When Peter McGuinness began his career at one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, he was placed in the accounts payable department after being deemed “not good enough” for account management. Despite being doubted, he went on to become the youngest vice president, president, and eventually CEO in the organization, where he led some of their largest accounts, including Mastercard and Unilever.
“Don’t get discouraged. It’s tough, and you’re worth it. And…persistence over resistance,” he said at the last Dean’s Speaker Series of the semester, in conversation with Ashley Wong and Budi Sosrodjojo, both MBA 25.
Watch the video:
Now the CEO of Impossible Foods, a company aiming to disrupt the food systems industry by creating nutrient-dense meat substitutes, McGuinness has taken on the challenge of convincing meat eaters to make the switch to a plant-based product. His main goal, he said, is to get meat eaters, like himself, to eat less of it.
The average American eats five burgers a month, he said. By replacing just one burger with an Impossible product, he said, the company would double in size for the next 15 years—and more importantly, there would be less impact on climate and more animals saved.
“I’m not a vegan. I’m kind of our target audience, right, which is a flexitarian. I eat a lot less meat, and I’m open to plant-based,” he said. “So the addressable market of Impossible is really like almost $1.5-2 trillion dollars. It’s the largest addressable market in the world—bigger than cars, computers, anything, because everyone has to eat, right?”
McGuinness broke into the food industry as president and chief operating officer of Chobani, where he helped introduce a variety of new products, including the company’s iconic Flip cups, creamers, and plant-based options.
When he joined Chobani, the company had 5% household penetration in the U.S. Investors attributed this to Americans preferring sweetness over tart Greek yogurt. McGuinness pivoted on the marketing, highlighting the product’s high protein content—and also introducing low-fat and zero-sugar options, which appeal more to the U.S. market. McGuinness grew the company to the No. 1 yogurt brand in the nation.
“Communication is a form of selling. Whether that’s in public relations, whether that’s in paid advertising, whether that’s in speeches you do, emails you do, you’re always communicating,” he said. “As you communicate as a person, what you say, how you write it, know that someone’s forming an impression of you.”
McGuinness took these lessons with him to Impossible Foods, which he has had setbacks, some which he acknowledged came from some of his own mistakes.
When the company first started, they leaned into messaging sustainability, as well as the company’s lack of harm to animals. When these methods proved ineffective, they targeted the cattle industry. Realizing they wanted to invite, not isolate, their customers, he instead highlighted the health benefits of the company’s 52 products, including protein, fiber, amino acids, and “zero cholesterol.”
While they are a mission-driven company, he said he’s learned not to sacrifice their business model.
“You don’t have a sustainable mission without a sustainable business, right? And you can’t let the mission overshadow the business,” he said. “The better the business does, the more good the company does in the world.”
But before Impossible goes global, McGuinness said he wants to focus first on making the brand more established and accessible in the U.S. by lowering costs and improving taste. That means remaining ambitious while acknowledging the company’s limitations. “Try to do everything, and you will do nothing. I promise you,” he said.
That said, he argued that “plant-based is here to stay.”
“Our job now is to destigmatize it, get rid of the myths, get rid of the misperceptions, make it more delicious, make it even more nutritious, make it even more available, and make it even more affordable.”
Read the transcript:
Chatman: Welcome to the Dean’s Speaker Series. I’m Jenny Chatman, interim dean here at Haas. Really great to see you. I am so excited to introduce our guest today, Peter
McGuinness. As you know, Peter is the CEO of Impossible Foods, the fastest-growing plant-based meat company in the world. Under his direction, Impossible is taking a leading role in reshaping consumer preferences and building a more sustainable and, importantly, a more compassionate food system worldwide.
So during Peter’s 30 years of experience in global marketing, he rose through the ranks to become CEO at Chobani by reenvisioning its marketing and advertising strategy, he helped build Chobani into an iconic brand and market-dominating product. I think I had some this morning. Peter’s almost positioned eminent brands for the new millennium, including Mastercard, Unilever, Microsoft, and Sony. If we relate him to our Defining Leadership Principles, the two I came are Question the Status Quo and Beyond Yourself. But you may have others in mind as well. I’m really excited to see how Peter sees the future of food and what all of us can do to make food and the planet more sustainable.
So before I introduce you to our student interviewers, let me just remind you that we have a specific way of doing question-and-answer here. You have a note card on your seat and a pencil. Throughout the talk, if you come up with questions, please jot them down. Our folks will be coming around and collecting them and then, at the end of our session, about 1:15, we’ll be
asking those questions. So think about those questions as you’re going through. So let me turn it over now to Budi and Ashley, who are going to lead today’s discussion. Please help me in welcoming all three of them.
Peter McGuinness: Thank you. By the way, I’d love to have you at my next board meeting, and you can just say that exact same thing with all my bosses.
Ashley Wong: Hi, Peter. I’m Ashley. I’m a second-year MBA student here at Haas. It’s an honor as a graduating student to participate in this conversation with you today, especially as the last Dean’s Speaker Series of the semester.
McGuinness: I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m going with the best for last.
Budi Sosrodjojo: We’re going with the best for last.
McGuinness: Delusional or not, it’s OK.
Sosrodjojo: Nice to meet you, Peter. I’m Budi Sosrodjojo, also a second-year MBA student
here at Haas. It’s great to be here today. It’s a great honor to speak with you in front of everyone, and I think everyone here is excited to welcome you to our beautiful campus. Welcome to Berkeley, and welcome to Haas.
