Josh Tetrick, founder of Hamtpon Creek Foods, a start-up that's trying to use plants to replace eggs. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED The Hampton Creek lab in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. Eggless omelets are on the horizon. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED The company's first product, an egg-free (and cholesterol free) mayo is already on Whole Foods shelves. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED The company’s scientists have approached the egg not as an indivisible unit but rather as a highly optimized tool capable of all sorts of different culinary tricks. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED “The reason why a chicken egg is great is because it has 22 different functionalities,” Tetrick says. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED With the help of a few million in venture funding, and an investment from Bill Gates, the company’s scientists have spent the last year scouring the world’s flora with start-up scrappiness. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED A closet is full of slightly tweaked versions of their novel mayo, like the room with the arks in Indiana Jones. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED French toast is also in prototype phase. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED To zero in on these egg-mimicking proteins and harness them for actual products, Tetrick assembled a team not only of traditional food scientists but of biochemists and molecular engineers. Leading the search is Joshua Klein, Hampton Creek’s Director of Biochemistry R&D. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED “[Josh] doesn’t look at mayonnaise or a cookie or a scrambled egg like we would,” Tetrick says. “He looks at it like a branch chain of amino acids.” Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Tetrick’s quick to point out that ditching eggs for plants makes solid financial sense. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Eggs are big business—nearly two trillion are laid every year—and Hampton Creek’s substitute is currently up to 18 percent less expensive than the cheapest chicken egg, which translates into a jar of mayonnaise that’s roughly five percent cheaper than competitors. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Mayo through the microscope. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED And yet, Hampton Creek isn’t content to just mimic the egg and squeak out a slightly better margin. The company’s scientists think they’ve only just started to unlock the potential their protein-based approach has to transform the food industry. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED “We tell ourselves, ‘Let’s not set the egg product as a five on a scale of one to five,’” Klein, Hampton Creek's head of R&D explains. Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED “Let’s set it at four and try to do better.” Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Just as I'm bringing the fork to my mouth, Josh Tetrick, the founder of Hampton Creek Foods, stops me: "I would encourage you to dip it in the salt first."

I'm about to eat a bite of a French omelet, prepared moments earlier on a little portable stovetop by Doug Ivey, Hampton Creek's soft-spoken Senior Scientist and, less officially, Chief of Scramble. I dab the yellow blob in a tidy pile of salt and put it in my mouth. Tetrick and Ivey stand by nervously. It tastes fine: A little chewy, definitely, and oddly tasteless.

If it was served to me at a restaurant, I'd send it back; if I encountered it while hungover I'd probably inhale it without thinking twice. Mostly, the few bites I had were unremarkable, which is actually very much remarkable, considering the one thing that made this omelet unique: It didn't involve any eggs whatsoever. Instead, this strange little omelet was made with plants.

>One young scientist helpfully informs me it is a "particle-size analyzer."

Hampton Creek occupies a small office in the heart of SoMa, San Francisco's startup neighborhood, at least several dozen blocks from anything you could actually call a creek. The front half of the space looks like a scene from any other young tech company: A dozen or so twentysomethings, packed tightly around a long table, each engrossed in their own laptop, with last year's indie pop hits emanating from speakers unseen. Just beyond the huddle, however, there's something quite different. The back half of the office is taken up by a brightly lit laboratory, complete with industrial-grade freezers, post-grads in white lab coats, and machines like the Mastersizer 3000, a slightly forbidding suitcase-sized apparatus that one young scientist helpfully informs me is a "particle-size analyzer."

Typically, he explains, such machines are used by polymer scientists to develop synthetic materials like latex. This particular unit is being used to monitor the emulsification of Hampton Creek's first product: a mayonnaise that, instead of eggs, is made with proteins from a particular species of Canadian yellow pea. Unlike the omelet from the Department of Scramble, which Tetrick assures me is very much a work in progress, Hampton Creek's mayo is a real-deal, ready-to-go, zero-egg (and thus zero-cholesterol) product, which you can now find on shelves of of select Whole Foods stores. And, as I can attest, Hampton Creek's mayo doesn't just taste normal. It tastes good.

Hampton Creek's mission is to find plant proteins that can replace eggs in spreads, sauces, baked goods, and breakfast favorites. With the help of a few million in venture funding, and an investment from Bill Gates, the company's scientists have spent the last year scouring the world's flora with start-up scrappiness. So far, they've been surprisingly successful.

Just Mayo, the company's mayonnaise, is already out the door. A plant-based product for baking called Eat the Dough will come next. The scrambled offerings, Tetrick hopes, will be ready for primetime sometime around March. In other words, plant-based eggs are not just a sci-fi moonshot. They're fast arriving on supermarket shelves.

22 Functions, Thousands of Plants

One of Hampton Creek's key innovations has simply been to look at the food industry from a slightly different perspective. The company's scientists have approached the egg not as an indivisible unit but rather as a highly optimized tool capable of all sorts of different culinary tricks. "The reason why a chicken egg is great is because it has 22 different functionalities," Tetrick explains. But different foods use different functionalities. In mayonnaise, the egg's powers of emulsification and coagulation are key. In baked goods, the egg has other roles: aeration, browning, binding, and texture.

Instead of finding a single plant protein that can replicate all 22 of the egg's functions, Hampton Creek's scientists look for plants that can satisfy the criteria for just one of these edible applications. While Yellow Pea, for instance, proved to be the perfect fit for mayo, the company's egg-less cookie dough is made possible by a particular grain of Sorghum. If you switched the plant proteins in these two products, keeping everything else in the recipe exactly the same, you'd end up with two totally inedible products.

