U.K. Fake Meat Specialist Will Rival Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods with Supermarket Deal

More fake meat!

British protein synthesisers Meatless Farm will rival Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods in the U.S.’s increasingly competitive fake meat / tech burger market. Meatless Farm, which says its products are “almost indistinguishable from meat in terms of taste and texture” and claims to have achieved uncounted “exponential growth,” has signed a deal with Whole Foods Market in over 450 locations, and would have expected a clear run at Beyond Meat’s monopoly, with Impossible Foods not yet able to sell its impossible burgers in supermarkets.

That’s no longer the case. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now satisfied that heme — soy leghemoglobin — is legit, and Impossible’s bleeding burgers and raw ‘bricks’ can enter U.S. supermarkets. Impossible has never centred its expansion strategy on supermarkets for this reason, and has watched its reputation grow outside of direct-to-consumer sales — this is a lucrative market it is yet to tap.

Given the outsize unicorn reputation and investor catnip that Impossible shares with Beyond Meat, its string of strangely unchallenged reputable chef endorsements, and more ridiculously aspirational name that speaks to the calculated optimism of having tech bros fix problems that a redistributed food system could solve instead, that’s probably bad news for Meatless Farm. Perhaps there will be room for even more fake meat, though — Beyond Meat has been in Whole Foods Market since 2016.

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• Good tweet: