When Impossible Foods announced that CEO Peter McGuiness would step down after nearly four years, the company framed the move as a transition “from a position of strength.” For Rachel Konrad, the former head of communications at Impossible Foods, it felt more like the inevitable endpoint of a long strategic detour.
“I would never have moved my whole family back from Europe to go to a CPG veggie burger company,” Konrad said this week on The Spoon Podcast. “I went to join a radical, unusual, category-busting biotech juggernaut.”
Konrad joined Impossible in 2016, knowing the company was stepping into a fight. In fact, those fights were what her former boss, Pat Brown, hired her to help fight.
Immediately after Konrad started at Impossible, Pat Brown forwarded her an email from someone “very highly placed in the ag sector.”
“It said there was an unlimited budget to destroy this silly little company called Impossible Foods, likely funded by the Cattlemen’s Association. Take it down based on propaganda, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”
That pressure campaign was real, but Konrad doesn’t believe that’s what ultimately weakened Impossible. “The biggest mistake startups make is they get a little traction and suddenly decide, ‘Now we’re playing in the big leagues,’” Konrad said. “They overhaul the company and adopt the incumbent playbook.”
That usually means conventional branding, big advertising spends, and competing directly with legacy giants.
“If you’re a startup, you will never out-advertise Nestlé or Unilever,” she said. “Once you adopt the chessboard of the incumbent industry, you’re dead. It might take a year or two, but you’re dead.”
Konrad sees Impossible’s pivot under McGuiness, explicitly positioning itself as a tech-enabled CPG company, as exactly that trap. She believes early investors like Vinod Khosla would have never jumped on board if they thought Impossible was going to be another CPG brand.
“Vinod did not invest in a stupid CPG veggie burger company,” she said. “He invests in things that change the trajectory of humanity.”
Konrad told me that what made Impossible different wasn’t branding, but its technology. She felt that the company should have aggressively pursued a B2B strategy in which Impossible was the platform for next-generation meat alternatives, rather than trying to conquer the world as a consumer-facing brand.
“It’s a category-defining biotech company that makes heme,” Konrad said. “Why didn’t Impossible license heme? Why didn’t it go into supplements? Why didn’t it become a major B2B player?”
When I asked her if the company pushing out Pat Brown and going with McGuiness was a mistake – pointing out Brown’s notorious prickly attitude – she said yes, pointing to the example of Steve Jobs.
“Apple only became Apple because Steve Jobs came back and said, ‘F**k that—we’re not doing SKU management,’” she said. “Impossible needs a Steve Jobs moment.”
I agree with Konrad that Brown is a unique visionary, the kind who is sometimes needed to overcome massive obstacles, but I still wonder if the overall headwinds against plant-based protein were too much for any leader.
Konrad doesn’t suffer from these same doubts and still believes Impossible has a chance to become a long-term success story. “My hope – for the planet, for people, for animals – is that Impossible goes back to that original vision. Without that, it’s going to be very hard to turn this around.”
It was a fun conversation and you can listen to it below.