>'The reason why a chicken egg is great is because it has 22 different functionalities,' Tetrick explains.

To zero in on these egg-mimicking proteins and harness them for actual products, Tetrick assembled a team not only of traditional food scientists but of biochemists and molecular engineers. Leading the search is Joshua Klein, Hampton Creek's Director of Biochemistry R&D. "[Josh] doesn't look at mayonnaise or a cookie or a scrambled egg like we would," Tetrick says as he leads me to Klein's station at the back of the office. "He looks at it like a branch chain of amino acids."

When I ask Klein what's keeping him busy this week, he says he's currently preoccupied with efficiency. Hampton Creek has already evaluated over a thousand plants at its San Francisco office–flowers, grains, stalks and stems–but there are thousands more to consider, and the quicker you can rule a protein out, the better chance you have at finding the rare one that works.

Klein shows me a series of jellyfish-blue transparencies that let the team's researchers see, at a glance, if certain qualities are present in a given protein. "We're trying to find new, smarter ways to screen for these properties faster," he explains. "As we evolve as a company, I think we'll come up with more and more perfected formulations."

What's So Bad About Eggs Anyway?

The Hampton Creek story–or at least the slideshow they use to tell it to you–starts, unsurprisingly, with an overview of the decidedly unappetizing conditions in which the majority of eggs are produced today. For Tetrick, a former college football player who spent several years after graduation working with nonprofits in Africa, the issue isn't eggs, but rather this system that produces them. "There's nothing wrong with the egg. What's wrong is making the chicken an egg production machine. That's the problem. And that's where 99 percent of the eggs come from," he explains.

When Tetrick says the status quo is a "problem," he's ostensibly talking about the ethics of keeping chickens in dirty coups and forcing them to poop out eggs to the point of exhaustion. But it's clear that there's another dimension that irks the founder: Mainly that the old way of getting eggs is inelegant and unsustainable and above all just plain inefficient compared to what he might be able to do with plants. In talking to him, it quickly becomes clear that he thinks Hampton Creek genuinely has a shot at coming up with a smarter way of doing business.

When you look at in these terms, the company's mission starts to come into focus. What Hampton Creek is really trying to do is disrupt the chicken itself: The business is out to show just how efficiently you can make egg-like products when you get rid of the squawking, two-legged factory that happens to produce the real thing.

>The issue isn't eggs but rather this system that produces them.

Indeed, Tetrick's quick to point out that ditching eggs for plants makes solid financial sense. Eggs are big business—nearly two trillion are laid every year—and Hampton Creek's substitute is currently up to 18 percent less expensive than the cheapest chicken egg, which translates into a jar of mayonnaise that's roughly five percent cheaper than competitors. It's this type of dollars and cents advantage, presumably, that has generated interest from the VC world. "Those guys, I don't think they necessarily look at this and say, 'oh man I feel bad for the chickens,'" Tetrick says.

This gets to an important aspect of what's going on at Hampton Creek. The company doesn't want to use plants to create an egg alternative. Instead, it wants to use plants to find cheaper and more sensible ways to give people the egg-based foods they already love. "We lose when we get into conversations about veganism," Tetrick says. "It's a losing proposition. We want people to put this in chicken salad. We want them to put this in their egg salad." The thinking is apparent in the branding of Just Mayo. The packaging shrewdly glosses over the egg-less formulation that makes the product distinct.

Some of Hampton Creek's mayo, in fact, is already being used in prepared foods at a handful of Whole Foods locations. Ultimately, Tetrick sees opportunities not just on supermarket shelves but higher up the food chain as well: Places like buffets and college cafeterias and maybe even one day on the breakfast menu at McDonald's or Burger King. You could say the true ambition is to introduce egg-free mayo to the world without the world even knowing it.

Egg 2.0

And yet, Hampton Creek isn't content to just mimic the egg and squeak out a slightly better margin. The company's scientists think they've only just started to unlock the potential their protein-based approach has to transform the food industry. "The way science works is that the first generation of discoveries isn't the optimal generation," Klein, the biochemist, says. "There are constant improvements you can make."

He likes to think of the current Hampton Creek mayonnaise as version 1.0. Updates and upgrades are already in the works. The next iteration might be a mayo that has a longer shelf-life, or one that doesn't require refrigeration. Version 3.0 might even make Hellmann's taste bland.

These spreadable superpowers may sound too good to be true, but Klein insists his team is close to making them a reality. Meanwhile, at the Department of Scramble, Doug Ivey is working hard on the mouthfeel of his omelet, nudging his plant-based creation closer to textural perfection every day. Elsewhere in the lab, new plants are being processed, and the techniques used to harness their proteins are being refined. From here, it seems inevitable that Hampton Creek's offerings will only get better, and cheaper, and tastier.

Indeed, the company isn't going to let its chicken-borne muse constrain its ambition. "We tell ourselves, 'Let's not set the egg product as a five on a scale of one to five,'" Klein explains. "Let's set it at four and try to do better." He pauses for a second, and we both silently contemplate a future where plant-based super eggs yield all sorts of fantastic new breakfast options. Then he snaps out of it, glancing around his workspace for something else to show me. "Have you ever seen, by the way, what mayo looks like under a microscope?"

Photos: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED