Hampton Creek has just announced a huge $90 million Series C financing led by Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures and Khosla Ventures. This comes just ten months after a $23 million Series B was announced in February, bringing their total funding to $120 million. Hampton Creek has an envious captable which includes Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, Salesforce CEO MArc Benioff, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, and Bill Gates.
Hampton Creek’s main product is a plant-based eggless mayo called “Just Mayo” which it sells in Whole Foods, Costco, Safeway, Walmart, Target, Krogers, and ShopRite. Earlier this year they also expanded to PARKnSHOP, Hong Kong’s largest grocer. Under the threat of disruption form this eggless menace, Unilever (which owns Hellmann’s) also announced earlier this year they they are suing Hampton Creek for fraud, alleging that the use of the word “mayo” in their “Just Mayo” product fraudulently implies that the product contains eggs. According to the FDA food standards (Subchapter D, Part 169, Subpart B, section 169.140) “mayonnaise” must contain eggs (Other required ingredients include lemon/lime juice or dilute vinegar).
In an interview with AgFunderNews last year, founder Josh Tetrick said “We specifically focus on intensive animal agriculture and how change can happen within that segment. And part of the reason as a company we focus on egg production is it’s one of the areas of intensive animal agriculture that we think has the most issues. whether it’s avian flu, rising prices, or the treatment of animals in the world of egg production. We think all that can be better. And so instead of using a chicken in a cage with seven other chickens, we grow plants in open fields. And we use those plants to actually surpass the functionality of a chicken egg, in products like muffins, cookies, and cookie dough.”
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