Better prices for consumers, bigger impact on the planet: why we’re dropping our prices in grocery stores.

Thanks to our tremendous growth over the past year, we’ve got good news for consumers: Today we announced that we’re cutting suggested prices by about 20% for grocery stores and supermarkets nationwide — savings that we expect you to see on grocery store aisles.

While this is our first price reduction since launching in grocery stores, it follows two other price reductions we've made in the past year: Last month, we cut prices by about 15% on average for distributors that sell to restaurants, after another 15% price reduction for restaurant distributors in early 2020.

Some companies cut prices only when they have lower-than-expected sales. On the contrary, we’re dropping our prices amid record demand for our products. Our stated goal since the founding of the company has always been to drive down prices through economies of scale, reach price parity and then undercut the price of conventional ground beef from cows, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. 

Better for your budget, better for business

This price cut and our other recent price reductions for restaurant distributors are possible because of our dramatic increase in sales and production this year. Just one year ago Impossible™ Burger was sold in only 150 grocery stores. It’s now available in close to 17,000 grocery stores nationwide -- a more than 100x increase in 2020 alone. 

The more Impossible Burger you buy, the less it costs us to produce per pound, and we choose to pass those savings on to our network of distributors and retailers, with the goal of ultimately lowering prices for consumers. This in turn accelerates our rapid retail growth — a virtuous cycle.

Lightening the environmental load

As we continue to grow, we expect to be able to fully undercut the price of animal meat based on the inherent advantages and cost efficiencies of our products. Impossible Burger uses about 90% less water and energy and 96% less land than a conventional burger from cows. While we tend to frame these benefits in terms of environmental savings, they also have real economic advantages: We don’t need pastureland, feed crops, slaughterhouses or nearly any of the other enormous costs associated with livestock. 

Remember: producing meat from animals is inherently inefficient. It requires a great deal of time and resources in order to produce a much smaller amount of product. Even in the industrialized US cattle value chain, which is the most efficient way to produce animal meat, the average pound of beef requires around 13 pounds of corn, soy, and other plant-based inputs to produce. By comparison, a pound of Impossible Burger takes only about a pound of plant-based inputs to produce. 

Driving a consumer movement

We’ve already seen that the sale of our products comes at the direct expense of animal-derived meat. Data from Chicago-based analytics company Numerator over the past 13 weeks shows that 82 cents per dollar comes from consumers who are shifting their purchases to Impossible Burger from other categories of animal-derived meats. Because Impossible Burger already rivals ground beef from cows for taste, mouthfeel and nutrition – with the added advantage of 0 mg cholesterol (14 g total fat and 8 g saturated fat per 4oz serving), and no animal hormones or antibiotics – we’re confident that more and more consumers will choose it over animal meat when pricing is competitive.

That’s why in order to meaningfully reduce the environmental impact of today’s food system, we need to attract as many meat eaters as we can to Impossible™ products, which means we must keep lowering our prices for consumers. Today’s announcement – which also includes double-digit price cuts for grocery stores in Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong – is one more step towards that goal.

Lower prices for everyone

 As we continue to achieve new cost savings, we openly encourage our partners to make Impossible products as affordable as possible in restaurants and on store shelves. And it’s working. When we first dropped prices for restaurant distributors last March, virtually all of our distributors dropped their prices to restaurants. 

We believe that with this latest price cut, grocery stores and supermarkets will follow suit, and we’ve encouraged them to do so. We expect consumers in the United States to see lower prices reflected at their local grocery stores later this month. 

Impossible Foods isn’t a just food company, we are a planetary technology company. Our hypergrowth has profound implications for the environment, and the more we grow, the more consumers save. This wasn’t our first price cut, and it won’t be our last -- because our planet depends on it.