Feeding the world by getting rid of eggs

Editor’s note: Josh Tetrick founded Hampton Creek Foods in 2011 to tackle how to make worldwide diets more sustainable without sacrificing nutrition or making food more expensive. Based in San Francisco, Tetrick’s food technology company is working to determine which plants can replace and enhance everything the egg is used for in modern diets.

The following was adapted from an interview with “TechKnow” contributor Marita Davison. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Marita Davison, “TechKnow” contributor: Tell me about your background.

Josh Tetrick, CEO, Hampton Creek Foods: I was a failed football player. I thought I was pretty good, but not good enough to actually play in the NFL. I started studying sociology and government and didn't know what the hell I wanted to do. I decided to go to sub-Saharan Africa for about seven years to figure it out. I was in South Africa; Nigeria; Monrovia, Liberia; Nairobi, Kenya—doing everything from helping support kids to get off the street and into school to investment law reform. I was just trying to figure my life out, and I was really frustrated that all the change that I thought we should be making wasn't actually happening.

After all those years in sub-Saharan Africa, I recognized two things. No. 1: It felt like the mechanisms for change that I was using just weren't good enough. The second insight was no matter what I did in sub-Saharan Africa, I kept running into this idea of food really mattering a lot.

I called my best friend, and I talked with him about it. He happened to have already spent about seven years of his life working with the world's biggest food companies, with Nestle and General Mills and McDonald's. I got to talking with him about the world of food. The more he told me about it, the crazier it sounded, especially when he told me about the chicken egg. That's what really came through.

He said about 1.8 trillion chicken eggs are laid every year around the world and 99 percent of them come from places that, if the regular person just saw it, they would be kind of disgusted. Not the best for the environment. Not the best for the animal. Not even the safest. That spurred this idea: What could we do to better feed the world in a way to make food a little bit healthier, a little bit safer, a little bit more affordable? And how the heck could we use the chicken egg or maybe even something better — a plant — to make it happen?

MD: Why eggs? Why did you start with eggs?
JT: The egg is the cheapest, most abundant source of animal protein on the planet. It’s incredible. When you really peel back the onion of the chicken egg, you see some pretty strange things. You see that it's a part of a system that's responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. It's a part of a system that sees avian flu pop up 17 times in the last six months around the world. It's part of a system that uses a lot of water. It felt like a good sort of lever that we could pull to bring the cost of food down, to bring the sustainability of food up and make food a little bit healthier. So that's where we're starting. In the same way that electricity ended up sort of ushering in the end of the gas light, we want to create a new model for the egg.

MD: Tell me a little bit more about how these products are more sustainable.
JT: Ninety-nine percent of those 1.8 trillion chicken eggs that are laid come from places that look like — imagine row upon row upon row of cages stacked on either side. Each one of those birds is fed lots of soy and lots of corn, laced with antibiotics. The soy and corn requires lots of land, water and fertilizer. That's why 70 percent of the cost of every egg actually comes from the feed. The energy-to-food ratio for the conventional egg is 39 to 1, significantly higher than almost any other animal protein. The difference between what Hampton Creek does and that is we don't use an animal. We've sourced plants from over 39 countries around the world. These are plants that grow in the open field. Their energy-to-food ratio is significantly lower, about 2 to 1 on average.

MD: What about people who are looking at your products for the health benefits? How's it meeting that need?
JT: The biggest impact is everything we do is totally devoid of cholesterol, whether it's in a cookie, mayonnaise or just a scrambled egg. Our plants also generally have about 10 percent more protein than the conventional egg. About 33 million Americans have egg allergies or egg sensitivities. We get lots of emails and phone calls from folks who want to avoid it just because of that.

MD: Who's your target market here? Who are you aiming to have buy into this?
JT: Someone that looks and thinks like my dad, which is to say just a regular person. A regular person who is busy, doesn't have an incredible amount of expendable income, and who isn't thinking constantly about mitigating their climate-change impact or animal welfare. They're just trying to eat good food. I think if we can figure out a way to make food just a little bit healthier and a little more affordable for most people, we're going to win.  

