Impossible Foods Launches Impact Calculator on Earth Day

• Impossible Foods’ online calculator shows you how much you reduce your land, water and greenhouse gas footprints by choosing an Impossible™ Burger instead of a burger from cows

• Restaurants, schools and other organizations can easily use the Impact Calculator to see how much they’re reducing their environmental footprint by serving Impossible instead of beef from a cow

• Share your savings on your social networks on the 50th anniversary of #EarthDay today — and every other day #ImpossibleImpact

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — Impossible Foods is launching its all-new Impact Calculator so people can see how much they are reducing their land, water and greenhouse gas footprints by eating the plant-based Impossible Burger instead of a burger from cows.

Restaurants, universities, hospitals, stadiums and larger organizations can just as easily use Impossible Foods’ web-based Impact Calculator to determine how much they’re saving when people eat Impossible Burger instead of beef from a cow.

“Switching to plant-based meat is a simple, powerful way to address climate change and spare resources like water and land for wildlife -- on Earth Day and every other day,” said Rebekah 

Moses, who leads Impact Strategy at Impossible Foods. “The Impact Calculator helps people understand how much they are helping protect and restore our planet every time they choose an Impossible Burger instead of a burger from a cow -- then they can share their results, raise visibility, and accelerate the urgent shift to a plant-based food system.”

The Impact Calculator uses data from Impossible Foods’ life cycle assessment for its flagship product, Impossible Burger. People can select whether they want to see their results translated as direct reductions (gallons of water, square feet of land, pounds of greenhouse gas emissions) or by comparison to familiar benchmarks (climate impact of airline miles, water for showers, and more). 

The calculator is based on the number of quarter-pound Impossible Burgers eaten, retail packages purchased, or pounds sold. For more information, please read this blog.

Special for Earth Day, Postmates, the leader in delivering anything on demand, debuted “The Impossible Collection” on the Postmates app today, with a message for their community to order an Impossible favorite as a way to go plant-based for Earth Day. Consumers are encouraged to share the images created by the Impossible Impact Calculator after ordering. 

Delicious, Nutritious, Sustainable

Impossible Burger sizzles, smells and cooks like beef from cows. It was named the top plant-based burger by the New York Times and received the Food and Beverage (FABI) Award from the National Restaurant Association, among other accolades. Impossible Burger is available in thousands of restaurants in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau, and in more than 1,000 grocery stores in the United States. 

To satisfy the global demand for meat at a fraction of the environmental impact, Impossible Foods developed a far more sustainable, scalable and affordable way to make meat, without the catastrophic environmental impact of livestock. Impossible Burger uses 87% less water, 96% less land, contributes 89% less greenhouse gas emissions, and contributes 92% less freshwater pollution than a burger made from cows. 

Impossible Burger rivals ground beef from cows for likeability, so consumers needn’t compromise on taste. Impossible Burger has no antibiotics, animal hormones or slaughterhouse contaminants. It has as much iron and protein as a comparable serving of ground beef from cows. Unlike ground beef from cows, Impossible Burger is a good source of dietary fiber.

Impossible Burger has 0 mg cholesterol, 14 grams of total fat, 8g of saturated fat and 240 calories in a quarter-pound patty. By contrast, a quarter-pound, conventional “80/20” patty from cows has 80 mg cholesterol, 23 grams of total fat, 9g of saturated fat and 290 calories.

#MeatIsHeat and #PlantsAreCool

The scientific community has already realized that shifting to a plant-based diet is a simple, realistic solution to the existential threat of global climate change. It’s not merely a way to significantly reduce ongoing GHG emissions but our most realistic chance to turn back the clock on climate change. 

People around the world eat nearly 1 trillion pounds of animal-derived meat every year, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. As a result of our voracious demand for animals, the livestock industry dominates the humanity’s land footprint: All the buildings, roads and paved surfaces in the world occupy less than 1% of Earth’s land surface, while more than 45% of the land surface of Earth is currently in use as land for grazing or growing feed crops for livestock. 

The global demand for meat, fish and dairy foods is also a primary driver of the catastrophic collapse in diverse wildlife populations and ecosystems on land and in oceans, rivers and lakes. 

“Unless we act quickly to reduce or eliminate the use of animals in the food system, we are racing toward ecological disaster,” said Impossible Foods’ CEO and Founder Dr. Patrick O. Brown. “But I’m hopeful because more people are waking up to the fact that ‘meat is heat’ -- and more importantly, ‘plants are cool.’ Thanks to this accelerating toward plant-based food, we still have a chance to avert catastrophe.”

For more information about the generational shift toward a plant-based diet, please read Impossible Foods’ Generational Trends Insights Report. 

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.

Impossible Foods was Inc. Magazine’s company of the year and one of Time Magazine’s 50 Genius companies. The flagship product, Impossible Burger, was named top plant-based burger by the New York Times and received the Food and Beverage (FABI) Award from the National Restaurant Association.

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