Food company CEO to deliver seminar on sustainability

February 14, 2017

Lincoln, Neb. — The Department of Food Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln will welcome Patrick O. Brown, founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, to campus on Feb. 20 to deliver his thoughts on, “Doing the Impossible: Making the Global Food System Sustainable, One Burger at a Time.” The free talk will be at 3:30 p.m. in room 277 of the Food Innovation Center at Nebraska Innovation Campus, 2021 Transformation Dr., Lincoln. 

Brown is passionate about sustainability and nutrition. He founded Impossible Foods in 2011 with the goal of making the global food system more sustainable by producing meat and dairy products from plants, which have a much lower environmental footprint. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, growing plants for livestock consumes 25 percent of the world’s fresh water.

Brown assembled a team of scientists, chefs, farmers and flavor experts to analyze meat at the molecular level to determine precisely why meat smells, handles, cooks and tastes the way it does. After developing an archive of proprietary research and technology, the company’s first product, the Impossible Burger, debuted in restaurants in 2016.

Prior to founding Impossible Foods, Brown had a distinguished career as a research scientist. A member of the National Academy of Science, he was a professor of biochemistry and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Brown’s research group pioneered the use of gene expression patterns to improve classification, diagnosis and individualized treatment of human cancers.

For media availability or for more information about the seminar, contact Devin Rose at 402-472-2802 or drose3@unl.edu.