First, a little bit about what’s inside the package:
Impossible Foods is on a mission to help solve the planet’s climate and extinction crises by turning back the clock on global warming, restoring biodiversity, and making the global food system sustainable. We’re doing that by making delicious, nutritious, affordable and sustainable meat, fish and dairy, from plants.
Impossible Burger has already started to displace sales of animal-derived foods, whose production is one of the biggest generators of greenhouse gas emissions and the leading driver of the global meltdown in wildlife. Sold in over 17,000 grocery stores across the United States, Impossible Burger uses 96% less land, 87% less water and 89% fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional beef from cows.
Impossible Burger Patty Pack:
Impossible Foods’ best known achievement to date, Impossible™ Burger, tastes like beef and is considered a triumph of food engineering — the result of nearly a decade of research and development. (Some prominent Texas ranchers can’t tell the difference between Impossible Burger and ground beef from cows; and a beef lobbyist called it the “real deal” and a “wake-up call” for the livestock sector.)
Impossible Burger is made for meat lovers, and it’s often found in the meat aisle in grocery stores. When creating our first-ever retail patty package, we thought about going with a stock design. But our product is unlike any other, and our packaging needs to be too. So we started from scratch. We wanted to create packaging that complemented the product, and highlighted everything from its deliciousness to its sustainability.
Overall Design: Our Impossible Burger patties come in a package that puts the patties front and center, and showcases how indistinguishable our product is from a regular beef burger. It uses Vacuum Skin Packaging (VSP) — an advanced technology that allows shoppers to experience the bright red color and juicy texture of Impossible Burger. The two-patty pack and easy-to-open pull tab provides convenient handling and cooking. In our studies, the packaging design was well-received by consumers, who called out that they liked how the patties are visible and separate, and how the tray keeps them in place.
The Tray: The patty tray is made with recycled materials, and is recyclable again after use. When creating the tray, we assessed recycled and recyclable materials, and considered both materiality (ratio of plastic weight to product weight on a mass balance basis) and how to dispose of the packaging at the end of its life. We decided on a rigid tray and recycled, recyclable plastic (rPET), which minimizes the total amount of that plastic used overall.
The Band: The descriptive band that wraps around the patty tray has an ultrasonic seal and for easy opening. The graphics represent our bright brand colors, our nutrition facts, and our sustainability icons — the first time we’ve communicated environmental savings on our packaging.
Our patty packaging design was a collaboration between a group of teams at Impossible Foods, including our Creative, Product Management, Packaging, R&D, and Operations teams. We have a patent pending on our unique packaging design.
