Startup Hampton Creek brings tech bent to future of food
- Hampton Creek%27s mayonnaise is in stores now
- Eggs and cookies are coming in 2014
- Investors include Bill Gates and Peter Thiel
SAN FRANCISCO — On a quiet street here in the tech startup capital, dedicated scientists and chefs are hard at work on the future of food.
The problem: too many people, a growing population and not enough animals to feed them. The solution: use plants and science to come up with alternatives.
The folks here at Hampton Creek feel they've already hit a breakthrough—a new kind of egg substitute, derived from plants.
Just Scramble, the company's chicken egg replacement, will be in stores in January. Scramble follows Hampton Creek's first product, Just Mayo, a mayonnaise replacement released earlier this year. Waiting in the wings: cookies made from plants.
"It tastes just like an egg, right?" says Chris Jones, a Hampton Creek chef and former Top Chef contestant, offering a sample of Just Scramble, which resembles the Egg Beaters liquid shell egg alternative long sold in stores.
"If you could create a product as delicious as the egg and you were able to use it, why wouldn't you?" he adds.
Hampton Creek's approach is to use technology to tackle food issues to come up with sustainable protein that doesn't put a drain on the environment, in a humane way. Investors include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Khosla Ventures, which has funded consumer tech products like the Jawbone portable speaker and website Zocdocs. Hampton Creek has raise some $6 million to date.
"We're a tech company that happens to be working with food," says Hampton Creek founder and CEO Josh Tetrick.
He reached out to investors in high-profile tech startups because he wanted folks "who didn't think small and wanted to change the world."
The goal at Hampton Creek isn't to come up with vegan alternatives to meat, but simply to explore new products that can replace the egg—everything from cakes and sauces to breads, pancakes and soups.
"Let the chicken go free," says Tetrick. "The caged chicken egg happens to be brutal to the environment. We can find a better way to feed the world and think differently about our food system."
Nearly 2 trillion eggs are laid each year, says Tetrick, with such massive amounts of soy and corn required to feed the chickens that it constitutes 70% of the cost of the egg.
His egg alternative will be substantially cheaper (about half the price of liquid eggs, he predicts) and lower in fat and cholesterol. Exact pricing has not been set.
He knows that many mainstream consumers look down on vegan products as poor tasting, so he doesn't want to be in that category. His goal is to be stocked in the same section as consumer goods from Kraft and Nabisco—in both Piggly Wiggly shelves in Alabama and upscale Whole Foods stores.
Even in this age of more widespread vegetarianism and veganism, meat consumption has doubled in the last 20 years, "and is expected to double again by 2050," Gates writes on his theGatesnotes website. "There's no way to produce enough meat for 9 billion people...we need more options for producing meat."
The research and innovation at Hampton is all about looking at the planet's natural resources.
"We have a way of analyzing plants from a molecular perspective that's just not being done elsewhere," says Tetrick. "It's striking how little of this research is going on. Ninety-two percent of the world's plants haven't been explored."
He won't say what kind of plant he discovered for the egg—until the product is released, but found a combination of a yellow pea and sorghum for the mayonnaise product.
Readers: are you ready to ditch the chicken egg for a tech substitute? Let's chat about it on Twitter, where I'm @jeffersongraham.