Beyond/Impossible Burger

On 29 May 2019, Lidl put a two-pack of Beyond Burger patties, 227 grams for 4.99 euros, on shelves in roughly 3,200 stores across Germany, and by the next morning most of them were bare. The patty under the wrap is pea protein pressed into a fibrous mass, colored red with beet juice and bound with coconut and canola oil so it stays pink raw and turns brown once real heat hits it, built to drop onto the exact bun, ketchup, mustard, pickle, onion, and lettuce a German Imbiss counter already stacks around a beef patty. Nothing around the center had to change; only the center did. Lidl restocked within weeks and the shelves emptied again, and the second sellout told a market that had spent generations exporting bratwurst rather than importing burger patties that it wanted the swap badly enough to strip a discount chain's cold case twice in one summer.

Germany buys more plant-based meat than any other country in Europe, an odd title for a food culture built on more than fifteen hundred named sausages and one of the continent's highest per-capita pork habits. German shoppers spent close to 2.2 billion euros on plant-based food at retail in 2023, with plant-based meat alone accounting for roughly 922 million of it, and more than a third of German households bought some at least once that year. In a hot pan the patty behaves the way the label promises: a hard sear on both faces before the fat and moisture inside can weep out and steam the crust soft, three or four minutes a side, scorched fat and browning protein rising off it in a smell close enough to a real burger cooking in the next pan to fool a distracted cook. Timid heat is the one mistake that reads instantly; cooked gently, the center stays the dull grey-pink of raw liver and never develops a crust at all.

The supply behind that shelf runs through the Netherlands, not Germany itself. In June 2020 Beyond Meat opened its first European production line inside a plant owned and operated by the Dutch meat processor Zandbergen World's Finest Meat, in Zoeterwoude, turning out Beyond Burger and Beyond Sausage under one roof with a company that had spent generations doing the opposite job. From there the patties moved into German retail at real scale: REWE alone carried the Beyond Burger in around 1,600 of its stores, and Kaufland stocked it across its full German network soon after. A California company that started on a single American grocery contract ended up routing its European supply chain through a Dutch meat plant, onto shelves in a country it had never manufactured in.

The strongest domestic rival never came from California at all. Rügenwalder Mühle, a family sausage house founded in 1834 by the butcher Carl Müller in the Pomeranian town of Rügenwalde and rebuilt in Bad Zwischenahn after the family fled west in 1946, began selling a vegetarian Schnitzel, mini-Frikadellen, and cold cuts under its own name in 2014, stamped with the same red-windmill mark it had put on Teewurst since 1903. The bet looked strange from a company still moving hundreds of tonnes of meat a week. By July 2020 its meat-free line had outsold its sausage line for a full month for the first time on record, and 2021 became the first entire year the plant-based side won outright. A company that had sold pork to Germany for close to two centuries was, by then, selling more meat-free product than meat, under the mark the company credits to its founder's wife, Alwine.

At the counter of more than fourteen hundred McDonald's restaurants in Germany, the plant patty carries a supplier's name most customers never ask about. McDonald's and Beyond Meat signed a three-year German supply deal in 2021, and the McPlant burger, a pea-protein patty with cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle, and onion on a toasted bun, went permanent across the country on 22 February 2023, alongside McPlant Nuggets rolled out to all roughly 1,429 German locations the same week. Order one in Munich or Rostock and the assembly matches the beef burger beside it on the board almost stroke for stroke, down to the grill marks pressed into the bun. Only the center differs, and the receipt says McPlant, never Beyond.

Order a plant burger anywhere in Germany today and the patty inside is Beyond's, never Impossible's, no matter which brand originally popularized the idea. Impossible's signature trick, soy leghemoglobin brewed by fermenting genetically modified yeast to make a raw patty bleed and a cooked one carry a faint iron note, has never been cleared for sale anywhere inside the European Union; the molecule that makes an Impossible Burger read as beef on a plate in Los Angeles or Singapore is not licensed to cross German customs. So the patty that actually sears on a German flat-top browns the ordinary way, through the Maillard reaction working on pea protein and coconut fat rather than heme chemistry, landing a slightly drier crumb and a rounder, nuttier top note where the iron tang would otherwise sit.

The EU's novel food review

Soy leghemoglobin falls under a specific European Union rule. Any ingredient without a significant history of consumption in the bloc before May 1997 counts as a novel food, and a novel food needs a formal safety dossier and a European Food Safety Authority review before a single gram reaches a shelf. Impossible Foods filed for that clearance years before most German shoppers had heard of either brand, and the review ran long enough that when the company finally reached the neighboring United Kingdom market in 2022, it launched an alt-chicken line built without the ingredient its whole American identity rests on, because heme still had no clearance there either.

The scientific verdict eventually came back favorable, twice, after years of the company supplying additional toxicity and allergenicity data EFSA had flagged as missing from the original file. EFSA's food additives panel cleared the ingredient, marketed as LegH Prep, as safe in June 2024, and its GMO panel confirmed the safety of the engineered yeast strain that produces it that November. Neither opinion changes anything on its own. Under EU novel food law, a favorable scientific finding still has to clear a European Commission vote and a member-state Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed before the ingredient can legally enter a single product.

By the most recent record of that review, the European Commission had drafted no final decision, and the member state Standing Committee on Plants, Animals, Food and Feed had not yet cast a vote. Until that vote happens, every plant burger sold in Germany, from the Lidl cold case to the McDonald's counter, stays built on the patty that already cleared customs years ago, not because Impossible chose to sit out Europe's biggest plant-based market, but because the Commission vote that would let it compete there had still not been scheduled, more than a year after EFSA's GMO panel called the yeast behind it safe to eat in November 2024.