McGuinness: Thank you, very much.
Sosrodjojo: To kick things off, I’d love to dive deeper on your career journey. As Jenny mentioned in the intro, you started your career in advertising, where you hone in the marketing
skills before transitioning into leadership positions at Chobani and now leading Impossible Foods. I would love to learn a little more about what initially drew you to the food industry, and did you ever always see yourself ending up in this space when you were starting out in advertising?
McGuinness: Yeah, I did start out at McCann Erickson, world’s largest advertising agency, $3 billion in revenue, and 10,000 employees. I started out in the accounts payable department, which is not a place you want to be, and I paid the media invoices, and it was on this old archaic computer system, and there were computers when I was that young. And you would input all the invoices, and it would take hours because these spots just ran forever. And then, you go to hit ‘pay,’ and one of them ran out of the time period and you couldn’t pay it, so it was the least thankful job in the world. It’s like two hours, and I can’t even pay the damn bill. So started out there, and I think it was interesting. I was deemed not good enough to be in account management, and as you guys all try to get jobs, it’s super difficult, so they threw me in there, and I was able to get into a training program and get some visibility. But it was super depressing at the time. And I’ll just answer that question, but one thing as you guys go into the workforce, and I still do this today, I was being interviewed by someone in human resources—I have no problem with human resources department—but they didn’t know the job. And they had a list of things that they thought were needed to get the job. Not really interested in my character. I had internships there twice, and it was like I was missing something, right, so therefore, I was disqualified. And so, I think, make sure that people understand your education, but also your character, and make sure you get your day in the sun.
So to this day, I interview everybody. Now at this point as CEO, I’ll interview them last and quickly. But the point is, I wonder how many people got judged, mistakenly judged, and didn’t get a shot that were talented. I went on to be the youngest vice president, president, CEO in that organization, and every time I got promoted, we didn’t have text tell the—I would send a note to the HR department saying, and I was terrible, I was angry, and I’d be like, ‘Jeez, I don’t know how I’m getting promoted for someone who’s not worthy,’ and I would just do that every time just to—I couldn’t help myself, and it was catty and immature of me, and I loved it. And they deserved it. So you also, there’s another moral in here, just don’t get discouraged. It’s tough, and you’re worth it. And persistence over resistance. And anyway, enough of that. So I went on in advertising, which is an interesting thing, and it was total advertising, so it was PR, it was sports marketing, it was digital, it was traditional advertising, and what you’re doing is, you’re building brands and driving demand. And what I realized is, that’s kind of the most important thing no matter what your title is. If you’re not growing, I don’t care if you’re chief operating officer, CEO, head of—if a business is not growing, it’s a problem.
So I spent my whole life in demand creation. I never thought of it that way. But how do you position a company, how do you position a product, how do you communicate about a product? How do you make it compelling to a consumer to want to purchase that product? I’m in the advertising industry, but that never ends. That’s still what keeps me up at night. How could I get more people to buy Impossible so we can change the world for the better? And by the way, Impossible is one of the greatest communication challenges of all time. Right? We’re asking meat eaters to change their eating habits and buy plant-based meat. Why? It’s not less expensive. It doesn’t necessarily taste better. And so the value proposition is an extremely tricky one.
So what I learned in advertising has never left me, no matter what my title was. So I did that for like 22 years. I did it in London and Paris and New York and Chicago, all around the world. And I went on to run those agencies, and it was incredibly valuable. And you honed your communication skills. And the other thing is, communication is a form of selling. Whether that’s in public relations, whether that’s in paid advertising, whether that’s in speeches you do, emails you do, you’re always communicating. And so, as you communicate as a person, what you say, how you write it, know that you’re forming—someone’s forming an impression of you, right? Your personal brand. And know when you’re in business, it’s affecting the company that you work for. Then, I went to Chobani, and it was a small company, $300 million when I joined. When I left it was $2.4 billion, so it was a good $2 billion run, and yogurt was a lot of similar things, right? It was for the coasts, it was for elitists, real men eat eggs, all that nonsense, and bacon. And we had to make yogurt cool, we had to make it a household name. And we were also twice as expensive because it was Greek yogurt, so it took 3 cups of milk to make 1 cup of yogurt—that’s how you got the protein—so we filtered it and filtered it, and what you’re left with is low-sugar, high-protein, which is the biggest megatrend in the world. So how do you make that a household product? The penetration, household penetration of Chobani when I joined was under 5%, so 96% of the country had never tried one. And the pundits had told the founder at the time, ‘Don’t make Greek yogurt, it’s too tart for the American palate. Americans love sugar.’ It might be true, but he said, ‘Screw that, I’m doing it anyway.’ And $2.5 billion later, No. 1 yogurt in America. We proved all the pundits wrong, so the other thing is, you should go up against status quo, you should challenge convention, you should challenge the naysayers. So that was really interesting and—but how do you do that, right? How do you make yogurt cool? It’s not really cool. And how do you make it more accessible, right? There’s a whole commercial strategies, right? We made it a dollar a cup, so you’re getting a cup of protein for a buck. We lean into the protein. We lean into the probiotics. So the nutritional aspects of it. We made it delicious. It was delicious and nutritious. We made it accessible. I call it DNA: delicious, nutritious, affordable. You have to make things up, always, and say you made it up. Anyway, we came up with a product called Flip, which was basically nuts and seeds and chocolate on the side car, I called it like Greek yogurt on training wheels, and it was the gateway drug into Chobani at the time. And we had Almond Coco Loco, we had Key Lime Crumble, and people are like, I’m not into this Greek yogurt, you dress it up, and it’s kind of cool. So flip became a billion-dollar brand product in and of itself, and kids loved it. and we tried all this nutritionist, high-nutrition kids stuff, and they thought it was boring. And then I did Brogurt—put it in a black cup and put a 20g on it—and guys are going to the gym. It was above Core Power and all that nonsense, and it was beautiful. and it was just marketing, right. It’s the same product, I just made it bigger, it was 16 ounces, that’s why you got the 25g. And you make it mobile, no spoon required, and you can chug it down and flex and be cool. So I did the Brogurt thing, and then sugar became a problem, so we became less sugar yogurt. We didn’t renovate core products. A lot of people make that mistake, and people reject it because it’s not the product they know and love. And then we did a zero-sugar yogurt. We figured out how to do zero sugar. Now, sugar is naturally found in lactose, the milk, we did 0, we found enzymes that would eat the sugar. And we came up with zero sugar. Then we came out with Chobani oat milk. People thought we were nuts, we’re a dairy company. I couldn’t go against the dairy country like Oatly does because we’re 99% dairy, so I just called it lactose-free milk, and we beat Oatly in market share and we beat them in six months. We went into creamers, and it was interesting because the status quo comment, you just look at categories that need disrupting. So there’s a $3 billion creamer market dominated by Danone, and we don’t like Danone at Chobani, it’s fake crap, and there was Coffee mate by Nestle, and they call it creamer, but there’s no cream in it, and it’s nondairy—not in a plant-based way, in an everything artificial way—so I lobbied the government for new regulations on defining the creamer category, and we went in and did a creamer. What was interesting, and I get off the Chobani thing on to Impossible, one of the biggest by-products of yogurt was cream because we sold mostly nonfat. If you’re in Greece, everyone eats whole-milk yogurt. It’s creamier, got a better mouth feel, but in America, people wanted the nonfat. So we had all this excess cream, so we sold it to butter companies and ice cream companies, and we said, ‘Why don’t we put it in the ball?’ We bought tetra lines from Europe, making 100% recyclable packaging, we put the cream in there, add a little pure cane sugar. We had a three-ingredient creamer, which is a beautiful extension to Chobani yogurts, and it’s in the morning day part. And we had creamers with cream in it; it was pretty cool. It’s like one of those aha moments, so we up-ended the creamer market, and it needed to be disrupted. Dominated by two legacy CPGs that made bad product, and they owned the distribution channels, and they could be lazy because they own the market, no one could challenge them. We had enough scale to challenge them. And before you know it, we were taking tons and tons of market share away from these legacy brands making bad products. And so, in the end, I think, and I’ll just put a fine point on Chobani, I think good food is a right, not a privilege. I think we’re trying to make better food for more people. And it sounds kind of wonky, but it’s a very tricky equation. There’s a lot of better food out there that’s expensive, so it’s not for more people. And there’s a lot of more people food that’s cheap and crappy to eat. So how do you make better food less expensive and more accessible for more people? That is the future of food. Democratizing better food. And it’s a broken food system. So the cheap stuff that everyone can afford is not better food. The better food, whole foods, I love it, our products are there, it’s expensive. So anyway, I think food companies have a lot of work to do to make their products better and more accessible and more affordable, and that’s that DNA, so it was a great run. I started as chief marketing officer; I ended up running the company. We had thousands of factory workers. We had a big factory in Idaho and Upstate New York. It was a beautiful story, founder is an amazing person, the product was—you felt good about the product. And Danone, our competitor, used potassium sorbate, you had a 30-day shelf life. And they put potassium sorbate for freshness, but it’s a chemical. I ran an ad one time, which I probably shouldn’t talk about, and it’s a challenger brand, we’re not a big advertiser, we don’t have tons of money, we’re not a multinational conglomerate, but you did little things that made a lot of noise. And so, I did an ad that said Danone yogurt had bug killer in it. I knew we would get a cease and desist and, we would get sued, but therein lies the magic because potassium sorbate is found in bug killer, so it was a creative license, probably a bad idea, but in the end, it was a six-month PR thing, and they had to defend it and every time they were talking about it, they were saying I don’t have bug killer but the person—bug killer, what are you talking about—it was fun.
