As managing director of Iron Edge VC Fund, Frank Cardia leads a firm that provides investor access to pre-IPO enterprises with significant upside potential. Frank Cardia and his team have a strong interest in businesses that produce plant-based-foods and find value in Impossible Foods.
Impossible Foods is a Northern California company seeking to reverse strongly ingrained eating habits through food technologies that replace the use of animals in items such as burgers. The Impossible Whopper, since its launch in 2019, has precisely replicated the taste and texture of meat, and many customers have shifted over.
Unlike companies targeting the vegan and vegetarian sectors, Impossible Foods aims to replicate beef and pork qualities as closely as possible. This is accomplished by creating large quantities of heme, a protein present in red meat cells that also stimulates taste buds. Heme is extracted from soy, inserted within genetically modified yeast, and fermented. This creates a product that appears to many identical to ground meat.
The growth arc of Impossible Foods has been rapid, with Impossible Beef now stocked in more than 11,000 supermarkets nationwide. With its shares still not available on the stock market, Iron Edge is positioned to provide investors with a way of accessing this significant opportunity.
