Hampton Creek Foods, a food tech startup backed by Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, is getting ready to expand beyond its initial product Beyond Eggs — though it’s not leaving eggs behind entirely.
The company recently released the YouTube video embedded below, which gives a brief glimpse of its upcoming scrambled egg replacer. And founder/CEO Josh Tetrick told me that he just got off-stage at TEDxEdmonton, where he gave the full demo.
Hampton Creek’s larger mission is to move the world away from animal-based foods by developing replacements that are cheaper, healthier, and tastier. Its first product, Beyond Eggs, is supposed to replace eggs in baked goods and other food products (the cookies with Beyond Eggs that I tasted earlier this year were delicious). Tetrick told me that the response to Beyond Eggs’ launch in February has been better than expected, with “more of an interest in the mission/purpose of our work than we anticipated.”
But Beyond Eggs doesn’t replace eggs as a standalone food. That’s what the scrambled egg product is supposed to accomplish. In Tetrick’s words, it’s “the whole damn thing – not an element in other food products.” And he’s hoping to start selling it in the next six months.
“We’re just using one plant to make it happen… and this one plant has awesome coagulation, texture, and springiness properties,” he added.
In a preview video for his TEDxEdmonton demo, Tetrick also offered some thoughts on the broader vision:
We think the food industry will change quite a bit. It will become a lot more humane, a lot healthier, and a lot more sustainable. And right now I think the big problem is that our food system is incredibly broken. And it’s broken because of its devasting impacts to our environment (greenhouse gas emissions), its devastating impacts to our health (rising rates of diabetes and heart disease), and its awful, almost bizarre brutality to animals.
Hampton Creek has raised a total of $4.5 million from Khosla, Founders Fund, Kat Taylor, and the Collaborative Fund.
Update: And here’s a video of the presentation.