The majority of human cases of influenza A (from live or dead infected poultry)
COVID-19
The mission of Impossible Foods is to eliminate the need for animals in the food system.
Transitioning away from eating animal products is one of the best ways to reduce the likelihood of future animal to human pandemics.