As the so-called “meat culture wars” enters a new chapter, Impossible Foods’s CEO Peter McGuinness believes that plant-based players need to drastically pivot their marketing strategy to compete with the deep pockets of the traditional meat industry. McGuinness shares his plan to center Impossible’s messaging less around climate impact—and instead, letting its product do the talking. McGuinness’s embrace of past mistakes and fluid pragmatism is a crucial case study in evolving to stay relevant. 

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Bob Sapian, a former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Two years ago you appeared on my podcast and, at that point, there was lots of enthusiasm and kind of a tailwind behind plant-based foods—plant-based meat in particular. And since then, things have kind of cooled, sales have slowed for the industry by double digits. These kinds of struggles, were these things that you expected? Surprised by? 

I wouldn’t call it cooled. I would call it maybe a correction. When the stock market goes down a thousand points, is that cooled or is it just overheated? Some of the novelty is wearing off. Some of it was a bit overblown. Some of it is cooling, and some of it is a reality that we need to change. We saw it coming. We didn’t know the depth and degree. And it’s really up to us to reverse it. And not be a victim. The category’s down, the sector’s down. There is a bit of a cloud around it for a whole host of reasons, and it’s not good.

You always want a growing category because you want that pie to be bigger. And in this case, you want the plant-based to be bigger because that means the animal industry will be smaller. My interest is not to steal shares from other plant-based meat in the 8-billion global space, it’s really to go after the 1.4-trillion-addressable animal market. Chicken, beef, pork—globally, 1. 4 trillion. That’s the market. 

I feel like there are two main drivers that have emerged: one about health and one about politics. First, health. There’s been pushback that plant-based diets may not be healthy or as healthy. How has that happened? 

Yeah, it is the elephant in the room. It’s a bit of a smear campaign. There’s a lot of myths around what plant-based meat is and what it isn’t. And the meat industry threw a couple terms, they throw a lot of things around, but there’s a few that stuck. And we need to admit it as an industry. “Fake, faux-processed” stuck. You say it enough, people will believe it.

And we’ve done a really bad job of refuting it. So, is our stuff not healthy? No, that’s complete BS. It’s made from plants. And I don’t want to get into a war with the animal industry because I don’t think that’s the way to grow plant-based, but meat is an animal. 

To the second point, about politics, or what has been referred to sometimes as the “meat culture wars”: I first noticed this in 2022 when Cracker Barrel started offering your Impossible Sausage and there was like this social media uproar over it. I’m sure you remember this moment. What did you hear? What did you do? How did this come to you?

This goes back to how the plant-based industry was launched and created. It was launched as an industry against something. We were against the cattle industry. We were against cattle farmers. We were against the slaughter cartel. And it was very politicized, very politically charged. It was very partisan. And it pissed a lot of people off. Regular people in America were like, “Oh, that’s just the elitists, and that’s the coasts, and that’s the academia.”

The industry should be for something. We’re making better food for more people. We’re putting good options for people to try. I don’t have a problem with cattle farmers. They’re hard-working people. So let’s be inclusive. Let’s invite meat eaters to try our products because we believe in our products and we think they’re delicious. Let’s not insult them. Let’s not judge them for eating meat. 

We have to change the playbook in our messaging and how we communicate and behave and talk to people.

Do you need to help your colleagues—the other companies in your industry—to address the challenges that they face against meat in a different kind of way? Are you trying to learn from each other? Or do you say, “I can’t really do that. I have to keep my head down, control what I can control?“

It’s a good question. I’m not a prophet, or an oracle, or the ultimate expert here. First and foremost, I’m paid to grow Impossible, but that does not mean that has to be at the expense of the categories. I do try to help. I do reach out, and I do attend a lot of conferences, and I do speak regularly to many other plant-based CEOs. Because at the end of the day, that’s the right thing to do. That’s the category we’re in, and they’re not the competition. 

Worst case scenario, they’re frenemies, but they’re really friends. If I steal from the $8-billion pie and don’t go after the $1.4 trillion pie, we haven’t advanced the value of the company for our shareholders, and we sure haven’t advanced the climate.

I want to go to the idea that plant-based food is critical to the climate crisis. It certainly is, but how important is that to your business, to your customers, to your investors. Or is it more like an internal issue for your team, for you personally?

The ultimate mission is to reverse climate change. How you go about that can be debated and discussed.

The biggest lever to do that is agriculture. Now, the problem is people don’t equate it. I would love the government to assist in availability, awareness, and also incentives without making it political.

But you don’t have a lobbying arm that is robust enough to get that to happen?

I don’t believe we do right now. Now, it would be nice if the government looked at this thing in a very intuitive way. Food’s the most important thing. It’s the largest industry in the world. It’s the one thing we have to do. You can live without a car. You can’t live without eating. So it’s pretty mind-boggling that this was completely omitted and missed. But, we didn’t lobby hard enough. So we’re to blame as well.

But it’s so interesting that the mission, as you come back to it, is about climate. And yet, the success of that mission has to do, at least it seems at this point, in not necessarily leaning into that as a message.

I know that’s counterintuitive. At the end of the day, we have a calculator on our website. It’s the simplest thing. The more plant-based meat that’s consumed, the less water is used, the less land is cleared, and the less GHG [greenhouse gas] is emitted.

When this industry was launched: We’re a tech company, [but] we don’t eat technology. We’re a climate company. We don’t eat climate. So what we need to do is get more people eating these products, and that’s going to do the most good—not only for your own nutrition, health, and well-being, but the planet’s. I hate to say it. We may just have to admit we’re a food company. 

It’s how you communicate about your products. We’re a tech-enabled food company. So we’ll innovate like a tech company, but we’re gonna operate like a food company. That’s it. And I believe in that. But how we communicate to a consumer to get you to buy it is you gotta lead with taste. And follow up on nutrition and then maybe “tertiarily” get into animal welfare and climate.

It sounds like the other part that’s counterintuitive is you have to be patient. But you also have to be impatient at the same time to be able to make the changes you need to make.

We are trying to change eating habits that have developed over hundreds and thousands of years. It just doesn’t happen overnight. 

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