The CEO of a startup that makes fake meat explains why he didn't sell to Google

Impossible Foods, a startup that makes fake meat, didn't sell to Google because it didn't want to be dependent on a company working on "a zillion different things," founder and CEO Patrick Brown said on stage at Vox Media's Code Conference.

The Information reported last summer that Google had tried to buy Impossible Foods for between $200 and $3o0 million dollars and although Brown didn't touch on price, he confirmed Google's interest.

Here's how he put it:

In a nutshell, bless their hearts - I don't have anything bad to say about Google - but we're a mission-driven company and Google has a lot of interests. We want to have control of our fate. We don't want our success to be dependent on the continuing willingness of a company that's trying a zillion different things to support it as it needs. It made no sense for us to be acquired by anyone at this stage.

Impossible Food's misison is to make a plant-based version of meat that's just as good as real, animal-based meat while being much more sustainable for the environment.

"We're making meat for uncompromising meat lovers but with a fraction of the environmental impact," Brown says, adding that its product looks like, smells like, and even sizzles like regular ground beef.

When Impossible Foods releases its first product onto the mass market it will cost about the same as organic meat, but Brown says that he expects the price to lower to that of regular, grocery store ground beef in a few years.