Impossible Foods Donates Its Millionth Burger and Doubles Down on Social Good for 2021

• Impossible Foods achieved its 2020 goal of donating 1 million Impossible™ Burgers to communities in need

• Leading environmental startup collaborated throughout the pandemic with social impact groups such as Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, Feeding America, Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, Rethink Food and SodexoMAGIC 

• Impossible Foods plans to expand its unique Social Good program in 2021 to address America’s interlocking crises of food insecurity, racial justice and unequal access to nutritious food -- particularly to help youth from kindergarten through high school

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Impossible Foods donated its millionth Impossible Burger this week, achieving the startup’s ambitious 2020 goal to nourish communities in need during COVID-19. 

Alameda County Community Food Bank, a long-standing Impossible Foods’ partner, was the recipient of the 1 millionth Impossible Burger. The organization distributes millions of healthy meals every year, and is on the forefront of new approaches to ending hunger and poverty. Impossible Foods’ Social Good program has also collaborated with social impact groups such as Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, Isaac Rochell’s Local Human, Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, Rethink Food and SodexoMAGIC, the nation’s leading dining service provider chaired by NBA legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson. 

Considered the world’s No. 1 environmental startup, Impossible Foods’ mission is to turn back the clock on climate change and halt the world’s catastrophic biodiversity collapse by making the global food system sustainable and equitable. The company launched a food bank donation program nearly three years ago in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2020 alone--and with COVID-19 exacerbating food insecurity--Impossible Foods donated 250,000 pounds of Impossible Burger.

In 2021, the company plans to continue working with social impact groups -- and in particular to find efficient, innovative ways to nourish America’s children. Since April, more than one in five households in the United States, and two in five households with mothers with children 12 and under, are food insecure.

“We recognized in the early days of the pandemic that Americans were facing an unprecedented and bleak scenario, with COVID-19 turning the longstanding issue of food insecurity into an acute crisis,” said Impossible Foods Vice President Jessica Appelgren, who launched the company’s cross-functional Social Good task force in 2018. “We don’t see the pain easing up in the short term. We take seriously our obligation to nourish our communities -- in our hometown of the San Francisco Bay Area and everywhere as our business expands.”

Together Stronger  

This summer, Impossible Foods teamed up with Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, an organization whose mission is to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders. 

Impossible Foods and Know Your Rights Camp are fueling better futures through large-scale product donations to organizations feeding communities disproportionately affected by hunger. Together, they’re working to bring more nutritious food options to communities most affected by food apartheid in the United States, and advocating for the right of all communities to access food. 

“As food insecurity and the consequences of environmental degradation disproportionately affect Black and Brown people worldwide, it has been a highlight of 2020 to partner with Impossible Foods to feed over a million people,” said Patricia Robinson, spokesperson for Know Your Rights Camp. “We’re proud of this work and intend to grow our partnership in 2021 to continue to address the rights of youth to good food and good health.”

In addition, Impossible Foods teamed up with pioneering restaurateur Pinky Cole of Slutty Vegan, musical mogul Jermaine Dupri, and The Pinky Cole Foundation to kickstart a unique voter registration initiative this fall. Together, they hosted a series of webinars featuring prominent civil rights and cultural leaders, many hailing from Pinky’s home state of Georgia.  “Votenik Zoom to the Polls” was an election-year twist on the celebrated spring break festival in Atlanta known as Freaknik.

Last month, Impossible Foods launched a program with Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States. Through a network of 200 food banks, it helps provide meals to more than 40 million people each year. When individuals purchase any Impossible™ bundle on its direct-to-consumer site through Dec. 31, Impossible Foods will donate an equivalent amount of Impossible Burger to food banks -- up to 100,000 burger patties. 

In addition, Impossible Foods is donating a portion of proceeds from the sale of Impossible™: The Cookbook (Chronicle Books, $29.99). For each book sold on Amazon, $3 goes to No Kid Hungry, a nonprofit working to ensure that children nationwide get the food they need during school closures throughout the academic year. To order a copy on Amazon, click here.

Delicious, nutritious, ubiquitous

Impossible Burger, which tastes like ground beef from cows and is hailed as a triumph of food engineering, is the flagship product from Impossible Foods, Inc. Magazine’s company of the year and one of Time Magazine’s 50 Genius companies.

Earlier this year, Impossible Foods launched Impossible™ Sausage Made From Plants. The savory patties are now available at more than 22,000 locations throughout the United States and Asia -- making it one of the most successful growth stories of 2020. Impossible Sausage Made From Plants is available at Starbucks, Frisch’s, Get Go, Shari's, CoCos and other restaurants. 

Impossible Burger has as much protein and bioavailable iron as a comparable serving of ground beef from cows. A 4-ounce serving of Impossible Burger has 0 mg cholesterol, 14 grams of total fat, 8g of saturated fat and 240 calories. (A conventional 4-ounce “80/20” patty from cows has 80 mg cholesterol, 23 grams of total fat, 9g of saturated fat and 290 calories.)

Impossible Burger contains no animal ingredients, no animal hormones or antibiotics, and is kosher, halal and gluten-free certified. And because it’s made from plants and bioengineered, it uses 96% less land, 87% less water and generates 89% less greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional beef from cows.

Home chefs can log into Impossible Foods’ Impact Calculator to learn exactly how much land, water and emissions they’ve saved by using Impossible Burger instead of ground beef from cows.

About Impossible Foods:

Based in California’s Silicon Valley, Impossible Foods makes delicious, nutritious meat and dairy products from plants — with a much smaller environmental footprint than meat from animals. The privately held food tech startup was founded in 2011 by Patrick O. Brown, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at Stanford University and a former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Investors include Mirae Asset Global Investments, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google Ventures, Horizons Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Temasek, Sailing Capital, and Open Philanthropy Project.

Media kit: www.impossiblefoods.com/media

Media Contact: Rachel Soeharto (PR@impossiblefoods.com)

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