The claim opens with "A ground beef-like food product comprising:" and then spends its length on what the product must contain. That is claim 1 of US 9,700,067 B2, a patent on the flavor and aroma of plant-based meat substitutes. The application was filed on July 10, 2015, claiming a PCT application filed on January 13, 2014, and the patent was granted on July 11, 2017. Google Patents lists Impossible Foods Inc. as the assignee. It is the only independent claim; claims 2 to 23 depend from it.
Reading claim 1 in order
A claim reads as a checklist: an accused product infringes only if it has every element. Claim 1 builds the checklist in a deliberate order, from the name of the thing to the result of cooking it.
The numbers sit in four elements.
| Element | What claim 1 requires |
|---|---|
| Heme-containing protein | 0.1 to 5 percent by weight, at least 80 percent sequence identity to SEQ ID NO:4 |
| Sugar | glucose, ribose, fructose, lactose, xylose, arabinose, glucose-6-phosphate, maltose or galactose, alone or in a mixture |
| Sulfur compound | at least 10 mM of cysteine, cystine, selenocysteine, thiamine or methionine, or a mixture |
| Plant protein | 10 percent or more by weight |
Source: the claim text on the Google Patents page for US 9,700,067 B2. The claim also requires that the product contains no animal products and that cooking produces at least two beef-associated volatile compounds.
Why a natural protein is not claimed bare
A claim that read "a heme protein" would meet the line drawn in the US Supreme Court's decision of June 13, 2013 in Myriad: "a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated." The Court held that cDNA, which is not naturally occurring, is eligible. Claim 1 does not try to own the protein. It defines it by sequence identity of at least 80 percent, which reaches variants, and it ties it to a sugar, a sulfur compound and plant protein in a ground beef substitute. What is claimed is the combination and its behaviour in the pan, not a molecule taken out of an animal or a plant.
Product-by-process is the other road
Claim 1 does not say how the product is made. A product-by-process claim does, and the MPEP section 2113 states the catch: "The patentability of a product does not depend on its method of production." If the product is the same as or obvious from one in the prior art, the process steps do not save the claim, and such a claim is infringed only by a product made by the recited process. The cooking result in claim 1 works as a different kind of limit: it is a property of the finished product, measured by what volatile compounds appear.
The label is a separate question
A patent decides who may make a product. It says nothing about what the pack may be called. The Court of Justice of the EU held in Case C-438/23 on October 4, 2024 that EU law covers the field and bars member states from banning descriptive names such as "steak" or "sausage" for plant-protein foods, and on January 28, 2025 the French Conseil d'Etat annulled two such decrees on that basis. The blog covered the earlier edge of this question in its 2020 note on "veggie burger" and "vegan cheese". Its March 2021 entry, Impossible Foods: Protecting Plant-Based Meat Substitutes having the Aroma and Flavor of Meat, is the earlier look at patents in this area.
One limit of this reading: a claim stacked with ranges and closed lists is only as wide as its numbers. The closed sugar list and the 10 mM floor in claim 1 are exactly the kind of edges that a later filer, or a court, will test first.