Burger King's Impossible Whopper: see the technology that is making the impossible, possible

The Impossible burger is kind of the Tesla of food if you think about it. It's full of new technology. It seeks to disrupt it's sector. And it has inspired thousands of sometimes heated conversations about the future, but one thing it hasn't been all this time is widely available in restaurants. That may be about to change. The impossible burger is coming to Burger King. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] The impossible burger patty will be available in the whopper at 59 St. Louis Burger Kings to start and likely the other 7,000 plus nationwide this year. But I'm neither in St. Louis or willing to wait, so we're going to have it our way. Yes, hi, I need eight whoppers. Done as follows please. I need two with cheese, two with out cheese, and then I need two without beef with cheese. And two without beef without cheese. Okay it looks good, that should do it. Okay $28.31, thank you. Thank you. 28 bucks. [MUSIC] Okay not that we've got what Burger King brings to the party and a lot of it let's go get the other piece. Let's go to impossible. [MUSIC] Impossible's headquartered in Silicon Valley and they're waiting for us with the technically correct grill. [MUSIC] Right, so this is, I call this a grill, you pros call this something else. Yeah, it's a conveyor broiler. Conveyor broiler. I see the thing moving, and inside there's a broiler. And this is what's really used in a Burger King restaurant, right? That's exactly right. Okay, the grill marks come from those things. They do. Okay, now I know where- And it takes its little journey. How long is the journey? About two minutes and 35 seconds. Now, you've got some of the patties here. I do. These are the ones that are actually gonna go to Burger King. Now show me what that looks like. And it looks a little different to me from the ones that I've seen. And eat but tell me what's going on here technically. Yeah, so technically we change a little bit to make sure that it fit the bun in the Burger King system. Yeah. We worked very hard and long to make sure that that Perfect bite was achieved as soon as you bit into your first Impossible Whopper. So tell me about the idea of the size, cuz I know if you go to a quick-serve restaurant and you get a burger, you do not wanna come up with a mouthful of just bread and lettuce. That's exactly right. So the diameter of this patty fits the bun perfectly. We have a very low level of shrinkage with Impossible. Why is that? It just doesn't shrink like traditional 80, 20 ground beef. There's coconut fat that responds about the same way as beef fat does. Okay. Here you can see the white specks here, as it cooks those render throughout the cooking process. So as you can see these little coconut specks just modeling itself after a 80, 20 lean to fat ratio beef. the 2.0 formula meant what?>>well you know the 2.0 the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 really gave us the ability to access different pieces of equipment because they responded better to high heat temperature Pot holding, there are a number of improvements, vast improvements. This is all restaurant talk I like it. Yeah. Always when some things in a hot area waiting to be served. Correct. So you just some additional engineering and the two point O, to get this thing to like all those restaurant style enviroments. As well as textual components, nutritional components. We have improved everything about this product. Impossible says one of their biggest updates that swayed BK, was getting the patty to survive the death defying drop at the end of the broilers conveyor. Now you're making this announcement on April 1, so I have to ask, is there anything I should know. Pat Brown is Impossible's founder. You can sort of think of it as a meta. April Fool's joke in the sense that people will get a burger that they will actually believe is made from an animal and be told it's made from plants and think it's an April Fool's joke and it's not. It's a happy trick. So it's kind of a meta April Fool's joke. We're making meat From plants. That's never been done before, people have made fan base replacements for me, but they haven't made plant based meat. Okay, so after all the understanding of what we're talking about the science and technology that went into it, the tools that machinery that are going to be used to grill it. It all comes down to one thing for the customer. What's it like when I pull it out of the wrapper? Now, here is one of those Whopper's we bought at the local Burger King, right? Now, we know what this looks like. Here, we've disassembled one there, and you can see, here's the grilled side of it. Let's compare that to the impossible that's going to go into that Whopper. You can see more regularity on this side. The impossible goes in and comes out. With the right shape, the right size, because of what it's made of it doesn't have this kind of shrinkage going on, and some different shaping to it. Alright let's assemble our very own, custom, not yet available in Silicon Valley, available in Silicon Valley, impossible whopper. Okay, now, You can see from the outside, look pretty similar, but the key, I think, is to cut in here now. [MUSIC] And let's see what these guys look like when they're cross-sectioned. [MUSIC] So, there is our traditional Whopper, and here is our impossible Whopper [BLANK_AUDIO] Okay, I've never played with food so much in my life and not actually tasted it. Let's get a bite now of the impossible Whopper. This is pretty accurate we've assembled here. These are real Whoppers with real impossible patties that are going to Burger King. This is all the real deal. All you're missing is the Burger King employee. Sorry, I can't help that. Let's see what we've got here. Now, I've had Whoppers, I know what they taste like. You know what's so good about it is how unremarkable it is. It's just like the Whopper you know. And that expected sameness and normalness is really the big story here, come along with some kind of a plant-based patty or something that takes you a different direction and consumers quickly feel schooled. As if what they've been eating isn't what they should have anything and over and over studies say that the consumers will push back on that and say don't judge me. Criticize me. I like what I like. This should print as what they like. One place the Impossible Whopper will be different, is price. Costing about a buck more than the standard Whopper. In an industry where wars have been fought with items that often cost just a dollar. But if you give them our burger [BLANK_AUDIO] A very large majority of them say they would definitely buy it, okay, and would be willing to pay a premium for it. Similar surveys reveal that if consumers do spend the money and make the choice, it's for taste and their own health first with the good of the environment and animals a pretty distant second. But neither impossible, nor Burger King can know for sure, as nobody has done plant-based meat in a restaurant at this scale.