Last year, we told you about the ‘Impossible Burger’.

It’s basically a meat-free burger that actually tastes like meat, which is a massive departure from similar products out there.

You know the ones. Your vegetarian friends bring them along to a braai and then insist that you taste them because “you can’t tell the difference”.

You can always tell the difference.

Anyway, Burger King decided to roll out the Impossible Burger in restaurants in St. Louis, USA, to see if they’d do well.

Here’s TechCrunch with what happened:

For Burger King, the rollout of the Impossible Burger enabled the company to snag new customers while not eating into its core business of selling Whoppers.

It’s about optionality, and the ability to “give somebody who wants to eat a burger every day, but doesn’t necessarily want to eat beef everyday, permission to come into the restaurants more frequently,” Chris Finazzo, president of Burger King North America, told CNN Business when discussing the initial test.

The test was so successful that they plan on making the Impossible burger available at every Burger King by the end of the year.

News of the Impossible Burger’s impossibly well- received debut in St. Louis was a bright spot in what would otherwise be a fairly downbeat earnings call for Burger King’s parent company, Restaurant Brands (its first quarter net income fell 9 percent to $135 million on weaker same-store sales growth), according to a report by the Associated Press.

The meat substitutes market is expected to reach $6.43 billion by 2023, according to a report by Markets and Markets. Venture capitalists, corporate investors and public markets are all hungry for alternative meat companies, and the nationwide rollout of the Impossible Foods burger coupled with the Beyond Meat public offering indicate that the industry is maturing.

Burger King brought some folks in to try the Whopper and the Impossible Burger to see if they could tell the difference:

There’s a slight problem, though. The burger is so popular that Restaurant Brands International, the Impossible Burger parent company, says the company is now on the verge of running out of the popular vegan burger, reports The Takeout.

RBI says that “interest in Impossible Foods’ plant-based meat alternative is growing so much that the company is struggling to keep up.”

It’s a good problem for a company to have—but still a problem. RBI says it’s not running out of the ingredients needed to make the burgers, which recently had their recipe tweaked (apparently successfully)—it’s a production issue.

The company plans to add a third shift, increase work hours, and is installing a second production line at its Oakland, California location. And even that might not be enough, due to growth in areas including “every sales category where Impossible Foods does business,” like independent restaurants, other chains like White Castle, theme parks, college campuses, and more.

Again, not a bad problem for a company to have.

No news yet on when the Impossible Burger will make it to South Africa.

In the words of that eloquent gentleman from the Burger King video – “No f****n cow”.

[source:techcrunch&takeout]