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The egg came before the chicken at Eat Just, the food technology company known best for Just Egg, a plant-based egg alternative that scrambles like a chicken egg only without the environmental, animal welfare and health drawbacks associated with animal proteins.

Since its founding in 2011 as Hampton Creek, the company has sold the equivalent of more than 300 million plant-based eggs. Behind celebrity spokespeople and event marketing such as music festivals, Just Egg today is the second-fastest growing egg product in the U.S. and it ranks No. 13 by total sales among all egg products, according to company figures citing Nielsen point-of-sale data. The company has raised more than $850 million, including $267 million to support an emerging sister brand called Good Meat, a leader in a race to grow “cultured meat” from animal cells. Good Meat’s cultured chicken in late 2020 became the first lab-grown meat brand approved for consumer consumption in Singapore. The U.S. remains a longer-term goal for Good Meat.

Eat Just's disruptive nature has occasionally landed it in the frying pan, drawing opposition from established competitors, and skepticism from some observers while enduring its share of internal crises in its early years. Below, more on how the brand’s origin story, its marketing approach and what's next.

How it started

Josh Tetrick, who once dreamed of playing professional football, found himself by age 30 sleeping on a couch of an ex-grilfriend’s home in California searching for something meaningful to do with his life. Though he’d been to law school and spent time working on environmental advocacy in Africa, “I felt really frustrated and unsure about what I wanted to do next,” the former West Virginia linebacker recalled. “I just knew that I wanted to do something meaningful and I’d come around to the idea that I wanted to use capitalism in a positive way.”

He found the idea he sought through the influence of his best friend, Josh Balk. Tetrick and Balk were high school football teammates in suburban Philadelphia, and Balk had long been onto the notion of mindful eating, getting Tetrick to pay attention to the environmental and humanitarian costs of how food gets onto the plate. Balk felt that the egg industry was especially troublesome in terms of land use, water use and carbon emissions, not to mention the welfare of hens, Tetrick said. Around 1.4 trillion chicken eggs are consumed every year, using 93 million acres of land and 51 billion gallons of water, according to Eat Just.

“Eventually,” Tetrick said, “[Balk] pushed hard enough where he said, ‘What if there was a company behind making animal protein better? And what if we started with an egg?’” Balk, who works as VP of farm animal protection at the Humane Society of the U.S., is listed as a co-founder of Eat Just.

Their idea was anything but an overnight success. Tetrick described Googling the number of plants in the world and finding 400,000—but no information as to which might replicate an egg. But Tetrick was able to convince early investors to back his idea, which got him off his girlfriend’s couch, and he began the process that led to the introduction of Just Egg years later.

Meantime, the company, then known as Hampton Creek, launched a pea-based vegan mayonnaise alternative called Just Mayo that was in for its own adventures. Shortly after its rollout, the brand was sued by Unilever, parent of Hellmann’s, for using the word “Mayo” for a product that didn’t use eggs (the case was eventually dropped after discussion between the parties; Hampton Creek later revised its label claims after discussion with the FDA).

In 2016, Just Mayo was found to have been targeted by the American Egg Board, an industry-funded trade group overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s marketing branch. The Egg Board was said to have spent nearly $60,000 to undermine Just Mayo, by using influencers to promote pro-egg messages and manipulating search results for the product. Emails uncovered in an investigation showed some Egg Board members joking that they would “put a hit on” Tetrick.

Hampton Creek also encountered troubles of its own. A Bloomberg investigation in 2016 found that the company had instructed employees to secretly buy its products and to inquire stores about their availability, in order to boost sales figures. Tetrick maintained this was a method of quality control; a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into the matter was dropped. And in 2017, the company was rocked by the departure of three top employees in what was described as a coup attempt, followed shortly by a mass board resignation.

While not addressing the internal issues directly, Tetrick said the disruptive nature of the company’s products led him to anticipate friction.

