Startup Scrambles to Replace Eggs

Startup Scrambles to Replace Eggs

 

Hampton Creek Foods Serves Up Plant Alternatives for Cookie Dough, Mayo

 

 

By Farhad Manjoo in the Wall Street Journal

·  @fmanjoo·  farhad.manjoo@wsj.com·  ·  Farhad Manjoo·  Biography·  Farhad Manjoo

·  @fmanjoo·  farhad.manjoo@wsj.com·  ·  Farhad Manjoo ·  Biography

The ordinary chicken egg is one of the world's most perfect foods. Eggs are a cheap, abundant, delicious source of protein. They're also extremely flexible, capable of performing as many as 22 different culinary functions in a wide array of foods.

In cakes, eggs trap gasses in the batter, creating a light, airy texture. In mayonnaise, egg yolks stabilize an emulsion of oil and an acid. In a meatloaf, they bind disparate ingredients together. In a custard, they thicken liquids to form a gel.

There's only one problem with eggs. "They are fantastically inefficient," said Josh Tetrick, the founder of a San Francisco food-technology startup called Hampton Creek Foods, only he uses an F-word other than "fantastically."

Egg production is the fastest-growing segment of intensive agriculture as demand skyrockets in emerging economies. Mr. Tetrick points out that 1.8 trillion eggs are laid globally each year, and chicken feed—much of it soy and corn, which require vast amounts of land, water, and fossil fuels to grow—accounts for 70% of the cost of an egg.

Mr. Tetrick thinks he can do better. He has secured financing from some of the tech industry's largest venture backers to do what most egg-loving foodies, myself included, consider both sacrilegious and impossible: He wants to replace the chicken egg with plant-based protein sources.

Actually, that's underselling the goal: Hampton Creek wants to "surpass" the egg, to make eggless foods that taste better, are free of cholesterol, last longer on the shelf, are more ecologically sustainable and humane, and are far cheaper than their eggy counterparts.

This is a gargantuan goal, and Mr. Tetrick concedes that the company isn't close to achieving it. But Hampton Creek is far enough along to illustrate the power of what you might call "food engineering."

To create its eggless products, the company's battalion of biochemists, food scientists, and software engineers are modeling their efforts on processes first used in drug companies and the tech industry. If their plan works—and my taste buds suggest it might—Hampton Creek may show how the software and biotech industries' innovation techniques might alter sectors far beyond.

Take Hampton Creek's cookie dough, which will go on sale in February. In a blind test, I was able to tell the difference between Mr. Tetrick's cookies and those containing eggs.

The eggy ones were slightly browner. Yet I preferred the eggless cookie's taste and texture. They weren't too sweet, were slightly salty, and achieved just the right balance between crunchy and chewy.

And the cookies are almost a side-benefit of the dough. Because the dough has no eggs, you don't even have to bother baking it. Indeed, Hampton Creek's product is called Eat the Dough. It comes in a carton with a spoon set in the lid, like something you'd buy from the ice-cream man.

Mr. Tetrick grew up in Birmingham, Ala., on a diet of "chicken wings and gristle." He's now a vegan and, while animal welfare was part of his motivation for founding Hampton Creek, he has been careful to play down that goal for his company . "That's a losing proposition in the marketplace," he said.

For Mr. Tetrick there are many more hard-nosed reasons for creating a better egg substitute. To borrow a favorite tech-industry slight, eggs can't scale.

He argues that they require too many resources for their production to grow indefinitely. And he has persuaded several tech luminaries to join his mission. Hampton Creek's investors include Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

Altogether, Hampton Creek has raised $6 million, with which Mr. Tetrick believes it can eventually render eggs "obsolete" across every dimension, including price. At the moment, Hampton Creek's egg replacement costs about 39 cents a pound, about half the price of a pound of liquid eggs.

"We want to drive the price through the floor so radically that it would be silly to consider anything else," he said.

How can Hampton Creek do that? Josh Klein, its director of biochemistry R&D, likens the company's egg-replacing strategy to the process a drug company might use to fight disease. Every day, the lab screens dozens of new plant species in search of applications that might be similar to those of eggs. Armed with the database, they mix and match plants to create new, eggless foods. Then, they prototype, taste, and repeat.

In a way, Hampton Creek is treating food like software, borrowing various bits of code from different kinds of plants.

It's a novel, mathematical way to think about food—one that confounds the sensibilities of those who reject "processed foods" but may ultimately realize the dream of providing sustainable, tasty, healthy and affordable food for the entire planet.

So far the results are quite good. Hampton Creek discovered a specific kind of yellow pea that has fantastic powers of emulsion, leading to a mayonnaise that the firm claims beats leading brands in taste tests.

I found the texture exquisitely creamy and, compared with eggy store-bought mayo, Hampton Creek's mayo had a cleaner, less aggressive flavor profile.

Mr. Tetrick says that, in large quantities, he can make eggless mayo 10% cheaper than conventional egg mayo. Driven by price, many Whole Foods WFM in Your Value Your Change Short position stores across the country have switched to Hampton Creek's mayo in their store-prepared foods (like the potato salad). But at retail, Hampton Creek's mayo isn't very cheap: It sells for $3.50 or $4.49 a jar at most Whole Foods stores. That's about the same price as egg-based mayo, but Mr. Tetrick says that Hampton Creek has room to cut its prices substantially.

The company's next goal is to make an eggless liquid that, when fried, turns into scrambled eggs. Right now, the product is in the prototype stage. One of Hampton Creek's scientists cooked up a plate for me, and I found the fake scramble slightly rubbery and grainy, more like a spongy crepe than an egg.

But Mr. Tetrick says he believes that it won't be long till the company creates the perfect eggless scramble. "The chicken is great, but it isn't getting any better," he said. In other words, it's a sitting duck.