Impossible Meat is not lab-grown. It’s a plant-based product made primarily from soy protein, coconut oil, and sunflower oil. The confusion is understandable because Impossible Foods uses a high-tech fermentation process to produce one key ingredient, but the burger itself contains no animal cells and is fundamentally different from what the food industry calls “lab-grown” or “cultivated” meat.
What Impossible Meat Actually Is
Impossible burgers are built from plants. The main protein comes from soy protein concentrate, and the fats that make it sizzle come from sunflower and coconut oils. The full ingredient list includes water, those proteins and oils, natural flavors, food starch, yeast extract, salt, and a handful of minor ingredients. Nothing on the list comes from an animal.
What sets Impossible apart from a standard veggie burger is a single ingredient: soy leghemoglobin, a protein that contains heme. Heme is the molecule responsible for the metallic, bloody flavor of real meat. It exists naturally in the roots of soybean plants, but digging up soy roots to harvest it would be wildly impractical. So Impossible Foods found a workaround.
The Fermentation Process Behind the “Meaty” Flavor
To produce heme at scale, Impossible Foods took the gene from soybeans that codes for leghemoglobin and inserted it into a strain of yeast called Pichia pastoris. This yeast is then grown in large fermentation tanks, similar to the tanks used to brew beer. As the yeast multiplies, it produces the soy leghemoglobin protein inside its cells.
After fermentation, the yeast cells are broken open to release the leghemoglobin. The liquid then goes through a series of filtration steps to isolate and concentrate the protein, which is mixed with stabilizers to create a standardized ingredient. This ingredient makes up less than 0.8% of the final burger by weight, but it’s what gives an Impossible burger its characteristic pink color and meaty taste.
This technique is called precision fermentation, where microorganisms are used as tiny factories to produce a specific protein or molecule. It’s the same basic approach used to make insulin, rennet for cheese, and various vitamins. The yeast is a production tool, not an ingredient in the final product.
How Lab-Grown Meat Is Different
Lab-grown meat, more formally called cultivated or cell-cultured meat, is a completely different technology. It starts with actual animal cells, typically harvested from a living animal through a small biopsy. Those cells are placed in a nutrient-rich growth medium and encouraged to multiply and differentiate into muscle and fat tissue. The goal is to grow real animal tissue without raising or slaughtering an animal.
The regulatory framework reflects this distinction. The FDA and USDA jointly regulate cultivated meat using the same rules that govern conventional animal products, because the end result is, biologically speaking, animal tissue. Plant-based products like Impossible burgers fall under standard food regulations. The FDA reviewed Impossible’s soy leghemoglobin through its safety consultation process and issued a “no questions” letter in July 2018, confirming it had no safety concerns about the ingredient.
Why People Confuse the Two
The confusion stems partly from marketing and media coverage that lumps all “alternative proteins” into one category. When people hear that Impossible uses genetically engineered yeast and fermentation tanks, it sounds like a lab process, and the mental leap to “lab-grown meat” is short. But the distinction matters: Impossible’s fermentation produces a flavoring ingredient from yeast, while cultivated meat grows animal muscle tissue from animal cells. One is a plant product enhanced by biotechnology. The other is, at the molecular level, actual meat.
Cultivated Meat Is Barely Available Anywhere
Unlike Impossible burgers, which you can buy at most grocery stores and thousands of restaurants, true lab-grown meat remains extremely limited. As of early 2024, only two restaurants in the United States were serving cultivated chicken. Singapore has moved slightly further, with a retail product containing just 3% cultivated meat available in a single butchery’s frozen section. Australia approved its first cultivated meat product, a quail-based item, in mid-2025.
In the U.S., regulatory approvals are still trickling in. The FDA cleared a cell-based seafood product from Wildtype in June 2025, and the USDA authorized a pilot plant for cultivated pork fat in July 2025. But widespread commercial availability of lab-grown meat is still years away. If you’re eating an Impossible burger today, you’re eating plants, not cultured animal cells.