The Just Mayo identity crisis, Unilever lawyers said, has hurt Hellmann’s market share, “caused consumer deception and serious, irreparable harm to Unilever” and the mayo industry as a whole. The firm wants Hampton Creek to stop calling it Just Mayo, yank the product off store shelves and pay Unilever damages worth three times the startup’s profits.

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It is a strangely defensive stance for Unilever, a Big Food titan that made more than $64 billion last year selling foodstuffs in nearly 200 countries (including “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, a spread that is not butter). Hellmann’s, which is branded Best Foods west of the Rocky Mountains, dominates 45 percent of the mayo market, data from industry researcher Euromonitor shows.

But market watchers say it highlights the fears from traditional food conglomerates facing unexpected competition from crafty start-ups. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the biggest battleground is mayonnaise: Americans buy $2 billion of the stuff every year — more even than ketchup, salsa or soy sauce.

“It’s not about using the (mayo) word,” said Michele Simon, a public health attorney who wrote about the suit. “It’s about the fact that this company is taking market share away. And now it’s like they’ve awakened the giant.”

That the plant-based Just Mayo is a new type of food will lend an interesting dimension to the legal proceedings: Brand disputes typically quibble over words, not the definition of the product itself.

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But the very modern legal battle will be fought on regulatory territory that is decades old. The FDA’s definition of mayonnaise was set in 1957, decades before the phrase “vegan mayo” ever made sense. (Maintaining that “standard of identity” is important: Kraft Foods’ Miracle Whip, which doesn’t meet the FDA’s standard, is technically a salad dressing.)

Unilever doesn’t just call out Just Mayo for what it calls confusing branding — advertisements have called the stuff “mayo,” and its logo resembles an egg — it also says the company has no proof in its claims of beating Hellmann’s in a taste test.

So what’s spooking Big Food? Hampton Creek has some big backers, including Bill Gates, and in a matter of months has spread rapidly to more than 20,000 Walmarts, Costcos and other stores across the country.

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While other organic spreads like Vegenaise play up their place in the vegan niche, Hampton Creek has widely promoted Just Mayo as a mainstream brand: healthy, cheap and good for everybody. (Company ads rarely call it “vegan.”)

“We don’t market our product to tree-hugging liberals in San Francisco, even though I’m in the middle of nine of them right now,” said Josh Tetrick, Hampton Creek’s founder and chief executive. “We built the company to try to really penetrate the places where better-for-you food hasn’t gone before, and that means right in the condiment aisle of Walmart.”

The fate of Just Mayo, which swapped out eggs for Canadian yellow peas, will be watched closely by other food conglomerates. Hampton Creek also sells Just Cookies, a line of egg- and milk-free cookie dough, and is working on a gooey egg-free mix, Just Scramble.

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The suit comes at a touchy time for Unilever, which just launched an ad campaign promoting itself as devoted to sustainability, and which backed its own soy-based egg alternative, Alleggra Foods, nearly ten years ago.

“Our concern here is not about innovation, it is about misleading labelling,” a Unilever spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday. “We simply wish to protect both consumers from being misled and also our brand.”

Just Mayo has fought back with the help of celebrity chefs including Andrew Zimmern, who launched a petition, “Stop Bullying Sustainable Food Companies,” that has more than 11,000 signers. The firm tweeted Unilever’s chief executive’s own words against him (he called for “transformational innovation”) and was less than subtle on its Facebook about its David-vs.-Goliath status (though the illustration has since been deleted):

Tetrick, the start-up’s chief executive, said his firm is looking at the lawsuit as a chance to not just expand their corporate profile, but to lift up their egg-free sandwich spread as the touchpoint for a larger food-based cultural movement.