But we did a lot of things like that, I sued Alex Jones from Breitbart, ultra-right wing, this is the last story—I keep saying this, but it’s good. He slandered us in Idaho, and we had a lot of immigrants that worked in our company. And he was saying, I guess there was something bad happened, and there was like a sexual assault in Idaho, and he said it was all done because of Chobani and all the immigrants and all this stuff, so I said, ‘We’re done with this,’ so it’s actually really hard to win and prove defamation—very, very hard. But sued them in Idaho because we knew the governor, we knew the mayor, we were a huge employer so they didn’t like the story, either. And wrote it in a way that if it got out, it would kind of be a press release for Chobani, and we said we’ll drop it as long as you apologize. I want you to apologize on all the channels that you defamed us on, I want you to apologize to the families, I want you to apologize to the families of Chobani, workers proud to be here, and Alex Jones doesn’t apologize. He says,
‘OK, we’ll see you in court, I’m going to hold you up in court, and we’re a corporation, you’re some broke wack-a-doodle, and you’re not going to win this. So this goes out, so anyway, it’s this huge national news story, right, and we’re just a yogurt company. And Chobani sticks up for themselves. Then that turns into we’re anti-bullying, we’re this beacon to not be bullied. And these letters are pouring in, and then even Brad Pitt reaches out and says I’m going to start suing the Enquirer, I was letting these idiots say anything they want about me. Then it became, I’m going to stick up for myself thing. End of the story, he had to apologize, he ran out of money, and on national TV, on all of his channels, he had to apologize to us, the families, it was huge. Massive brand building moment, right? Kind of had nothing to do with yogurt, it was the values of the company: equality, inclusion, stick up for yourself. So it was wild so these are the things you have to do actually because we were scrappy. We didn’t have money and resources, right? And I could go on and on, we did stuff with Russia, too, which is pretty funny. Anyway, so Chobani, because we were sponsoring the Olympics, and Putin wouldn’t let our yogurt in. And so, I was doing a New York Times interview, and I said, ‘I’d like to think yogurt had diplomatic immunity,’ and it trended two weeks on Twitter, but every time our athletes lost, I said it was because they didn’t have Chobani. It became in the national news cycle. And Putin knew it, damn it, and so it was fun, those kind of things, right? And so we had a lot of fun at Chobani. We grew to a national No. 1 yogurt in America, top 20 trusted brands in America. The company’s only been around for 12 years. But it was authentic, right? And you’ve got to lean into the—what the company stands for. It’s constantly challenging. And you’ve got to have a value system, right, and you have to have a mission. And you have to lean into it, and you have to live it, right, and all forms of communication, so there’s a lot of valuable stuff in there, and also you have to make a good product at the end of the day and make it affordable for everyone. So anyway, that’s Chobani, it was great, great company, great brand. And then I went over to Impossible. And I had eaten the product—I thought it was amazing. I couldn’t even understand how it could taste like animal meat, in some cases better. I remember chicken products were preferred to the
animal 70 to 30. I love the mission of it. It’s also a broken food system, and I think the world
will have more—I’m not a vegan. I’m kind of our target audience, right, which is a flexitarian. I eat a lot less meat, and I’m open to plant-based. And so the addressable market of Impossible is really like almost $1.5-2 trillion dollars. It’s the largest market—addressable market—in the world, bigger than cars, computers, anything, because everyone has to eat, right? So chicken, beef, pork, animal global is over $1.5 trillion. That’s what makes Impossible potentially so valuable.
But the mission only works if we displace the animal. If I’m picking on veggie burgers, you’re not advancing climate, animal welfare, you’re not advancing anything. We have to get meat eaters to eat our product. Sounds so simple. And they have been eating meat for generations, and they’re quite happy eating meat. So how do you get them to come over, right? Eight, nine years ago, beyond Impossible, before my time, they led with climate, which was intuitive. But not enough people care about climate. It is what it is, it’s a sad fact, we have to make more
people aware of it, we have to make more people care but not enough people care for it to be mass. The other thing is when you attach climate to food, it makes people think it’s going to be a compromise, right, it’s not going to taste good, it’s a warm beer, cold shower. And so, it just didn’t work. So we did that for years and years and years, and people were banging their head up against the wall saying, ‘What? How does this not work?’ So we wasted a lot of time and money doing that. Now, we learned, we learned what to do—you can learn what not to do, incredibly valuable lesson, too. But we lost time. Then, we went down the animal welfare route, very intuitive. Do you want to kill all these animals and stuff? Not enough people cared. So enter me, and by the way, we did it kind of in a, I would say, and these are mistakes we made, and I think—I promise to be very transparent here, it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s totally OK to share them. And so, in the end, we were against the cattle industry, death to the cattle industry, death to the slaughter cartel, it was like a zealot kind of thing. And at the end of the day, people don’t want a civil war in America. I don’t know cattle farmers, but I don’t have a problem with it. I might have saw “Yellowstone,” kind of liked it, “1923” not bad either, “1880” whatever the hell, a little too far away, I don’t like that one, so people just don’t—there’s another thing about business and, there’s another thing about brands. You should be for something, not against something. So we insulted the animal eaters, which is 99.9% of the world, when we should have invited them. So we just had the I wrong, just a tiny little mistake. so there’s another lesson in here, never piss off your target audience and expect them to buy your product. So we’ve been backpedaling that and really just trying to come up with what is the communication hierarchy, right? And really what it is, is it’s food. It’s center plate. We were having a talk back in the green room or whatever room we were in, and I was like oat milk, we made it, it’s an ingredient. So oat cap and oat latte and barista, you’re having coffee, you’re putting a milk in there. That’s less heady, that’s easy. This is center plate. This is your main dish. Very, very hard. And so, it has to taste good. So I’ve asked everyone in the plant-based industry to work on their products and make them better. I’ve heard time and time again, you’re never getting a second chance to make a first impression. There’s 200 plant-based companies in America, probably 180 too many. And a lot of them don’t make quality products, so people come in, they don’t have a good experience, and they shut down, right? So it’s food. When I first came to Impossible, the investors are like, ‘Peter, you’re running a tech company.’ I was like, ‘Huh? Technology?’ ‘Yes, we’re using technology to make the food, but tech is a bad word with food, too, because that translates to processed. So I split the difference with the investors. I said, ‘We’re a tech-enabled food company. But we have to make delicious food. It’s center plate. It’s your lunch, it’s your dinner, and no one wants to compromise their food. Life’s hard enough. So if it’s not delicious, it’s a nonstarter. The second thing people want is what’s best for themselves. And it’s OK. We’re all naturally a little bit selfish. So it has to be nutritious. And we did a lousy job. We have zero cholesterol. I called it lactose-free milk. I could say zero-cholesterol meat. Whether you’re rich, poor, bicoastal, Republican, Democratic, no one likes cholesterol. I think I’m going to increase my cholesterol today, get a heart attack sooner… zero cholesterol, half the saturated fat, the same protein, over 20 grams of protein, with nine essential amino acids and fiber. There’s no fiber in animal meat. When I get to Impossible, I was like, ‘Hey, we have fiber in there, where should tell people about that, yeah, it sounds great, so fiber is a huge thing, not found in
animal meat.’ So you’re talking about, this product is nutrient-dense. Now, the animal industry is calling this processed. And we’ve done a lousy job of defending ourselves. I define processed as something artificial like a Twinkie. And I like Twinkie, I’ve cut back in my advanced years, but something that is highly artificial that delivers no nutrition, that’s processed. By the way, almost 70% of the entire grocery store is processed. But that’s stuck because we have a lot of ingredients because it takes a lot of ingredients to mirror and mimic an animal product. It’s not easy. So we’re going to label delicious and nutritious. I’m not trying to repeat Chobani like I’m a one-trick pony, but then you have to make it accessible. So it’s not distributed enough, price is a problem or a challenge or a barrier. So we got the deliciousness with Impossible. And 70/30 prefer to animal on chicken and 50/50 on beef. A blind taste with an animal burger and our burger, that’s pretty remarkable, I think. Now we have to work on the accessibility and the affordability. So it needs to be distributed in more places, and it needs to be more affordable. And then I think we have a really, really sound, sustainable business model, and what I tell everyone at Impossible is, ‘We have a beautiful sustainability mission, but we didn’t have a sustainable company, right? So the better we are from a business perspective, the more good we can do in the world.’ So we have to make sure our balance sheet is in order, we have to have cash. We can’t spend money rampantly with no business model, and his, that’s why a lot of plant-based companies are going out of business every day. There’s like 10 a month going out of business. You have to have a sustainable business to achieve your sustainable mission, and in that order, by the way, and a lot of people make mistakes, they’re on the wrong side of that equation, and they’re not going to do enough good in the world because they’re not going to be around. So delicious, nutritious, accessible, affordable, I think is the future of food. It’s actually incredibly vital to the plant-based sector because I think a lot of the plant-based companies have the nutritious part, not enough have the delicious part. None of them have the accessibility part. It’s just not—and I’ll get technical for a second, there’s 9,000 total distribution points out there, we have 1,000. It’s a really good start, there’s 8,000 more, you know. We’re in 60,000 food service locations. There’s 1.5 million. So when people say the category is dead, I said, ‘It hasn’t even really started. It’s in first gear.’ And then the affordability piece, we’re finally at parity with grass-fed organic beef, but we’re two times the price of private label, that stuff in the well. So we have to work on pricing. In order to get pricing, we need scale. In order to get scale, we need to grow, so we have to crack this code, and no one’s done it. Having said that, plant-based is here to stay. The world will become more and more plant-based. Whether it be for animal welfare, climate welfare, nutrition, no cholesterol, or whether it be for the simple fact there’s not enough animal products to feed the population. So no matter how you slice it, no matter how you dice it, there is plant-based here to stay. We can debate size of market, what markets move faster, you know, till the cows come home—pun intended—but what we can’t debate is plant-based is here to stay. Now, our job now is to destigmatize it, get rid of the myths, get rid of the misperceptions, make it more delicious, make it even more nutritious, make it even more available, and make it even more affordable. And if we do that, and I say that a little flippantly, like it’s easy, it’s very hard—there will be a massive plant-based market doing good in the world. And again, if we don’t displace the animal product, if you’re not eating us in lieu of an animal product, you’re not saving trees, water, avoiding GHG, and animal welfare, so it’s a fascinating business.
I’m exhausted. I’m sure you are too. Sorry for going on and on about it, but I think it’s a very difficult—it’s a big challenge. It’s doable. It’s achievable. And it must happen. And so we just have to make it—we just have to make it happen now. And anyway, rantings of a tired mad man.
Wong: Turning to the mission and the products that have won Impossible its disruptive title. Impossible’s products promise to take on multiple roles on fighting climate change while serving up tasty, nutritious food, as you mentioned. How are you and your team balancing all these hefty priorities while making sure they’re not diluted and compromised as you scale?
