If Impossible’s patent on its heme-based burger is thrown out, the resulting intellectual property will become vulnerable prey, leading to an increasingly vicious fight as small startups and big food companies alike battle to produce and sell heme in as many products and combinations as possible. A loss would dampen the company’s dominance of the meatless food chain and likely throw the entire ecosystem into chaos. (Beyond Meat, often cast as Impossible’s main competitor and the only new meatless meat food tech company to go public, does not rely on heme to create its meat simulacra). One month after the new factory announcement, Impossible Foods sued Motif for patent infringement, becoming the first new food tech company to initiate a fight over intellectual property for meatless meat in the United States.
In February 2022, the company signaled it was committed to the heme project by beginning construction on a new 65,000-square-foot research and production facility in Massachusetts. (Motif has since become its own company, spun out of Ginkgo). “We'll brew up the next 100 hemes so that we can see many more Impossible Burgers in the next few years,” Jason Kelly, the founder of Motif’s former owner, Ginkgo Bioworks, said in 2019. Motif FoodWorks has pitched itself as the maker of ingredients for countless Impossible replicas. Now Motif FoodWorks, a much smaller industry player, is also producing heme and selling it as an ingredient for a meatless burger, sparking an unusual legal battle in the food tech industry. Tiny concentrations of that substance, known as heme, have made Impossible’s burger the reigning realistic meat substitute among chefs and food bloggers.
In the small and fierce meatless-meat ecosystem, Impossible Foods has held one bloody advantage: its discovery that the molecule responsible for pinkish, juicy, coppery muscle can be grown in a lab.
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