Earlier this month, Impossible Foods released what it calls its annual "impact report." It's not the same as a sustainability report; Impossible Foods released something analogous to a sustainability report in March, detailing the lifecycle assessment the company had done on its Impossible Burger 2.0 formulation.

Rather, the company's impact report is a marketing piece — as these reports almost always are — detailing how its products and no-animal-products-ever philosophy has already changed the dialogue around food, and to some extent has already affected the environment. Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown uses it to iterate his goal of eliminating animals as a food-production technology for humans, globally, by 2035.

But, in a move I find hard to understand, Impossible Foods' leadership also used its impact report to take a swipe at regenerative livestock agriculture, a subset of the grass-fed beef industry.

A regenerative grazing system promises to restore soil health and increase carbon sequestration while increasing herd density and size. To do this — in an overly simplified explanation — regenerative farmers keep their animals bunched and moving across designated grazing areas; the action of their hooves and addition of their manure restore soil health over time and sequester carbon to offset the pollution produced by livestock agriculture.

There are regenerative processes used with hog and poultry production as well. Proponents swear by it as a potentially planet-saving technique, but the program also has plenty of critics, not just at Impossible Foods.

Sourcing from so-called regenerative farms is popular with those brands that market themselves as a healthier-for-the-planet meat product: Applegate, Nature's Gourmet, Cooks Venture, Epic Provisions. Still, grass-fed and -finished beef constitutes a single-digit sliver of the beef market in the United States, and regenerative livestock production, of any species, is but a small slice of that.

So what was the point of calling out regenerative agriculture the "clean coal" of beef in its impact report? What does Impossible Foods gain from its public tongue-lashing of Allan Savory and The Savory Institute, credited with pioneering regenerative agriculture, calling its theories "very thoroughly debunked?"

In an article on the Food Navigator website about the report, Carrie Balkcom, executive director of the American Grassfed Association, wrote in a rebuttal that Impossible Foods' intent was "to deflect negative attention from its GMO soy-based products" and called its flagship product "impossible-to-defend Impossible 'burgers'."

Perhaps. If that is Impossible Foods' and Brown's intention, they're using a proven messaging technique, albeit one that is most effective when the target is a Goliath to the finger-pointer's David. The conventional meat industry knows this dynamic well.

And while fans of brands like Applegate and Epic are certainly also likely to be fans of Impossible Foods, I see it more of a yes-and situation in the shopping basket rather than a zero-sum, this-or-that choice. After all, according to IRI, shopping trips in which meat substitutes are purchased are four times more likely to also include meat than shopping trips that don't include a meat substitute purchase.

One of the meat industry-changing dynamics of the last decade has been the industry's ability to segment the market narrowly, directing various claims at a consumer niche willing to pay a premium for "antiobiotic-free" or "free-range." The profit is in the adjectives, and the pie is growing because of them for the meat industry as a whole. For the foreseeable future, consumers will continue to be open to all these claims.

Impossible Foods is bringing a surprisingly narrow perspective to a broad opportunity.

What was the point of that?

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