Quality Meats: Impossible Foods Opens Pop-Up Restaurant in Chicago, Featuring Oatly Ice Cream

Building on its impressive foodservice record, Impossible Foods will open its first pop-up restaurant in Chicago, showcasing its plant-based meat products across a range of dishes.

Impossible Foods is opening a new pop-up restaurant in Chicago’s XMarket Food Hall tomorrow, a first for the plant-based meat maker.

Titled Impossible Quality Meats, the foodservice concept will spotlight the company’s vegan beef, chicken and pork products in a variety of dishes. The idea is to call attention to its expansive foodservice footprint (it is available in over 45,000 locations in the US alone) and showcase the versatility of its plant-based meat range, which has now been on the market for eight years.

“Impossible began as a foodservice brand, launching our flagship beef product in 2016 with some of the best restaurants in America,” said Impossible Foods CEO Peter McGuinness. “It’s been a natural evolution for us to create our own branded dining experience to showcase our delicious food.”

It’s the latest move in Impossible Foods’ bumper summer of 2024, featuring its first major marketing campaign (to promote its refreshed brand identity), appearances at the Met Gala and the Olympics, and a partnership with champion competitive eater Joey Chestnut.

What’s on the many at the Impossible Quality Meats pop-up?

Impossible Quality Meats will be open Tuesdays to Sundays from 11am to 8pm, and run throughout fall 2024. It has been leased through PlantX Life Inc., whose parent company Veg House is managing the pop-up.

“With Impossible Quality Meats, we wanted to offer diners a fun way to experience our food. From breakfast to lunch to dinner, we leaned into classic craveable dishes people love,” said McGuinness. “Choosing meat from plants shouldn’t feel like a compromise. It’s great-tasting food, plain and simple.”

The menu contains small plates like Asian-style meatballs in hoisin-lime sauce, Italian meatball sliders, nachos with Impossible Beef or Chicken and a Cheez Whiz-style vegan alternative, beef chilli, as well as chilli cheese fries.

Visitors can also choose grilled chicken Caesar (with vegan parmesan), crispy southwest chicken or Asian-style chicken as part of a salad or wrap.

And on the bun menu, there’s a choice of a breakfast sandwich (with sausage and a vegan egg), a classic Impossible Burger, a smash burger, a bratwurst, an Impossible Hot Dog, and a chilli dog. In addition, the pop-up restaurant will also have rotating burger and hot dog specials.

The Impossible Nuggets are served with fries (which can be subbed for onion rings if you pay extra) and a choice from nine sauces.

And while the company may have stopped working on Impossible Milk, that doesn’t mean Chicago residents wouldn’t get dessert at the pop-up. The brand has partnered with Oatly, the world’s largest oat milk player, whose ice creams will be available in vanilla, chocolate and swirl options.

Impossible Foods is hosting a launch party on Saturday, August 17 at the XMarket Food Hall, when locals would be able to sample Impossible Hot Dogs, Burgers and Oatly Soft Serve for free.

Impossible Foods highlights record amid faltering industry sales

The development is a marker of Impossible Foods’s reputation as a foodservice mainstay. The company claims to be the leading plant-based brand in this channel in the US, and has long-standing partnerships with American chef David Chang and his Momofuku restaurant group (going back eight years), Bareburger (seven years), White Castle (six years), Starbucks (five years), and Disneyland (four years). And just last week, it completed five years of the Impossible Whopper at Burger King.

In addition to the Impossible Quality Meats pop-up, visitors of Xmarket Food Hall can also buy retail products like its plant-based beef, hot dogs, and chicken nuggets at the PlantX Bodega. It follows the brand’s entry into Whole Foods Market nationwide, which is a sign of its strong retail performance – Impossible Beef is the top-selling plant-based beef in the US across both retail and foodservice, while the vegan meatballs and nuggets are the bestsellers in their respective categories too.

In the US, Impossible Foods is the leader in refrigerated meat analogue sales, making up 9% of the market, according to Bloomberg. However, this segment witnessed a 21% drop in volume 19% decline in dollar sales in the 52 weeks ending May 19, 2024, data by Circana shows. Analysts ascribe this to high prices, unsatisfactory taste and texture, and concerns about ingredients.

Impossible Foods has already been leaning on its taste-first messaging since the identity and packaging refresh in March (with a heavier focus on health too), while it claims to have cut prices by 20% since early 2023.

At the pop-up, prices for dishes with Impossible Foods range from $7.99 for the hot dog to $12.99 for the nachos, chilli-cheese fries, meatball sliders, salads and wraps. Meanwhile, a single-patty Impossible Burger – topped with lettuce, onion, tomato, pickles, and special sauce – will set you back $9.99.

Nutritionist slams ‘unhealthy’ claims about plant-based meat

There’s one other factor hampering vegan sales: disinformation campaigns by the meat industry, and misinformation about the healthfulness of plant-based meat. Some have suggested that plant-based meats are less healthy than meat, despite the latter’s links to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancer.

“The idea that all plant-based meats are categorically unhealthier than animal-based meats is scientifically unfounded. In fact, many plant-based options, like those from Impossible Foods, outperform animal meat in terms of key nutrients like cholesterol, trans fat, and saturated fat,” Kaytee Hadley, a registered dietitian and health and nutrition ambassador of Impossible Foods, told Green Queen.

“Most Americans do not consume enough plants or fibre, and Impossible products contain high-quality plant-based ingredients that contain important nutrients including fibre, iron and potassium,” she added. “Any one food in and of itself will not meet a human’s nutritional needs on its own because people need to eat a diversity of foods and nutrients, but in the context of a balanced diet, plant-based meats, like Impossible, can be a great addition.”

Hadley suggested that basing a food’s nutritional value on the number of ingredients is an “outdated and highly simplistic approach” view of nutrition. “Many foods are enriched with vitamins and minerals (for example, baby food, cereal, and white rice). Does this addition make a food less nutritious? The obvious answer is no.

“When you look more closely at the actual ingredients, processing methods, and nutritional profile of plant-based meats, it’s easy to see that these products are not all necessarily ‘less healthy than animal proteins’.”