A customer selects a package of plant-based Impossible Burger during the product launch of grocery store Impossible Foods Inc. at Gelson Markets in Los Angeles, California, USA, on Friday, September 20, 2019.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | beautiful pictures
Impossible Foods is suing Motif FoodWorks for patent infringement, alleging the startup’s heme technology too closely mimics its own signature ingredient.
Both companies are privately owned, although Impossible is much larger, with a valuation of $9.5 billion.
Impossible’s beef and pork substitutes use soy fat, produced from genetically modified yeast, to mimic the taste and aroma of real meat. With Besides meat, Impossible has helped rejuvenate the vegetarian burger market. Several other companies have caught on, from industry giants to small startups.
Motif has raised $343.5 million from investors like Bill Gates and was valued at $1.23 billion last year, according to Pitchbook. It was spun off from biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks. When Motif launched in 2019, Ginkgo Co-Founder and CEO Jason Kelly tells CNBC Impossible’s success inspired the formation of Motif, which develops the key ingredients to make plant-based proteins and ships the rest to food companies.
In December, Motif announced that its first new food technology, Hemami, would be marketed to large-scale customers. The Food and Drug Administration has deemed the ingredient “generally recognized as safe.”
In a complaint filed in federal court in Delaware on Wednesday, Impossible alleges that Motif’s Hemami infringes a patent for its trademark heme ingredient. While Motif’s version uses bovine myoglobin, it follows a similar process to create the ingredient, which can then be used in meat substitutes, according to court filings.
According to Impossible, their patent covers the invention of a beef substitute that uses a muscle clone consisting of a heme-containing protein, at least one sugar compound, and one sulfur compound. It also defends against inventing a meat substitute that mimics meat through a adipose tissue clone using at least one vegetable oil and one modified vegetable protein.
“We welcome the efforts of other companies to develop appealing plant-based products, but we do not tolerate attempts to undermine our brand or products through trying to and illegally violate our intellectual property rights,” Impossible said in a statement to CNBC.
Motif did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
