Impossible Foods ‘now going after the pig’ with sausage rollout: President

Dennis Woodside, president of Impossible Foods, discusses the plant-based meat company’s latest product offering, its expansion into more retailers, and the possibility of going public.

Video Transcript

- Compostable food is going to tell a big sausage to plant this new company is just a middle ground sausage in a bid to grab breakfast goers. Chew on this more with Impossible Foods president Dennis Woodside. Dennis, good to see you this morning here.

Two questions. Why sausage? Yeah. Why sausage? And when I go into a supermarket, where will this be positioned?

DENNIS WOODSIDE: It is to completely replace the need for animal based food, animal agriculture. And we've gone after the cow successfully. Now, we're coming after the pig.

The sausage is a huge market. It's got a $10 billion market in the US alone. And for us to fulfill our mission, we got to compete with the pig.

- And Dennis, is this just resigned to the supermarket aisles when we see this with some of your food service partners?

DENNIS WOODSIDE: Oh. Yeah. So currently, Starbucks is serving the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich with one of the most popular breakfast sandwiches in America. And that is the sausage product.

You're going to find this product all over grocery stores. We're already in thousands of stores with sausage. And the thing about it that's amazing. It's actually far better than the animal product on every dimension.

From a nutritional standpoint, it has about 30% fewer calories, about 47% less fat. No cholesterol whatsoever. And we get a blind taste test with a couple of consumers, where we gave them the leading annual day sausage and we gave them our product two out of three on a blind basis chose impossible over the animal.

So if we can provide products that tastes delicious, and nutritious, and are better for consumers, they're going to migrate to them. And we're going to be everywhere. We're going to be in both the fresh aisle, and the frozen out with this product.

- Hey, Dennis. It's Julie here. I got to ask the sodium question. How does it-- I mean, obviously, when you're talking about meat that doesn't have any seizing on it, it's not really apples to apples. But a typical package sausage product, how does that compare?

DENNIS WOODSIDE: It's-- it's slightly higher in sodium. But it's the-- the animal sausage actually has quite a bit of sodium in it. So we're slightly higher, but not-- not-- not materially.

- And Dennis, it's Myles here. I want to ask a little bit about pricing. Just for this product, but pricing across the space. You know, we've seen a lot of entrants coming in. There's a lot of competition in the growing alternative meat category. And just how have you-- have you been taking down your price of being able to take price? Where is it fitting into the overall grocery environment today?

DENNIS WOODSIDE: Yeah. So for us to compete with the pig, we've got a price like the pig eventually. Now, we're-- we're new to the market. And the animal industry has had 100 years to scale their supply chain and drive costs down.

As we scale up, our costs are going to come down as well. We lowered price twice in the last roughly 20 months by 20% and 15%. So as we scale up, as we are production lines get more full, we've run three shifts. We can pass costs along to the consumer.

- And Dennis, speaking of the cost that you might need to pass on to the consumer. How's that going in terms of supply chain, right? This particular product I believe is soy based.

First of all, what have you seen in input costs? And second of all, about getting it. Because I know I don't know how if you've had issues recently, but I know you and some of your rivals going back a couple of years had some troubles getting enough of what you needed to make your products.

DENNIS WOODSIDE: Yeah. So-- so we've-- we've scaled up our-- our supply chain massively in the last couple of years. Our manufacturing capacity has increased by about 10x over the last two years. And we've secured multiple partners that help us scale, and help us bring on new capacity when we see spikes in demand.

So we haven't had any-- any issues recently. You may find when you go to the store sometimes we're stocked out. And a lot of times that's because the retailer isn't used to the product and hasn't gotten in the habit of predicting demand.

But we have not had any-- any issues ourselves. We haven't had any issues with COVID either affecting our supply chain. As far as pricing, we've locked in our pricing for most ingredients for multiple years. So the short term swings in the commodity market don't really affect us.

- Dennis, why is it impossible a public company?

DENNIS WOODSIDE: Well, we've been able to grow with private financing. And we'll continue to grow organically without the need currently for going public. Our CEO and founder Pat Brown. He has said this is inevitably going to be a public company someday.

But right now, we have the funds that we need to continue to expand the business. So there's no need.

- Fair enough. Good luck in your battle with big pig. Impossible for Dennis Woodside.

- Good to see you. Have a good weekend.

- Thank you.