It's a late summer Friday afternoon, and I'm sitting in a Soho office building eating vegan mayonnaise by the spoonful.

"What are your impressions so far?" Scott Norton, one of the cofounders of Sir Kensington's, asks as he shows me the company's "spoon-to-spoon" mayonnaise dipping technique, employed in order to use as few of spoons possible without double dipping, the kind of detail you think about when you run a condiment company.

"Of the mayonnaise?" I ask, stalling, hesitant to express my initial thoughts on tasting any sort of food or drink.

"Of the whole thing. You're, like, meeting a weird guy, eating mayonnaise."

Sir Kensington cofounders (and Brown University classmates) Mark Ramadan and Scott Norton Sir Kensington's

And while mayo is one of those condiments that has a lot of haters—my brother later tells me that the idea of eating mayonnaise by the spoonful is what "they'd do to me in one of those pre-Raphaelite hellscape paintings"—I'm having a pretty great time nerding out over sandwich spreads.

And that is Sir Kensington's raison d'être: To overthink condiments and come up with some pretty freaking cool innovations along the way.

The latest, which they are promoting via a fry truck making the rounds in the New York, New Jersey and D.C. areas this month, is Fabanaise. Instead of eggs, it uses aquafaba, the brine at the bottom of a can of chickpeas, as an emulsifying ingredient.

And that is Sir Kensington's raison d'être: To overthink condiments.

The vegan-friendly waste product had become something of an internet celebrity recently, after some French chefs began posting their experiments. Goose Wohlt, a software engineer in Indiana, saw the videos, did some cooking of his own, and posted the results to a vegan Facebook group. Dan Barber then used the ingredient at his wastED pop-up at Blue Hill in New York City, a temporary restaurant designed to draw attention to the problem of food waste, and sites like Food52, Slate, and The Kitchn took note.

So did an intern at Sir Kensington's, who spotted the Food52 article, says Norton. The company had been experimenting with creating an eggless mayonnaise, but had trouble finding an emulsifier that didn't make the end product gritty. And a company that prided itself on selling the first mayo with a non-GMO certification that used free-range, humanely raised eggs couldn't use chemical-heavy food additives.

The aquafaba worked, and didn't have any strong vegetal aftertastes like the pea proteins and soy they had also tried. But there was a catch: where to get it?

"It's not like we could go door-to-door in Brooklyn asking for everyone's discarded chickpea water," Norton said.

So with the help of Whole Foods, they connected with Ithaca Hummus, which had been disposing of 100,000 pounds a year, which Sir Kensington's now buys and upcycles.

"It's especially exciting for us," Norton says. "Not only are we creating the food we want to create and believe in, but we are doing it in this way that is rescuing this waste product and bringing attention to a creating a conversation around food waste."

The Sir Kensington's Fry Truck

The last piece of the puzzle was giving it that savory aspect of mayonnaise that normally comes from egg yolks, but which aquafaba on its own lacks. Kombu seaweed turned out to be the solution that didn't use any food additives or animal products.

If it sounds like a challenge to formulate a new version of a beloved pantry staple using familiar an ingredient most people have never heard of, keep in mind Norton and his co-founder Mark Ramadan are the type of guys who read the Malcolm Gladwell 2004 article "The Ketchup Conundrum," about how Heinz's made the only perfect ketchup—and founded a ketchup company anyway.

According to Gladwell, Heinz has achieved the perfect flavor balance. Maybe–but that doesn't take into account ingredients and brand positioning, Norton said.

Made from whole tomatoes, with no high fructose corn syrup, and originally sold in bespoke preserve-type bottles with a cartoon monocle-wearing British man on the label, Sir Kensington's was designed to appeal to people who wanted ketchup on their grass-fed burger with their farm-to-table sides. When the ketchup line took off after its 2010 launch, the company expanded to mustard and mayonnaise, which is now the company's best-selling product.

The brand is now poised to expand its distribution, thanks in part to an $8.5 million investment from Verlinvest, the family-owned private equity group that's made a name for itself by buying up stakes in some of America's most popular new food companies. FreshDirect will begin carrying the Fabanaise this month as well.

"You will never get rid of Heinz—it is a mainstay, it is the benchmark for conventional, traditional ketchup," says Ken Blanchette, a specialty food buyer for FreshDirect and early buyer of the brand. "But you have a growing population that wants more interesting, defined tastes, and people that don't want their father's ketchup."

You will never get rid of Heinz, but you have a growing population that don't want their father's ketchup.

So, back to Norton's question: What do I think?

I think it tastes like, well, mayonnaise. It's not too lemony, or too sweet like Miracle Whip. It's savory, but I wouldn't be able to pin down the flavor as seaweed. If someone put it on my sandwich or potato salad without telling me, I'd have no reason to suspect it was vegan.

And perhaps the true litmus test? A mayo hater like my brother would definitely not eat it by the spoonful.

Want to catch the Sir Kensington's fry truck? Check out the schedule below:

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