McGuinness: Yeah, I mean, look, I think what I’ve kind of—we have 50 skews, chicken, beef, pork, breakfast, lunch, dinner, you can have our Starbucks sandwich, you can have it at Burger King, Applebee’s, iHop, whatever, by the Safeway, and what’s the name of that, the Berkeley Bowl. What I have instructed our team to do is, we’re on the fifth-generation burger. And we’re not going iPhone 15 or 16 or whatever fricking number we’re on, but I can see us being probably seven or eight generations of this burger each time, making it the taste, the texture, the flavor better. Simplifying the ingredients. Taking cost out of it, not because we’re publicly traded and we’re earnings per share driven to make it more accessible. So we don’t need any more skews. What we need is our skews to be in more distribution, more places, and what we need is our current skews to even taste better and be more affordable. So that’s heavy renovation work. So we used to have a pioneering R&D department, searching for the next big thing. And let’s go do milk and let’s do salmon chunks. I’m like salmon chunks? You can’t even sell the burger, are you nuts? And we have a debate on whole mussel steak. We can make a steak tomorrow, but that’s a much, much smaller market, it’s a bigger bridge in people’s mind. Plant-based steak, it’s that thick, we’re not ready. So why don’t we make our 52 products right now more delicious, more nutritious, and more affordable, right? That’s the best thing. And we can’t do everything, we can’t boil the ocean, we can’t do everything, and the team, we’re ambitious, right, team’s like, ‘Peter, we got to go to India and China, and I’m like, hello, we have 5% household penetration in the U.S. Ninety-five percent of America has not had an Impossible burger yet. I’m going to China? What, are you nuts? And I said, ‘Also, we don’t have the resources. It’s OK to admit it.’ Another big trap in business is: Try to do everything, and you will do nothing. I promise you. So you have to have priorities, and so we’re going to do the EU and the UK, makes sense, per capita consumption of plant-based meat is 2 ½, three times what it is in the U.S. And I’m not saying ‘no’ to China; it’s not if, it’s when. But we have to prioritize. Like the Roman Empire was in Scotland when Rome was burning. And has Hadrian’s Wall—it didn’t work out for them. We can’t be all over the place geographically. We have to resist. There’s so much opportunity, but do you know how much opportunity is right in front of us in the U.S.? Every five percentage points of household penetration, the company doubles. The scale of this thing is in the trillions. By the way, it was a binary thing, it was a black-and-white thing. You’re a Neanderthal if you eat meat, so we have to stop insulting people who eat meat, but the average American consumer eats five burgers a month. If one of them was an Impossible burger, the amount of
water, trees, it’s OK to take a gradual—you’re not going to change someone’s eating habits overnight, so if you can incorporate Impossible into your diet, so if one burger out of every five was an Impossible burger, the company would double in size for the next 15 years. Just one. Twenty percent. And the amount of water and trees you’d save, enormous, and animals you’d save. So I think the other thing is this is going to be a gradual progression, right? And that’s OK. That’s OK. Let’s just get on the menu; let’s get in their basket. Let’s get them to buy it and try it.
And they’re pleasantly surprised. And the repeat is high. So it’s a journey, and we’re on it, and it’s not going to happen overnight, right? There were people predicting the animal agriculture would be dead in 2026—$1.5 trillion industry is going to vanish in a year. I mean, c’mon. So we’re on a journey. We have to enjoy the journey, we have to make sure we’re smart about it, and it’s OK to admit the difficulty and the challenges, and not sugar coat it, candy-coat it.
And so, we have to get in more people’s lives, and that’s flexitarians. So vegans are 1%, 1.5% of the population; vegetarians 5%, 6%, that gets you to 7%. If I’m displacing those products, I’m not advancing anything from mission perspective. Flexitarians, to the way I define it, people open to eating plant-based and people cross-fit, cross-eaters, you know. And there are about 100 million to 110 million of them in the U.S. It’s a huge market. It’s over a third of the U.S. It’s a massive market. So we have to appeal to flexitarians that are willing to eat our products. We also had loan marketing money talking to everybody, and the reality is, there’s immovable people. Some people will never change meat, and that’s OK. We can’t afford to talk to them; we don’t have the time to talk to them, so targeting is really, really important, right? Fish where the fish are. Talk to people that are open-minded. Why would I talk to people that are close-minded right now? maybe I can convert them in 10 years with $100 billion that we don’t have. So we’ve learned so many lessons. But right now, I’m like, chief boring officer, right? And it’s like no China, no India, no new products. It’s like, ‘Peter, you’re boring.’ But the reality is, as a food company, and food companies do it all the time, you make your products better, you put them in more places, you make them more affordable to people. It’s all boring stuff, but it’s critical that we do that. It’s critical that we start behaving as a food company. And that’s going to get more consumption of our products, which is going to make the world a better place. And if that’s boring, so be it.
So right now, as a company, we’re in the, what I would call nuts and bolts, just getting the basics done, right? And is it incredibly inspiring? Is that my pitch to investors? No way. I’m a tech company. But we have to do this stuff. And it’s a necessary evil. and there’s a playbook to it, at Chobani, kraft does it every day, nestle does it every day, all this stuff. We can still be a cool brand, we can still champion causes, champion people, be inclusive, speak up when we see injustice, but the nuts and bolts of the business need to get done. for us to be sustainable and get more products out there.
Sosrodjojo: You’ve got to focus on the main product first before
really trying to attack any other market.
McGuinness: Absolutely.
Wong: Thank you, so much, for all of your thoughtful responses today, Peter. Before we turn it over to audience Q&A, we would love to conclude with a Dean’s Speaker Series staple.
McGuinness: Uh-oh.
Sosrodjojo: Best for last.
Wong: We are living in tense economic, political, environmental times, also in the era of accelerated innovation, growth, and scientific development. But thinking ahead, looking even beyond Impossible, what keeps you up at night, what helps keep you going, and what directions in the food space are you most excited about?
