If you eat processed food and you’re not a vegan, a decent portion of your diet probably comes from factory-farmed eggs. Sure, you may stick to cage-free eggs when you’re cooking omelets, but 95% of eggs in the U.S. come from battery-caged facilities where birds are packed body to body in impossibly small spaces. This is not entirely the reason behind the existence of Hampton Creek , a San Francisco startup that makes a plant-based egg substitute so believable that it’s about to sign two deals with Fortune 500 food companies that want to use the stuff in sauces and dressings.





When I step into Hampton Creek’s airy warehouse space, I’m greeted by a dog, a couch, and a handful of researchers hard at work on refining the company’s products–in this case, that means they’re doing everything from making cole slaw to mixing up mayonnaise. CEO Josh Tetrick sits me down to tell me the story behind why the company is honing in on the egg market. It’s not an appeal to vegans–though of course, they’re welcome to eat Beyond Eggs products, too.

There are the environmental issues, of course. 18% of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, and much of the arable land and fertilizer in use today goes towards feeding and dealing with factory farm animals. And then there’s food safety–something that has recently been shoved in the spotlight by the new bird flu scare in China. Animals in close contact breed disease, and it doesn’t take much for a seemingly harmless bird virus to take hold in the human population.

But the big thing for Hampton Creek is the size of the market. About 33% of eggs end up as ingredients in food products like muffins and mayonnaise. There’s a $6 billion market for egg ingredients globally, and production costs are rising around the world. Beyond Eggs costs 18% less than real eggs. So it’s not unreasonable to think that big food producers would want to slip a cheap and convincing egg substitute into their products (both of the companies that Hampton Creek is about to work with plan to disclose that they use Beyond Eggs). Tetrick believes that Hampton Creek can thrive as its own consumer-facing brand as well.





Hampton Creek has only been in existence for about a year, but its 17-member team has already created 344 fake egg prototypes and studied 287 types of plants that could be useful in production. On the afternoon when I visited, the company had already created eight mayonnaise prototypes. “Plants can bind like an egg in a cookie, hold oil and water in mayonnaise, scramble like an egg, and puff out in a muffin,” says Tetrick. You just need to know which plants to use and how. That’s what Hampton Creek’s lab members work on figuring out every day.

Megan Clements, the Director of Emulsion Innovation (yup, Director of Emulsion Innovation) at Hampton Creek, is devoting many of her waking hours to creating the perfect eggless mayonnaise–one that has the optimal stability, mouthfeel, and taste. She shows me a closet lined with hundreds of jars, all filled with mayo prototypes. After going through a number of tests (droplet particle size, thickness, etc.) every single test batch is jarred and stuck in the mayo library (that’s right, mayo library) to check for shelf stability.

Hampton Creek’s extensive testing seems to be paying off. Clements tells me that the company took samples to a nearby university campus, fed the mayo to over 200 students without telling them it was eggless, and then asked them to compare it to one of the most popular mayonnaise brands on the market. The eggless mayo won.