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SINGAPORE – Home cooks here will be able to purchase Impossible, a plant-based meat substitute made by Impossible Foods in the United States, at 79 FairPrice stores and at the RedMart online grocery store starting this week.
A 340g package will sell for $ 16.90, or about $ 5 per 100g, more expensive than a lot of supermarket ground beef. RedMart, for example, sells Master Grocer Australia’s premium quality grass-fed frozen ground beef for $ 6.95 for a 500g package, which works out to $ 1.39 per 100g.
Still, the US company, based in Silicon Valley, relies on curious home cooks to buy the product. It says Impossible’s retail sales in US stores grew more than 50 times in the six months after its retail launch. It is now sold in more than 11,000 stores in the US, including those of the retail giant Walmart; and at Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country.
Nine out of 10 customers are carnivores, the company’s chief financial officer David Lee told The Straits Times in a Zoom interview from the United States.
When asked about the price, he said the company was committed to lowering the price of its products, but did not say whether Impossible planned to open a plant in Asia to make the plant-based meat. However, he said any “high-quality manufacturing plant” could make the product.
Apart from Singapore, plant-based meat, made with soy protein, is also sold in PARKnSHOP supermarkets in Hong Kong. The product was launched in both cities in March 2019 and is served to date by some 550 restaurants in Singapore and some 700 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau.
Home cooks were able to purchase 2.27 kg bricks of the meat alternate for $ 88.90 each during the breaker period, to help restaurants sell their stock when dining was not allowed here.
The company launched its pork substitutes, Impossible Pork and Impossible Sausage, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early 2020. Impossible Pork has not been commercially launched and the company has not announced plans to do so.
Impossible Sausage, a pre-seasoned variation that can be used to make patties and as a pizza topping, debuted in the US in the middle of this year and launched in Hong Kong in September. Lee does not have dates for a Singapore release.
Dr. Pat Brown, Founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, told The Straits Times: “Asia is absolutely our number one priority for expansion as our long-term goal is to make it available globally and in all places where animal meat is sold. We’ve seen high adoption in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore, which is encouraging as we expand into Asia. “
After causing a stir with his meat alternate, which tastes like real meat, he heads to the pork market.
He said: “Our next goal is to ‘disturb the pig’ and go after the entire ecosystem of swine production. After cows, pigs have the second largest global environmental footprint. Pigs are the most consumed animal in the world. representing approximately 38 percent of meat production worldwide.
“Even worse than cows, the use of pigs to make pork poses a great threat to public health. Swine and avian flu are the most likely pandemic vectors because they are easily passed to humans through feces in slaughterhouses. A University of Minnesota study found fecal matter in 69 percent. Percent of pork, and a devastating case of African swine fever has already killed about a quarter of the world’s pigs and is expected to increase world prices of animal protein “.
When The Straits Times interviewed Dr. Brown at the Impossible launch in Singapore in March last year, he said his team of scientists were looking to create whole pieces of plant-based meat, rather than substitutes for ground beef. The work is in progress.
He said, “Steak and other whole cuts are decidedly more difficult to make with plant-based ingredients precisely because they are ‘whole’ chunks of meat. When we design them, we need to put plant components together that have different functions. We want red, bloody heme in between. of a steak, we want a strip of juicy fat line running through it.
“Putting these different parts of a steak together and making sure each component is where it belongs is much more difficult with a large solid slab of meat than with ground beef, where 90 percent of the assembly is mixing the components. “
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