Meatless Impossible Whopper wouldn’t be possible without NJ biz incubator

Anything’s possible. 

If Tesla’s sports car can orbit Earth with Bowie’s “Space Oddity” playing on eternal loop, a plant-based burger developed in New Jersey can sizzle like beef and brown when you cook it. 

Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger — a lab-created patty that browns when heated and mimics ground beef down to fat particles — launched in 2016, supplying American restaurant chains a juicy meatless alternative that’s beefy enough to court its target consumer — carnivores.

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The plant-based patty that seems to bleed like beef due to a “heme” compound — impressed Burger King. The Home of the Whopper launched the Impossible Whopper nationally this summer, aiming to stock it in more than 7,000 locations by 2019’s end. 

Impossible Burger is sold at 17,000 restaurants in the United States, Hong Kong and Macau in China, the company estimates. Last month, it rolled out in select grocery stores, including some Wegmans locations on the East Coast.

Supplying tens of thousands of locations requires production on a massive scale. 

Without a Bridgeton, New Jersey-based food business incubator, this Silicon Valley start-up would have been cooked. 

“It’s blown up even beyond their wildest dream,” said Diane Holtaway, the center’s marketing director. 

In late 2015, Impossible Foods reps crossed paths with the New Jersey’s Rutgers Food Innovation Center at a trade show in Chicago, Holtaway said.

Three months later, Impossible was moving into a room at the Food Innovation Center’s Bridgeton facility. 

Impossible’s founder Patrick Brown already had worked on the product in his California plant’s test kitchen for five years. “They ran into some trouble and just couldn’t create the volume of burger they demanded,” Holtaway explained. 

Impossible Foods signed with Rutgers for help developing the meaty texture of the plant-based product, and scaling it up for mass distribution. (Company representatives declined to be interviewed for this story.) 

“We mentor food companies from start-up through (businesses of) significant size,” Holtaway explained. 

Does your grandmother’s crustless, low-carb, vegetarian, gluten-free quiche deserve to be in grocery store freezers?

Rutgers Innovation Center’s food scientists — like Julie Elmer who worked with Impossible Foods — will help get the recipe right, source bulk ingredients and suss out the chemistry that keeps the taste and nutritional properties of nanna’s quiche, but on a grand scale. 

Then, Holtaway jumps in to help start-ups build marketing strategies for the products, build food safety protocols and chip away at getting the crustless delight to consumers. 

“That is often a very, very critical point for food companies,” Holtaway said. “You have a great idea, but how do you commercialize it?”

Impossible Foods is one of the larger companies mentored by the New Jersey university’s incubator. The start-up — backed by Serena Williams and Katy Perry — raised more than $750 million. 

Impossible Foods’ resources were immense, Elmer told the Courier Post. Typically, “nobody has that kind of money,” Elmer noted. 

Chank’s Pizza Cones — a Vineland, N.J.-based family business distributing its savory cones to college campuses nationwide — started as a small food cart at Penn State football games, its owner said. 

Jinja Drink, a green tea and ginger tonic, was developed in its Philadelphia founder’s home before signing with Rutgers to prepare the recipe for large batch production and create a marketing strategy. 

Impossible Foods started with a massive pocketbook and huge names backing the concept. But it struggled to make its “heme” compounds — the element that makes meat taste like meat — into something that resembled ground beef, Elmer said.

Brown was focused on developing the patty’s taste — that “heme” molecule. It’s a soy-derived molecule the company says is found in every living animal and plant. It’s most abundant in animals, the company says. 

“Their focus was on how to make this taste like a burger with their unique biochemical compound they isolated and grew,” Elmer, a chemist and food scientist explained. 

Over two years, Impossible Foods worked daily at the Southern New Jersey facility in test kitchens to get ingredient ratios right, and experiment with equipment to fine-tune the patties’ texture. Rutgers helped the company design its Oakland, California, plant and create food safety plans. 

A year after the California company moved out, Holtaway — in a white lab coat and hair net — stood in its former work space, a now-empty room with a red rubber floor and a few pieces of stainless steel equipment against the walls. 

“There were all these big pieces of equipment. It was almost hard to move around,” Holtaway remembered. 

She pointed from one corner of the room to the other, describing where the Impossible ingredients were mixed, then laid out on trays, then pressed into burgers. 

Meanwhile, next door, in a room of similar size and food safety sterility, Jake Ciancaglini worked with his sister and cousin building pizza cones. 

As Chanks grew from a small cart to a food truck serving 1,000 pizza cones during a three-hour Penn State football game, the Ciancaglinis knew they needed to simplify their production to allow for growth. 

The first phase of Rutgers-assisted development worked out the recipe for the cones’ dough so it would keep its taste and texture during freezing and thaw and reheat well. Then, the family worked with Rutgers to find the precise configuration of pre-load the pizza toppings in the cones, Jake Ciancaglini explained. 

The Rutgers team also helped Chank’s products get cleared by the United States Department of Agriculture approvals.

Freezing their product allowed them to expand its market. It ships frozen, ready-to-cook cones to college stadiums across America, including Penn State, Harvard, the University of Arizona and Pocono Raceway. 

Holtaway said the center is trying to get the cones into Rutgers University’s sports venues. 

There’s more experimentation cooking for Chank’s, Ciancaglini said. 

“Right now we’re Chank’s Pizza Cones, but we’re leaning more on Chank’s Grab and Go. We’re testing out different things. We’re testing our grab cakes — a crab cake cone — Buffalo chicken and almost like a hot dog thing,” Ciancaglini explained. 

“People are so interested in starting food companies, but many don’t have the experience to do so,” Holtaway said. 

“We educate businesses.”

Carly Q. Romalino is a Gloucester County native who’s covered South Jersey since 2008. She’s a Rowan University graduate and a six-time New Jersey Press Association award winner. 

She is the Courier Post’s “watch dog,” taking deep dives into matters throughout the region.