ENCORE: Beyond Meat vs Impossible Burger | Flame Broiled | 2
Business Wars
Wondery
4.6 • 13.2K Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s 2016 and both Pat Brown’s Impossible Foods and Ethan Brown’s Beyond Meat are cooking up plant-based burgers for mass consumption. Ethan tries to woo Whole Foods executives to carry his Beyond Burger in their stores from coast-to-coast. Pat’s taking a different route. He’s asking celebrity chefs to put his Impossible Burger — a plant-based meat that bleeds — on their menus. Soon enough, fake meat gets truly famous. But as Beyond Meat tries to cash in on Wall Street and as Impossible Foods gets its patties into Burger King, meat-raising ranchers in America’s heartland are on the attack.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This series originally aired in 2024. |
| 0:10.4 | It's a chilly June morning, 2015, in Redwood City, California. |
| 0:15.3 | Bill Maris pulls into the parking lot of Impossible Foods headquarters, |
| 0:18.8 | the 40-year-old who runs Google's venture capital business |
| 0:21.7 | steers his car into a space between two electric vehicles. Hopping out, Maris zips up his hoodie, |
| 0:28.1 | walks past a full bicycle rack, heads inside. There he finds Pat Brown, Impossible Foods' 60-year-old |
| 0:35.7 | CEO and founder, taking notes. As he watches a burger patty cooking on a griddle. |
| 0:41.2 | It's a little early for lunch, isn't it, Pat? |
| 0:43.4 | I'm not sure you'd want to eat this thing, Bill. |
| 0:45.8 | Our recipe for plant-based meat isn't perfected yet. |
| 0:49.0 | But it does look just like beef, and we're getting closer to the right taste and texture. |
| 0:54.1 | Oh, and check this out. |
| 0:56.5 | Pat grabs a spatula and flips the burger over. He presses the spatula gently on top of the |
| 1:01.8 | patty. Red juice flows out onto the griddle. Whoa, the burger is bleeding. How did you make it do that? |
| 1:08.8 | I can't tell you, Bill. It's a trade secret. Well, that's why I |
| 1:12.4 | came here today, Pat. As you know, we invested in your company last year. We're fans. And now I want to |
| 1:19.1 | buy your secrets. Google Ventures wants to buy this whole company. Pat's surprised. He founded Impossible |
| 1:26.3 | Foods four years ago and has racked up $75 million in venture capital funding, |
| 1:31.8 | including an investment from billionaire Bill Gates, who has also put his cash into another plant-based meat company, beyond meat. |
| 1:39.7 | Despite his war chest, though, Pat still doesn't have a viable commercial product. |
| 1:45.7 | Pat scrapes the bleeding burger off the griddle and flips it into a nearby trash can. |
| 1:50.7 | Pat points the spatula at Maris. |
... |
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