These Plant-Based Foods Have Scrambled The Grocery Aisle

From yolk-free mayo to chickenless “eggs,” Hampton Creek CEO Josh Tetrick is bringing his vision of sustainable, plant-based foods to grocery aisles across the country—and he’s cracking a few shells along the way.

- Jonathan Ringen

From Silicon Valley to SoMa, the Bay Area is packed with blockbuster companies that were built on little more than a good idea. But there’s only one that was built on a condiment. Three years ago, Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, which swaps a protein derived from Canadian yellow peas for the eggs that help emulsify oil into sandwich-spreadable goodness, appeared in Whole Foods (and, later, Walmart and Kroger) stores across the nation. Among an increasingly influential coalition of shoppers—ethics-minded consumers, along with vegans and people with food allergies—it was an instant hit. To a casual observer, vegan mayonnaise hardly seemed like the opening salvo in a war to capture supermarket-aisle space from giants like Unilever, Kraft, and Nestlé. To Josh Tetrick, the 36-year-old founder of San Francisco– based Hampton Creek, it was that and more. A high school football star from Birmingham, Alabama, who still speaks with a Southern drawl, Tetrick sees the entire global food system as an opportunity for the kind of rip-it-up-and-start-again thinking at which Silicon Valley excels. Or as he puts it, flashing a wolfish grin, “I want us to be the biggest food company on the planet. And I want us to do some good at the same time.”

His plan? To create a whole range of high-tech, plant-based products that use fewer resources from farm to factory to table, cost less, and are both healthier and tastier than traditional products. The company deploys a three-part process: identifying underutilized, low-impact crops (like sorghum, which requires little water); applying computer data to determine if any proteins they contain might be functionally useful in food (the way the yellow pea turned out to be a great emulsifier); and then using advanced cooking techniques (via a dream team of Michelin-starred chefs) to create tasty recipes for packaged products.