FSQ (Frequently Searched Questions): Why doesn’t Whole Foods sell Impossible products?

When Google autocompletes search queries about retail brands, it offers a glimpse of what most confounds customers. This series looks for answers.

It’s no wonder consumers are searching online for the answer to why Whole Foods doesn’t carry Impossible Foods’s plant-based meat products because neither company seems to be in a hurry to explain.

We sent several emails seeking comment to both Whole Foods and Impossible Foods over several days, but neither responded.

Due processed: Whole Foods’s relationship with plant-based meat is…complicated.

In 2019, John Mackey, the co-founder and then-CEO of Whole Foods, described some meat alternatives as “super highly processed” on CNBC.

“I don’t think eating highly processed foods is healthy,” Mackey said. “I think people thrive on eating whole foods.”

But Mackey also noted in the CNBC interview that it “launched” Beyond Meat, introducing the brand’s plant-based products in Whole Foods in 2013.

And Whole Foods shoppers have plenty of plant-based meat brands to choose from these days, including Beyond Meat, Daring, Abbot’s Butcher, and its private label, 365 by Whole Foods Market.

Narrowing it down: Impossible Foods products, however, are far from impossible to find, with distribution at chains including Walmart, Target, Wegmans, Kroger, and Albertsons.

John Clear, director in the consumer retail group of global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal, told us plant-based meat is “a high-dollar and -margin category, but it’s not a high-velocity category.”

In other words, while plant-based meat can be as expensive as the animal-derived meat, how often consumers buy it “is nothing compared to” how often they buy beef or chicken, Clear said.

• 86% of consumers reported eating chicken purchased from a supermarket in the prior two weeks, according to a 2018 survey.
• 19% of households reported purchasing plant-based meat in 2021, and among them, 64% of those buyers purchased it multiple times throughout the year, according to a 2021 study.

And since consumers don’t buy meat alternatives very frequently, he explained, some supermarkets are apt to be more selective about how many brands they carry.

“They used to do the whole spectrum,” Clear said, referring to categories that sell with less frequency, “but now they’re narrowing in on whichever one sells the most.”

Another factor may be what Impossible Foods calls its “magic ingredient,” the one that makes its plant-based beef seem to bleed.

Thicker than water: It's called soy leghemoglobin, and Impossible Foods’s version, which it calls heme, is created using genetically modified yeast cells and makes its plant-based meat seem to ooze blood like a hamburger or steak.

Soy leghemoglobin may set Impossible Beef apart—Beyond Beef uses beet juice for coloring and oozing—but it’s also created hurdles for the brand. Founded in 2011, Impossible Foods was not approved to be sold in supermarkets until 2019, when the FDA ruled that that use of leghemoglobin as a color additive was safe.

Impossible Foods launched in the UK in 2022 but is awaiting approval for the ingredient from the European Food Safety Authority and the UK Food Standards Agency. In the meantime, it has only introduced its plant-based chicken products in the EU, as well as its plant-based sausage products, which in the US and elsewhere contain soy leghemoglobin but were reformulated without it for the UK market.

While Impossible Foods has cited numerous studies indicating that the ingredient is safe, the claim has been challenged by the Center for Food Safety, which unsuccessfully sued the FDA seeking to reverse its decision that approved the ingredient.

We noticed when researching soy leghemoglobin that Natural Grocers, which has 166 stores in 21 states, has banned products with the ingredient, claiming on its website that the ingredient “has no proven track record of human consumption and has had very little testing to prove its safety for long-term use.”

So we checked the Whole Foods website, which lists more than 260 banned ingredients, including hydrogenated fats and saccharine.

And there it was, between sorbic acid and stannous chloride: soy leghemoglobin.

Silence of the bans: Clear was not aware of Whole Foods’s ban on the ingredient, but when we informed him, he said it could help explain why Whole Foods carries Beyond Meat's products but not Impossible’s.

“It’s easier to go, ‘Well I’m gonna go with Beyond because they use beets to make the color. And I definitely won’t have a problem there because it’s all-natural,” Clear said.

Both Whole Foods and Impossible Foods declined to respond to our repeated requests for an explanation of why the former doesn't carry the latter’s products, and Clear had a theory as to why.

“What about in 18 months if [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy says, ‘I don’t really care about that ingredient anymore, Impossible is the brand we need,” Clear said. “You don’t want to make public statements about their ingredients that would prevent you from bringing them in later.”