Where in the World is the Impossible Burger?
And why countries like Australia are missing out
What it is and why we must have it
The brainchild of renowned Stanford geneticist, chemist and food technologist, Pat Brown, Impossible Burger is completely plant based. The Impossible Burger is arguably the most revolutionary product in today’s Plant Based Revolution. It fries, acts, and tastes just like beef. It even bleeds.
Brown founded Impossible Foods, a company that produces the Impossible Burger and has declared that its mission is to save meat, preserve the earth, and spare animals along the way.
The Impossible Burger is not without its critics. Its most innovative and controversial ingredient is the soy leghemoglobin which creates the ‘bleed’ of the burger, an ingredient that can now be used to create other meat-like products, including steaks. Some corners of the vegan community do not consider the Impossible Burger to be either vegan or cruelty free. Anti-GMO campaigners have also attacked the Impossible Burger and the approval of its soy leghemoglobin which was produced with the aid of a genetically modified yeast. Ironically, the Impossible Burger contains no GMO ingredients but was created using the modified yeast as an agent.
Criticism alone will not stop the Plant Based Revolution. The Impossible Burger is a showstopper, and a sign of what is to come. Last year, a new book optimistically claimed that we will end animal farming by making current animal products obsolete. Meat substitutes such as Impossible Burger would play a key role in replacing the pleasure, convenience and accessibility of animal products.
There are all sorts of theories, but simply put: the Impossible Burger sounds and looks delicious. The more people who can have access to it, the better.
Join us as we review how the Impossible Burger is being released in different regions in the world. At the end of this page, we call on you to help Open for Animals keep consumers informed.
Where in the world is it?
Asia
The Impossible Burger is now available in Hong Kong and Macau.
Here’s where to find them.
Hong Kong was the first city outside the United States to receive the burger.
Now it’s coming to restaurants in Singapore on March 7, with an exclusive early taster on March 6 at an Impossible Foods event at Lau Pa Sat.
A number of restaurants in Singapore will feature the burger on March 7 with more to follow:
Bread Street Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay
Adrift by David Myers
Potato Head Singapore
Three Buns Quayside
Park Bench Deli
Privé Orchard
Empress
CUT by Wolfgang Puck
These restaurants are turning the Impossible Burger into other meat alternatives, including sausage roles and sliders that range from $14 to $27 for sets of three. So if you don’t want the Impossible Burger as a burger, you’ll have more choices.
Impossible Food’s current strategy is break into Asian markets in order to tap into a rising demand for beef and the biggest population in the world. More locations in Asia will soon have the Impossible Burger this year.
It’s a wise strategy, but it does mean that areas outside Asia and the United States are missing out.
Australia/New Zealand
In July last year, Air New Zealand shocked consumers by announcing that it would be the first airline to stock the Impossible Burger. It is now being served on the airline’s international flight between Auckland and San Francisco, and by all reports is extremely popular.
Air New Zealand’s coup was not received completely positively by the animal farm loving New Zealand. Politicians, industry lobbyists, and farming representatives all chipped in to criticise the airline, with the acting Prime Minister even half-joking that it could be an act of treason.
The news also shocked the region. New Zealand, considered by many Australians to be its provincial understudy, was ahead of the game once again.
Other than served in this airline hundreds of miles in the air, the Impossible Burger has not arrived on land in Australia or New Zealand. That’s despite Australia having one of the largest and the most active vegan and vegan curious populations in the world, according to Google trends.
Australia is also one of the highest per capita consumers of meat, has one of the most overweight populations in the world, and is the land of barbecuing and democracy sausages.
Isn’t it time the Impossible Burger 2.0 was urgently shipped out? This begs the question, who is responsible for distribution? What is preventing this burger from entering these countries and taking them by storm?
We’ve written to Impossible Burger and to Food Frontier in Australia to find out more. We’ll keep you posted.
United States
Impossible Foods is a Californian company, and not surprisingly the United States has the greatest availability of the Impossible Burger. The company established itself in the US and over many years convinced the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow its sale.
Impossible Foods has now even spread to over 1,400 outlets, including the no-frills White Castle burger chain, where a slider sells for $1.99.
Impossible Burgers are now available in about 5,000 restaurants in all 50 states, where it retails from between $8-$15.
Notable restaurants include:
Cockscomb
Momofuku Nishi
Fatburger
Umami Burger
The Impossible Burger can now be delivered straight to homes through online convenience apps and other services.
Impossible Foods now produces 500,000 pounds of burger a month, and it plans to distribute its product into grocery stores across the United States this year.
In January this year, Impossible Foods also announced the Impossible Burger 2.0 and exhibited at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The new burger design is apparently a step up into an more convincing beef taste, aroma and texture. The new burger is, the company claims, soy based and gluten free, with zero cholesterol and as much bio-active iron and protein as a beef patty.
There’s no word however on when the tastier and healthier Impossible Burger 2.0 will be available to the average consumer.
Other Regions
We’ve discovered no news in any other regions.
In Europe, we are concerned that anti-GMO campaigners may be holding up the entry of the Impossible Burger. But we will learn more soon.
As soon as find out something or you update us, we’ll update this page.
Update us
Sightings and Bitings
At Open for Animals, we want to gather together information to help anyone find the Impossible Burger.
Another alternative to meat burgers, the Beyond Burger is already widely available in many countries. The Impossible Burger hasn’t followed suit and progress in distributing these burgers to countries outside the United States seems painfully slow.
We think anyone who is willing to pay for the pleasure should have a chance to try a burger considered to be the most realistic alternative to meat. To address this issue, we are putting together sightings of the product and information about why it is not being supplied at this date to locations around the world.
To help us do that, we need to know from people on the ground:
Where in the world have you sighted the Impossible Burger?
What it was like to bite into one?
Are you fighting to find one?
Tell us!
We will update this page with any information we receive that is useful.
Impossible Foods includes a location finder on its website, but we are not sure how live the information is. What is more, we are becoming frustrated by the lack of availability in many countries, including Australia.
So we are reaching out now to Impossible Foods and Plant Based organisations everywhere. We are working out how to help promote the product and get it distributed globally. Once we find out, we will begin putting together a how to guide to speed up the Plant Based Revolution.
And what if you are vegan or vegetarian and personally don’t want to eat it? 2019 has been declared “the year of the vegan” by Forbes, but a large part of the reason vegans are experiencing a growth in attention is that products like the Impossible Burger are beginning to challenge the dominance of the meat industry in convenience food and quick service outlets. Nonvegans are also their biggest market.
So if you are a concerned vegan or vegetarian, perhaps your personal consumption is irrelevant when it comes to this burger. The best thing you could do for veganism is to support us in making the Impossible Burger available to anyone who wants to try it.
Open for Animals is a new animal advocacy group founded in 2019. It is open to anyone who wants to learn more about helping animals.
Contact us
Website: https://www.openforanimals.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/openforanimals/
Facebook Messenger: m.me/openforanimals
Email: weareopenforanimals@gmail.com
