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Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown said Tuesday that the company is speeding up its development of new meat alternatives.
“Not only is the pace of new product development getting faster, but we’re getting better at getting better. The whole innovation cycle is accelerating,” Brown said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday.
The company announced Monday at the Consumer Electronics Show two new products, Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage, its first since releasing the vegetarian Impossible Burger three and a half years ago.
Select Burger King restaurants will sell the meatless sausage in the Croissan’wich later in January, but Impossible has not given a timeline for the release of its meat-free ground pork.
Part of speeding up Impossible’s innovation cycle includes nearly doubling the size of the company’s research and development team in the next 12 months, Brown said.
And the focus of those scientists won’t just be on mimicking red meat such as pork and beef.
“We’ve worked on pretty much any product that comes from an animal, whether it’s terrestrial or fish or shrimp,” Brown said. “There’s work ongoing on it, and you can be sure that in the next few years, we’re going to be launching products to cross some of those categories.”
Shares of Impossible’s rival Beyond Meat, which sells its own meatless sausage product, were up nearly 7% in morning trading Tuesday. Since going public in May, Beyond has seen its shares soar more than 200%.
Impossible has not shared any plans to go public. Still, Brown said Tuesday, “I think it’s reasonably likely at some point that we’ll go public.”