Technology

Five months after launching a pilot program with the iconic White Castle fast food chain, Impossible Foods is taking its meatless burger substitute to every one of the companyrestaurants.

With the rollout, White Castle becomes the largest fast food chain to include the Impossible Burger on its menu and the largest customer for the purveyor of beef-like meat substitutes.

At a low, low cost of $1.99, the Impossible Slider does achieve the near impossible of bringing a processed vegan food option to consumers at a price point that everyone can afford.

The company first unveiled the Impossible Slider at 140 locations in New York, Chicago and New Jersey, and the burger is now available in 377 restaurants across 13 states.

&White Castle is teaching us how to popularize plant-based meat and become a mainstream, mass market menu item and cultural icon,& said Impossible Foods& founder and CEO Dr. Patrick O. Brown, in a statement.

From its first appearance in David ChangMomofuku Nishi restaurant in 2016, the Impossible Burger is now available in 3,000 locations, including restaurants, corporate cafeterias, universities and food service locations in the U.S., Hong Kong and Macau, according to a company statement.

It has been seven years since the company raised its first $7 million investment from Khosla Ventures . Since that time Impossible Foods has managed to amass another $443 million in financing — including a convertible note from the Singaporean global investment powerhouse Temasek (which is backed by the Singaporean government) and the Chinese investment fund Sailing Capital (a state-owned investment fund backed by the Communist Party-owned Chinese financial services firm, Shanghai International Group).

The company built its first large-scale manufacturing plant in Oakland, Calif. last year and expects to add a second shift to the factory to double production.

As we wrote earlier, the heart of Impossible Burgertechnology is the heme molecule and the ability to make its vegetable matter appear as bloody as a medium-rare burger.

Heme is present in most living things and, according to Impossible Foods, itthe molecule that gives meat its flavor. The company says that itthe presence of the heme molecule in muscle that makes meat taste like meat. Impossible Foods engineers and ferments yeast to produce that heme protein naturally found in plants, called soy leghemoglobin.

&Itthe iron-containing molecule that carries oxygen in the blood… what makes meat red or pink… Itessential for every living cell on earth,& says Brown. &The thing that we discovered was that pretty much the entire flavor experience of meat that distinguishes it from all other foods is due to heme. Heme transforms fatty acids into the bloody flavored odorant molecules, and when you cook meat, the protein that holds the meat at a certain temperature unfolds and lets loose.&

Brown says Impossible Foods can make fish flavors, chicken flavors and pork flavors, but is going to stick to ground beef for the foreseeable future.

The next trick for the company is to manipulate the flavor profile of its meat substitute so its burgers can win in blind taste tests against any other combination of meat patty.

&The companymission is to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035,& says Brown. &The only way to do it is to do a better job than any animal at producing the most nutritious, delicious, affordable and versatile foods. And it will be a very interesting proof of concept landmark when we have a burger that is — for flavor and deliciousness — the best burger on earth… thatgoing to send a very important signal to the world.&

The FDA is giving makers of e-cigarettes 60 days to come up with a more effective, forceful plan to combat underage use of the products.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb is yet again moving the goal posts for e-cig companies. He now considers underage use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) an epidemic, forcing the government to make a choice that we all knew was coming: save the smokers or save the kids

&I believe in the power of American ingenuity to solve a lot of problems, including this one,& said Gottlieb in a statement. &I&m deeply disturbed by the trends I&ve seen. I&m disturbed by an epidemic of nicotine use among teenagers. So, we&re at a crossroads today. Itone where the opportunities from new innovations will be responsibly seized on right now, or perhaps lost forever.&

E-cigarettes, like the Juul (which owns more than 70 percent of the market by revenue), offer smokers what some say is a healthier alternative to so-called &analog& cigarettes. Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death, according to the CDC, with 6 million deaths per year worldwide, and that number is expected to rise to 8 million by 2030.

Public Health England says that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful than combustible cigarettes. Addiction, which in this case is caused by nicotine, is always harmful, but not nearly as threatening as the harm caused by actual smoke from traditional cigarettes.

On the spectrum of risk, e-cigarettes should seem like a huge win in the decades-long battle against smoking.

But that was before teenagers started using e-cigarettes, including the Juul, at a surprisingly increasing rate. The FDA says more than 2 million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year. While nicotine isn&t all that harmful to a fully developed brain, the developing brain of a teenager is inordinately susceptible to addiction, and underage use of nicotine delivery systems may leave these users addicted to nicotine for life.