McGuinness: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. I think, look, I think if I just put my business hat on, I want to be an active brand, I don’t want to be an activist brand. That gets you kind of in trouble. I have personal views, and I think we run a business. I just want to make our food accessible to everyone. So I want us to be an inclusive brand, I want us to stand for things. I don’t want to be a negative against things. So you can operate your company in a way that reflects good values. I think we live in a terribly-partisan world, right, and by the way, we were caught up in all of that, so we were the woke brand and the bicoastal elitist, academic, all of that. And it became partisan; it became political. And a lot of that was how we positioned the product, right, against the cattle industry, all that kind of stuff. So it’s never good when your business gets entangled in all of that, and I’m not trying to be a wimp and cop out, right? I told you things we did at Chobani with Breitbart, the board told me, ‘You’re killing all those yogurt eaters. I said, ‘Those Breitbart people don’t eat yogurt, trust me, we’re all good.’ So you have to be careful with that.
Now, I think, look, we have to lead our lives, I think everyone should have a point of view. Everyone should have their own value system. everyone should like what they like, like who they like. and presidents will come and go. there’s checks and balances in place so you just have to live your life, right, and you have to live it to the best of your ability. And you can’t let all of that bog you down. And it’s hard to introduce them to business because they can get very difficult quick. But I’m optimistic. I think the job market right now is tough. I’m not going to deny that. Stock markets all over the place. You can’t even follow the news, it’s dizzying. And so, don’t try. And I think all this will bounce back. I think our sector’s down 15%, 18% for all the reasons i
told you. I think it will come back to growth. So we’re kind of in kind of a stretched, stressed kind
of situation, plant-based in general, so I think things are very tough out there. I think it’s temporary. I think, be eyes wide open, be optimistic, persistence over resistance, you guys are incredibly talented. You’re in an unbelievable institution. I couldn’t get in here when I was your age. I still couldn’t, I don’t think, so you’re in a great academic institution. You’re very, very bright. You’re obviously curious, you’re listening to me drone on about all this stuff. And you’re going to get to the place where you want to be. And it may not be a straight line. That’s OK. Believe in yourself. I keep saying persistence over resistance. People ask me what I hire for. And I say I look for work ethic, of course, I look for grit. I think grit, scrappiness, right, I look for character. I ended up in the accounts payable department because no one cared about my character, right? And, of course, I look for work experience and education and smarts, but I also look for street smarts, common sense, beautiful thing, too. So just go at it. And the other thing I would say, it’s such a cliche, it’s like try to find something you’re passionate about. I’m passionate about food because I think the food system is broken, and I think it’s—good food is a right, not a privilege. And I think there’s a lot that can be changed in the food system if you challenge it. And I think—and we have to eat food every day, so it’s kind of essential, right? So I’m passionate about that. But again, I didn’t get into food until 22 years into my career. So find something you’re passionate about. Go at it, give it your all, be your best, and the world will take care of the rest, you know. I’m not sure I even answered your question.
Chatman: It’s fantastic advice. So we wanted to get a couple questions in from the audience. There have been a wonderful array of questions, and I’m not sure how many we’ll get to, so you can decide how you want to do the answers. Here’s one that’s fun, that is kind of backward way into your view of the future. So this person says, ‘If you were to found your own food startup, what would you do?’ And then, clearly, they have been taking a lot of midterm exams because then they said, ‘Be concrete.’
McGuinness: So if I were to start a food company?
Chatman: Yeah.
McGuinness: And by the way, I can run food companies, I’ve never founded anything in my life, so I have a lot of respect for founders. Look, it would be something along the lines of what I’m talking about. I would probably do something in plant-based because I do think that is the future. We need more plants in our diet, period, for so many reasons, right? For lack of animal food, for animal welfare, for all the reasons we talked about. I think it probably would be in the plant-based space, and I think I would start it with everything I know now. Imagine that? It would be beautiful. I’d make no mistakes. We would have the communication perfect, and I’d start in China. Kidding. It would be a plant-based food company with all the things we talked about, just making delicious food, and I’d be casual about getting it into people’s hands. I wouldn’t make all those mistakes because I think it’s vitally important, climate change is real, animal welfare is real, nutrition is real, right? We have a diabetes epidemic, too many people have heart problems, and so there’s just too much bad food. In fact, bad food dominates food, right? Which is so crazy if you think about it because we have to eat two, three meals a day, unless you’re on Ozempic, which is another thing. And hopefully no one is in this room, but I’m not judgmental. And so, anyway, that’s my answer. I would do a plant-based company right knowing what I know now, and that’s easy because hindsight 20/20, foresight much worse proposition.
Chatman: ‘What differentiates the U.S. from the European plant-based food? Is it the market, is it the customers, what is the difference?’ And you could broaden that out in terms of European approaches to food generally.
McGuinness: Yeah, yes, and yes. I lived in the UK for a while. UK, EU is more fresh food, more whole foods, more—they’re also—they don’t deny climate change. They take care of resources better. They have respect, more respect for natural resources. and they’re just probably, I think, my guess is somewhere between four and six years ahead of the U.S., and that’s why per capita consumption of plant-based is 2 ½ times what it is in the U.S. They’re more open-minded, right? They’re not denying climate change. They’re more respectful of natural resources. And, as a result, the environment is more favorable for them to try it and adopt it and incorporate it. and I believe the same thing is going to happen here. We’re lagging, they’re leading. But I look at them as a leading indicator, which gives me promise and hope for the American food system, right? So we have a huge case study right there. The EU is a very large place, and the UK, it’s a
small island, but—so it gives me hope so we’re going to enter that market in September. We’re a bit delayed because we had some regulatory things we had to clear, and I’m super excited, super, super excited that we’re going to be in those markets, take advantage of it.
