The Impossible Slider

White Castle is now selling The Impossible Slider, a vegetarian burger, nationwide

USA TODAY NETWORK Susan Selasky, Detroit Free Press 

White Castle is known for many things, but serving up healthy fruits and vegetables is not necessarily one of them. But that’s changing, when it comes to veggies, anyway, though they’ll still be coming in the form of a slider.



(Photo: White Castle)

Starting Wednesday, White Castle restaurants nationwide will offer a new slider made entirely from plants. The Impossible Slider, created by California-based Impossible Foods, will sell for $1.99.

A pilot program began in April at White Castle locations in New York, New Jersey and Chicago. Now the plant-based burger will be sold at all 377 locations in 13 states.

The Impossible Burger launched in 2016 and soon began making its way onto the restaurant scene. It’s now sold at more than 2,000 restaurants across the country, according to Impossible Foods.

The burger looks like a burger. It smells, sizzles and cooks like one, too. You can cook it any way you like.

According to impossiblefoods.com, it's made from all-natural ingredients such as wheat and potato protein, coconut oil for fat, a dash of soy sauce and potatoes. The company says the flavor is brought together with “konjac and xanthan — common ingredients in chefs’ kitchens.”

But the kicker is the color. The patty is red, just like ground beef. It even bleeds red like a typical burger cooked medium-rare would.

The color and texture come from an ingredient called heme, a component of many proteins, including hemoglobin — the pigment that gives blood its color. Heme is found in both plants and animals, and Impossible Foods starts with heme sourced from the roots of soy plants.

Though the Impossible Burger is perfectly suited for followers of plant-based diets, the White Castle launch is aimed at capturing the appetites of beef lovers.