This dilemma obviously leaves e-cig makers in a tough spot, but it is also a sticky situation for the FDA. In July of last year, the FDA decided to extend the deadline for e-cigarettes to get FDA approval. This decision was made in part to give e-cig makers and the FDA itself the opportunity to thoughtfully and cooperatively figure out the ‘rules of the road& in a budding new industry that Gottlieb himself believes is to the benefit of public health. As part of the extension, e-cig makers could leave their products on the market with the caveat that they were not allowed to bring new products to market.

In the wake of growing use by minors, the agency is now walking back some of those decisions. The FDA is keeping an even closer eye on offline and online retailers selling to minors, as well as watching for ‘straw purchases& on the e-cig makers own online storefronts.

But the FDA is putting a good deal of the responsibility on the e-cig makers themselves. These companies, which include JUUL, Vuse, MarkTen, blu e-cigs, and Logic (97 percent of the market), will have sixty days to present the agency with a more comprehensive and effective plan to eliminate underage use of e-cigs, or the agency will have to re-evaluate its decision to extend the FDA deadline and leave these existing products on the market.

&JUUL Labs will work proactively with FDA in response to its request,& said Juul Labs spokesperson Victoria Davis. &We are committed to preventing underage use of our product, and we want to be part of the solution in keeping e-cigarettes out of the hands of young people. Our mission is to improve the lives of adult smokers by providing them with a true alternative to combustible cigarettes. Appropriate flavors play an important role in helping adult smokers switch. By working together, we believe we can help adult smokers while preventing access to minors, and we will continue to engage with the FDA to fulfill our mission.&

One of the trends that the agency has observed is minors attraction to flavors, particularly flavor-based cartridge devices, as opposed to open-tank vaping. The Juul happens to fall in the former category. If the FDA doesn&t see the response ithoping for in the next sixty days, flavors may well be the first piece to be taken off the market.

Juul Labs, in particular, has already done quite a bit to stymie underage use, from raising the age of purchase to 21+ on its website, removing everyone but real-life former smokers from its social media, investing $30 million into its own youth prevention plan, and working with online retailers to pull unauthorized listings of the product from their sites.

The letter from the FDA, then, suggests that the agency is looking for much more drastic action.

Big tobacco stocks are up on word of the news.

Hustle Fund, the pre-seed firm founded by former 500 Startups partners Elizabeth Yin and Eric Bahn, has closed their first fund, coming in at the tune of $11.5 million.

Hustle Fund also recently brought on Shiyan Koh to its team of general partners. Before joining the firm, Koh was the VP of business operations and corporate development at personal finance company NerdWallet. She formerly worked as an investment professional at Bridgewater Associates and Institutional Venture Partners. At Hustle Fund, Koh will be based in Singapore to focus on expanding the firmreach in Southeast Asia.

The fund initially hoped to raise $50 million, according to an SEC filing last October, butfelt confident it could prove its investing hypothesis with $11.5 million, Koh said in an email to TechCrunch.

&This has allowed us to get to the business of backing founders faster,& Koh said. &We want to be in this business for decades to come, so Fund 1 is just the beginning!&

Limited partners in the fund include Shanda, a global investment firm focused on the online gaming industry, messaging and communications company LINE, Korean search engine Naver and others.

Hustle Fund wants to be different from its peers in the venture capital community. Instead of backing founders with degrees from Stanford or some Ivy League school, the goal is to level the playing field for founders by focusing on potential impact.

The firm operates by investing $25,000 in pre-seed startups, and then undertakes a four to six-week growth period with each company. The idea is to work alongside the team and then determine if the fund will follow on with additional monetary investment.

&One of the fascinating things I learned while running the 500 Startups accelerator is that I understood so much more about our investments once they came into the batch, and I could see them work,& Yin said in a press release. &Not surprisingly, I noticed that the best teams were the ones who could execute with speed. Itfrom this observation, we built Hustle Fund to back founders who can execute with high velocity by observing founders work.&

Since Hustle Fundlaunch last September, the firm has invested in 40 companies, including Setter, Thank You Kindly,FleetPanda and ClaimCompass.

Although Yin and Bahndepartures from 500 Startupscame in the midstof the drama surrounding 500 Startups founder Dave McClurealleged sexual misconduct, the pair was already planning on leaving the troubled accelerator to start their own fund. Before Yin and Bahn joined 500 Startups, they had their own respective careers as founders. Now, they&re combining their experiences as founders and investors to help small, scrappy startups.