“A company that is pushing back is waking up in the morning thinking how it can make more money that day. And if they’re going to make more money that day by selling kale, then they're going to sell more kale. If they’re going to make more money that day by slaughtering an animal, then they're probably going to slaughter more animals,” Tetrick said. “So there’s going to be pushback, that’s part of the deal, and the best way to deal with all that is to put our heads down and make things taste good, make people feel good about it, and make it more accessible to all consumers. They don’t care about all that noise. So there needs to be a fixation on what actual human beings want. I don’t think that’s terribly complicated.”

Tipping point

When asked to reflect on a turning point for his company, Tetrick gives two answers. One was the launch of Just Egg in retail in late 2018. The other, he said, was “learning how to deal with the hard stuff.”

“If you’re going to try and create an entirely new category, both on the egg and meat side, you’re definitely going to be dealing with hard stuff: Hard technical stuff, hard investor stuff, hard everything stuff,” he said. “And learning how to deal with that, where you’re looking at it, confronting it, and not getting sunk by it, is a really important discipline. It’s a really important habit.”

Just Egg’s arrival took Tetrick back to Googling plants from his ex-girlfriend’s couch. He thought then the company would have a product ready in a year or two. It turned out to be closer to seven years. “It was much harder, much more multidisciplinary, much more capital-intensive and required much more of my intellect, leadership and emotional self.”

Just Egg’s breakthrough plant was a legume known as the mung bean. The mung bean was chosen because its protein gels and layers at a time and a temperature similar to the protein in a chicken egg. The company mills mung beans into flour, then separates its protein by spinning the flour at a high rate of speed. That’s mixed with water, canola oil and other ingredients.

The egg launch helped to power plant-based egg alternatives to rapid growth. The category grew by 42% in dollar sales in 2021 and by 1,000% since 2018, when Just Egg was introduced, according to the Plant Based Food Association.

Conventional egg dollar sales dipped by 4% in 2021, the trade group added, with plant-based eggs now making up 0.6% of the overall market up from 0.05% three years ago. The percentage of households buying plant-based eggs grew by 50% last year, the group added.

Marketing strategy

Tetrick said the connecting thread in Just Egg’s marketing is “deeper principles” about what drives people to choose what they eat. 

“People want food that tastes really good, that makes them feel good and that they can afford," Tetrick said. "Our marketing should be about that. The product should be about that. … The closer we can get to optimizing those three things, the better this is gonna be, but the most effective way to communicate with consumers about this is this is a way of eating breakfast that's a little bit healthier."

The company has done this by using celebrities, influencers, and recently—a heavy dose of experiential marketing.

Just Egg this year launched a new campaign called “Really Good Eggs,” starring two of its celebrity investors: actor Jake Gyllenhaal and tennis legend Serena Williams. The ads, narrated by J.B. Smoove, poke fun at celebrity perks like personal trainers and nutritionists while pointing out that everyone can benefit from healthy plant-based eggs. 

The Williams ad shows her making a breakfast sandwich while scientists plan out her day in the background; Gyllenhaal scrambles eggs after a workout “only famous people know about.” The ads came from the agency Mythology.

A more serious health tone is established by NBA star Chris Paul, who in a Father's Day campaign this year discussed his father’s longevity and health improvement once he switched to a plant-based diet.

Other celebrity endorsers include Olympic skier Lindsey Vonn, NBA star Cade Cunningham and soccer athletes Ashlyn Harris and Ali Krieger. 

The brand is also making multiple efforts to get in front of crowds. Over the summer Just Egg showed up with activations at a series of summer music festivals including Bonaroo, EDC Vegas and Primavera Sound. It was a sponsor of the Vans US Open of Surfing. And it recently introduced a new product, plant-based breakfast sandwiches called MingsBings, created with Iron Chef Ming Tsai, at the Food Network’s New York City Wine & Food Festival. This fall, the brand presented samples at 40 colleges and universities.

Tetrick acknowledges that plant-based alternatives to conventional foods can come against limits. A consumer hovering over the Just Egg display at the supermarket could buy a bunch of broccoli instead.

“I believe that to be the absolute truth, but we have to balance that with an acknowledgment that we’re not perfect machines,” he said. “I have an electric car and sometimes I should ride my bike to pick up groceries but I drive instead. Why am I in a car when I should ride a bike? It’s because I’m not perfect… you’ve got to meet people where they are.”

What experts say

Jay Jacobowitz, president of Retail Insights, a Brattleboro, Vermont-based natural foods consultant, is skeptical that cultured meat and plant-based versions of natural products will find mass appeal.

“If you think about the basics of the natural products industry, natural means undisturbed, simple, uncomplicated, and labels with two or three ingredients, and less processing,” he said. “Elevating carbon footprint, animal husbandry and other values above what we put into our bodies is a limiting factor long-term,” Jacobowitz added. “The natural/organic movement has sustainability because of the simplicity of the ingredients and simple processing. If you elevate another value above that–sustainability for the earth–and subsume the simple ingredient story for carbon footprint, there’s a natural limit to what the consumer will embrace.”

Yet there’s plenty of momentum in the space. Last month the Food and Drug Administration said it completed its first pre-market consultation for cultured meat from the company Upside Foods, considered a “green light” for further steps toward approval. Upside still requires USDA approvals of its manufacturing establishment and inspection of its food.

Upside, like Eat Just, are members of a coalition of cultured meat companies that this month formally established their own trade association, the Association for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation (AMPS).

“Today’s food landscape is changing quickly and cultivated/cell-cultured meat is at the forefront of innovation, helping to meet the growing demand for meat, poultry and seafood through delicious, healthy and sustainable food options,” Dave Tonucci, president of AMPS Innovation, said in a statement. “Formalizing AMPS Innovation allows us to properly support the needs of the cultivated/cell-cultured meat, poultry, and seafood industry via science-based regulatory advocacy and transparent communications on the production, safety and benefits of cultivated meat, poultry and seafood.”

What's next

Eat Just’s Good Meat division is among some 90 companies pursuing cultured meat, or meat grown from a cell of a living animal. While it's still early in the game, Tetrick believes the practice will one day outsell plant-based meat alternatives and become cost-effective and available enough to feed the world.

“In 50 years I can see having a conversation with my grandkid and she’d be like, “Wait a second. You’re telling me that in 2022 we used to collect billions of animals and essentially destroy the planet to feed them soy and corn just to have chicken?’”

Good Meat in the meantime is feeding consumers in Singapore where its chicken products come not from a lab but a manufacturing facility– “just like yogurt or Gatorade or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes,” Tetrick said. In order to feed more people, costs must come down dramatically and approval to manufacture and sell need to come to more places. Tetrick said Eat Just is in discussions with the Food and Drug Administration and is waiting on approval for a U.S. launch. “We’re planning as if it could happen at any time, but it’s difficult to predict.”

If and when it does, the company has engaged chef and board member José Andrés, who has agreed to launch Good Meat’s products at one of his restaurants.

Good Meat, like Just Egg, will likely appeal to younger college-educated consumers but to meet the company’s environmental mission, more need to come along. “The mission is to move people towards a much healthier, more sustainable way of eating, meaning away from conventional animal products to these things we think are a lot better,” Tetrick said. “That’s going to require more than our target market today, that’s going to require people in McDowell County, West Virginia, who are averaging $26,000 in median income, We need to work for them, or we’re not actually going to solve our mission.”

Is tackling food innovation like football? “It’s a good question,” said Tetrick. “Football for me was a place to be a better version of myself in terms of discipline and work ethic and being a member of a team, stretching myself mentally and physically. It gave me a muscle to push. Football was also a little out of my reach too, which kept me straining.

“This [Eat Just] for me is pretty similar. It’s extremely challenging and complex and if I’m not turned on during the day emotionally and mentally it’s not going to work, because it’s too difficult. So it's a place that forces me to keep straining to be the kind of human being that I’m pushing to be.”