MD: But right now your mayo product is being sold at Whole Foods, which is kind of a high-end, upscale kind of marketplace. Are you hoping eventually to get into more mainstream, lower-cost areas of distribution?
JT: In the next six months — just think of the largest, most shopped retailers on planet earth. We'll be in most of them. We don't think good has to be premium-priced. We don't think good has to be inconvenient. We think good should be exactly the opposite. Good should be, you turn on the light switch and it happens to be powered by a solar thermal plant. That's really good for the environment and more affordable.

MD: Are you going international?
JT: We're launching in Hong Kong in 90 days. We were lucky enough to get an investment from the wealthiest person in Asia, Mr. Li Ka-shing. Through an incredible distribution network and insights and intelligence, we're going to be starting our market in East Asia, with a grocery store called Park and Shop in Hong Kong.

MD: You've been funded by some pretty high-profile folks. How did that come about?
JT: The company was [started] in my studio apartment. I spent a lot of time with my dog. We spent a lot of time on the couch back in my studio apartment. I had about $22,000 in my bank account. My friend and I had this idea. We pitched it to a firm called Khosla Ventures and told them the story of where the cheapest, most abundant source of animal protein comes from. They said, “This is crazy.” Luckily, they invested half a million dollars in us. Since then, we've been funded by the Founders Fund and Peter Thiel. We've been really grateful to have the support of Bill Gates, who named us one of three companies shaping the future of food.

MD: I think of the egg as the ultimate low-cost protein pack, this bundle of nutrition. Why mess with an already good thing?
JT: It's really, really important to step back, close our eyes, move out from the classical music and the shelled egg and the glass of wine and say, “What is reality?” When we're honest with ourselves, we can say we should probably mess with it, because it's abusive. It's degrading. It uses a lot of water. There's probably a smarter way. We're not trying to sort of have some grand campaign here against a chicken egg. We are trying to have a grand campaign in a movement to make food better for everyone. Not just for people that make over $100,000 a year, but to make it work for everyone.

MD: What's been the reception of what you're doing within the egg industry itself?
JT: It's been really interesting. They launched a campaign against us. Facebook ads, Google ads. On the other hand, we've had a number of folks in the egg industry reach out to us and say, “This is the future. How can we partner?” We think that's awesome. We don't look at people that work in the conventional egg industry, actually, and think they're bad people at all. We don't think that they wake up every day excited to put hens in a tiny cage and feed them lots of soy and corn so they can lay 283 eggs per year. They don't live for that. They live to build a business, to compete successfully in a marketplace. And we think if they see another path to the same ends, then they'll take it.

MD: What do you say to people who think that you might be messing with nature?
JT: We say, please come in. Just see what the deal is. Ninety-two percent of the plants around the world have never been explored. So, what we do is this: We would work with a farmer in, let's say, western Canada. We'd identify a particular type of plant, in this case a varietal of a yellow pea. We forgot it was awesome, because we thought someone cornered the [market on] really awesome plants. We bring that varietal of yellow pea in here [to] some really smart scientists that used to try to find therapies for HIV.

They'll look at it. They'll identify a number of these different biochemical properties. They won't engineer it. They won't manipulate it. They won't try to chemically induce it to do something interesting. They’ll look at it. They will understand it at a level that other folks haven't. They'll help us build connections between what's happening on the biochemical level and what actually happens in a food product. Does it actually gel together like a scrambled egg? So there's no manipulation. In fact, everything we do is certified non-GMO.

MD: This is not a genetically modified product at all?
JT: No, not at all. Really, it's a recognition that the world forgot how abundant and how complex the natural world is. We forgot. I don't know why we forgot, but we did. But we can step back, and we can remember again.

MD: What's the endgame for you?
JT:  I think it's the world figuring out how it feeds 9 and a half billion people in a way that is convenient, affordable and just so happens to be better for the planet. Just so happens to be a little bit better for our bodies. Slowly, you're going to see the back of intensive animal agriculture and the unhealthy practices that kind of come from it break. Not because of anything else other than it's just smarter. For the same reason, again, the horse and buggy is no longer with us. It's just smarter. It just works better for people's lives.

To learn more about Hampton Creek Foods, watch "TechKnow," Saturday 7ET/4PT.