Silicon Valley is Making Synthetic Eggs

Agfunder got the insider’s scoop into the Silicon Valley startup, Hampton Creek Foods, that is making synthetic eggs.

“When you eat a cookie, you probably don’t think of yourself as being a carnivore. You just wanna have a delicious chocolate chip cookie. You’re not even thinking about the philosophy of it.

The whole idea of starting this company isn’t to cater to vegans in Northern California, it’s to cater to everyone.

More and more people are looking at the current food system and realizing that it’s not quite right and things need to change. 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 that it’s one of the areas of intensive agriculture that we think has the most issues. Whether it’s Avian flu, or the rising prices, or the treatment of animals in the world of egg production, we think all of that could be better.

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, and cookies, and cookie dough, and even mayonnaise. And then we also use those plants to put them in a pan and scramble them up like a scrambled egg.

There are lots of busy people out there who are moms and dads and aren’t thinking about the challenges of sustainability, and I don’t blame them—there’s a lot to think about in their own lives—and we try to make it easy by just creating delicious food that happens to be much more sustainable and much more affordable than the status quo, and we think that’s really how we can have an impact.”

–Josh Tetrick, Hampton Creek Foods CEO