Yahoo Finance

Impossible Foods is heading north to Canada.

The California-based maker of the plant-based Impossible Burger announced its products will be available at a dozen Canadian restaurants, including Bymark, Patois and Maker.

The move comes as the faux meat trend has exploded in recent years. In recent months, sales of Impossible and Beyond Meat (BYND) have boomed 264% as the coronavirus impacted production at meatpacking plants.

Impossible Foods CFO David Lee says a key driver of the company’s success is its bet on meat eaters.

“Ninety percent of our customers raise their hands and say, ‘I'm a carnivore,’ ... so we've had to adjust during this global pandemic; we've had to adjust to the customer,” Lee said on Yahoo Finance’s On The Move.

“We've seen meat eaters really embrace the Impossible Burger, and more and more grocery locations with high, high levels of repeat.”

Impossible Foods has been making headway into venues frequented by meat lovers, inking deals with Burger King (QSR), with the Impossible Whopper, Starbucks (SBUX), and White Castle. It’s also pivoted to grow its grocery business from 150 grocery locations in the U.S. to over 10,000 in the last nine months with more people eating at home amid the pandemic.

Impossible, whose motto is “grill burgers, not the planet,” says targeting meat eaters also helps its mission. “Every time a meat eater ... eats an Impossible Burger, they save like 96% of the land and over 85% of the water [and use] a fraction of the greenhouse gases by making that trade off,” he said. “When someone is already plant-based, it doesn't have the same impact on the climate change.”

In addition, he says, it’s good business. “It’s also is a major factor for funding the business as an ongoing financial stability measure, that the total addressable market for people who enjoy plant-based meat is a small fraction of the multi-trillion dollar market amongst those who enjoy meat as meat eaters. So it's not just important for our mission, which is our number one job, but it's important for the means for us to serve our mission, to provide our investors and our customers a size of business that can be impactful.

Bridgette Webb is a producer at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @bridgetteAwebb.

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