Chatman: Here’s another one, this person says, ‘As a vegan, for the animals, I’m a big fan of Impossible Foods. Could you please share what the company is doing to address misconceptions about the healthiness of alternative meats?’
McGuinness: That’s really leaning into the nutritional profile, right, and every time I do an interview, I’m asked about processed, and I give the same answer. Twinkies and 70%, you know. We have to lean into the nutrient-density of the food. By definition, if something is delivering 20 grams of protein, no cholesterol, half saturated fat, daily supply of fiber and iron, it’s not processed, it’s a nutrient-dense food. Processed foods are not nutrient-dense, and if you stick to a very simple script, we’ve done a lousy job, the plant-based industry has done a lousy job. Remember, processed came from the animal industry, they threw all sorts of stuff at us to slanderous because they’re threatened by us. Most of it didn’t stick. Processed has hurt us dramatically. And we as an industry have done a lousy job explaining it, defending it. And we as Impossible have not done a great job, so my answer to that is really lean into the nutrition aspect of the food. And that’s the best way to debunk the processed misperception, misconception.
Chatman: Great. So our students are interested in learning from specific failures. You’ve talked about things that have been challenging for you, but can you think of a specific failure that you would like to share and kind of what you learned from it?
McGuinness: Yeah, we made tons of mistakes at Chobani. We got ahead of revenue and growth and spent too much money and bankrupt and restructures and all sorts of crazy stuff. Had to take on investors we didn’t like, and we just powered through it over a decade. At Impossible, we made a lot of mistakes, you know. We got kind of drunk on the whole plant-based thing. It was the next big thing, and it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Let’s go fundraise and raise all this money, and let’s go spend it. We had a little we work. Has anyone say we crashed? That keeps me up at night and gives me PTSD, but we raised a lot of money and we spent a lot of money. We thought we could raise, raise, raise, and never-ending. money dries up quick, investors get burned, investors want return on their investment, and Beyond Meat went public, now it’s under $200 million in market company, and the stock is under $2. Like it or not, people look at that and say the whole plant-based is messed up. Oatly did the same. So, in the end, you’ve got to have a sustainable business. So we overspent, we didn’t have concrete business plans, we didn’t have concrete ROI modeling. We said, ‘Let’s try all this stuff.’ White whale projects. We did some crazy stuff. and the burn rate was outrageous. When I started at the company, we were losing $1.5 million a day. That’s hard. That’s like many people’s full-time job to lose that kind of money. And I’m not trying to say, but I just did the basic math at that rate, we would have been bankrupt last year. I had to restructure and lay some people off, and it was very uncomfortable work, but I did it to save the company. And we got way ahead of ourselves. Our ambition was ahead of our ability; our ambition was way ahead of the market. It’s OK to be ambitious. But blind ambition, very, very dangerous. And so, we took more office space than we needed. We did crazy 10-year contracts on ingredients that we didn’t need to lock it all up that were incredibly contradicting to the company—constricting to the company. I had to get rid of ingredient deals, I had to get rid of all this real estate, and then I had to reduce that burn rate because we have to conserve cash because, at the end of the day, cash is oxygen to a business. Without it, you can’t do anything, you can’t pay people, can’t innovate, can’t get your products out there. And that was very uncomfortable. Now, I went from the new CEO, the bad guy, I was just doing it to save the company to now chief boring officer, so I think I’ve graduate today a slightly better place. But the lesson in all of this, and I’ll just put a fine point on it, is we got drunk on it, for lack of a better term. And we just thought we believed our own nonsense, which is a very bad thing, right? We didn’t believe the data, we didn’t believe the size of market, and it’s OK to dream. But dream is bad for the balance sheet without some dose of reality. And it’s OK. So now, we’re kind of a little bit more sober. Not as fun. Chief boring officer. And we’re going to live to fight another day, and we’re going to be here forever. And part of my job is to make sure Impossible needs to be in the food system; it needs to be around today. It needs to be around tomorrow. It needs to be around next year to disrupt this whole thing. The best way for me to do that is to make sure it’s solvent and has a sustainable business model. If that’s boring stuff, that’s boring stuff. But Impossible has to be around forever to disrupt this food system and do good in the world. and we need money to do that. And we need profitability to do that. And I’ll just end it on what we talked about in the green room: You don’t have a sustainable mission without a sustainable business, right? And you can’t let the mission overshadow the business. And, by the way, the better the business does, the more good the company does in the world. Inextricably linked. Straight line. And so, that’s where we have to get. It’s OK to be a mission-based company. It’s great. It’s awesome to be values and mission-based, it’s incredible. I don’t want to work for a company that’s not mission-driven. But not in the absence of a business model. And we had—and we were 99% mission and 1% business. And it got us in trouble. Corrected it now. Not going to go out of business; we’re not going to go bankrupt. But if we waited a little longer to make those corrections, we wouldn’t be here, and I’m being a little dramatic, but it’s true.
Chatman: Well, thank you, Peter, for reaffirming for us that going to business school is a good idea. And that the—
McGuinness: A very good idea.
Chatman: —the business fundamentals actually are incredibly important and operable. But also for inspiring us with your vision for not just Impossible Foods but for food systems in the world at large. Thank you, so much, for taking some time to spend with us.
McGuinness: You’re welcome.
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