You can’t tell by looking at it, but this juicy burger contains no meat or animal products. Yet its creators say it looks and tastes like real beef.
The California company Impossible Foods makes its burger using wheat, potato, and coconut oil. But the secret to its realistic appearance and flavor is heme. This iron-rich molecule is a component of proteins found in muscle and blood that give them their red color. Plants also contain small concentrations of heme.
Biochemists at Impossible Foods isolated the gene for heme in soybeans and inserted it into yeast. This single-celled organism then produced heme for use as an ingredient. The result: the meatless but bloody-looking Impossible Burger.
Its creators say their burger uses fewer resources than red meat. But how’s the taste? “I grew up on a farm, so I’m used to eating a lot of meat,” says Nick Halla of Impossible Foods, “and I think it really tastes like meat.”