Remember Just Mayo? For a while it was just Just. Now it's Eat Just. They've pivoted off the vegan pitch and among other things are experimenting with cultured cellular meat.
And raising money. In March they announced they had brought in another $200 million, bringing the total take to 2/3 of a billion dollars.
From Wired, June 1:
The war on eggs started back in the ’70s, not with the company formerly known as Hampton Creek, but with a little cafe-grocery store in Los Angeles.
This story is adapted from Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat, by Larissa Zimberoff.
In 2013, the San Francisco–based startup Hampton Creek, today known as Eat Just, launched its first product—an eggless, plant-based mayo. The press release claimed it was “the world's first food product to utilize a plant protein that consistently outperforms an animal protein.” This, even though soybeans had been mined for their functional capabilities in foods—for both animal feed and human nutrition—as far back as 1940. Regardless, journalists went wild.
It was like people had never seen a condiment before. The Guardian wrote that founder Josh Tetrick wanted to “disrupt the world food industry by replacing eggs with plants.” CBS News noted that the startup “tried 300 different kinds of plants'' before hitting on the formula for this eggless mayonnaise.
Tetrick first pitched the company to investors with what he admitted was a brief deck promising to build the world’s largest plant database in order to bring plant-based foods to market. To get there, Tetrick ultimately wooed over Big Data employees from Google and Stanford. TechCrunch announced that the company had analyzed the properties of more than 4,000 plants in order to find 13 with the “ideal traits needed for better consistency, taste, and lower cost.” This plant database, which was initially touted as having potential for licensing deals, has yet to come to fruition, and those Big Data guys have since left to start other companies.
It was a prime example of a new era of do-good food missionaries. They promise to reverse climate change and end our reliance on eating animals for protein—and then race to raise funds, hire employees, and, to hit those goals faster, sell the promise to the consumer.
The thing is, in this case, eggless mayo already existed. Vegenaise—a mashup of the words vegan and mayonnaise—was first developed in the mid-1970s by Follow Your Heart in California’s San Fernando Valley.
Before becoming the vegan product powerhouse it is today—it sells salad dressings, cheese, and yogurt (among other things) made from coconut, potato starch, canola, and more—Follow Your Heart was a natural foods market with a cozy vegetarian café inside. The café sold freshly made fruit juices, vegetable soups, and an avocado, tomato, and sprout sandwich that featured a thick swipe of tangy, rich mayo. But instead of eggy Hellman’s, the cafe was using a faux mayo called Lecinaise, made by a guy named Jack Patton. It was made from soy lecithin—basically a fatty emulsifier—and Bob Goldberg, cofounder and CEO of Follow Your Heart, used it on everything. He called it his “secret ingredient.” The creamy white spread was so crucial to the café’s success that Goldberg estimates that at one point the café had purchased about 40,000 pounds of the stuff....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
February 2019
Remember Just Mayo? They Rebranded to Just and Raised Another $200 Million
Mr. Tetrick is one tech bro I would not trust with anything.
And what's with all the rebranding going on? Snapchat becomes Snap, WeWork is now We and Google became Goo Alphabet.
July 2017
Hampton Creek, Attempting the 2 1/2 Twisting Reverse Uber, Sticks the Faceplant Landing! Entire Board Leaves, CEO Remains!
And the Valley is going crazy!
But seriously, we would have expected nothing less. What a performance!
Bill Gates Invests In Another Lab-Grown Meat Company
"Bill Gates headlines an all-star list of investors pumping $75 million into meatless burgers"
Mr. Gates also partnered with Li Ka-Shing and Khosla on Hampton Creek which is attempting to pivot from Just Mayo into laboratory-grown 'meat'.*
"Mayo-scandal firm Hampton Creek from San Francisco going whole hog for Frankenmeat: report"
Just Mayo Guy, Hampton Creek's Josh Tetrick, Pivots to Industrial Scale Ingredient Supply Biz
Hampton Creek: Remember All Our Vegetarian Talk? Never Mind
Questions America Wants Answered: Is Eating Lab Grown Human Flesh Cannibalism?
"People buying meat from strangers on social media is a serious problem"
Seven Startups Creating Lab-Grown Meat
Target Corp. Cuts Ties With Hampton Creek: Just Say No to Just Mayo
Hampton Creek (Just Mayo) Reports an Attempted Employee Coup
"Mayo-scandal firm Hampton Creek from San Francisco going whole hog for Frankenmeat: report"
May 8, 2017
Bro Culture Apparently Works Best With An Unending Supply of Other People's Money: Hampton Creek Edition
“Leveraging our Hampton Creek Instagram channel through condiment launches for our Just Mayo and Just Dressings allows us to showcase our condiments in a playful, creative way and allows us to connect with different consumer demographics across the country. We also leverage Hampton Creek fan reposts and user-generated content...."That is Hampton Creek's brand marketing director quoted in Progressive Grocer.
As the man said when told his Chinese takeaway was cultural appropriation:
When you talk like that you are self-identifying as an idiot.Ahem.
Last Wednesday the Financial Times' David Keohane pointed us to a Hampton Creek article that reminded me of nothing so much as Christopher Isherwood's sad stories of the he-whores and she-whores who overstayed the great Weimar Berlin party of the 1920's.
All I could think of was "Dude, the rave's over, go home"....
Hampton Creek CEO Fires Top Execs After Fundraising Struggle
