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Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on What It Will Take to Normalize the Concept of Cultured Meat

Will we ever reach a day when fast food restaurant serve nothing but plant-based or cultured meat? Many hope so, including Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just. But Tetrick’s ambitions for alternative protein stretch far beyond the QSR sector.

As of this writing, Eat Just is selling its cultured meat product at a restaurant in Singapore (where it got regulatory approval late last year). Stateside, the company has sold enough of its plant-based egg product to equal 100 million chicken eggs, and has been rapidly expanding throughout the restaurant industry.

As to wether we’ll ever see a day where the plant-based restarant is the norm, there are a lot of steps needed to get there. Tetrick and I chatted recently about these along with many other topics on the alt-protein front. Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, Tetrick explains what exactly it will take for cultured meat to reach parity with traditional meat, how experience matters when introducing it to consumers, and why he hops we reach a day when cultured meat becomes boring.

You can listen to the interview read the transcript of our conversation below. Note that the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Jenn Marston: You’ve had a few different announcements in the last few months around JUST getting into more restaurants. Do you ever see a point where we’re going to have restaurants, and I mean, big restaurants, McDonald’s, or, you know, Starbucks or something, only offering alternative proteins on their menus?

Josh Tetrick: I think that one, if we don’t get to that point — similarly if we don’t get to a point where every car dealership only sells an electric car — that our planet will not be in a good state 30 years, 50 years, 100 years from now. So before I tell you what I think it should happen, I’ll say I think it’s a necessity that it does happen, given the urgency that we have around oceans, rain forests or [the danger of] another zoonotic disease outbreak. 

I don’t think it will only be plant based. I see a world in which restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu. So they remove fried chicken, they remove hamburgers, they remove steaks or remove fish, they replace it with cultivated cultured meat. And some restaurants end up having plant based on the menu. That’s what the restaurant menu in the next 10, 20, 30 years will look like. I don’t think there’ll be a need for conventional meats. 

When you have actual meat cultivated, it doesn’t require slaughtering animals. So we’ve done a lot of really important research around this particular topic. [We did a lot of work] in Singapore, looking at restaurant operators and surveys and I’ll give you one finding from that: About 80 percent of restaurants said that they would put cultivated cultured meat on their menu. And about 70 percent of people said that if [cultured meat] meets the tastes and the cost demands, there would be no reason to have conventional meat on the menu at all. So I think that’s what you’ll see. And I think there will always be people that want plant. My girlfriend Shelley is a good example. I gave her some my chicken and she almost spit it out. She said, ‘I don’t want something that tastes like an animal.’ And I think there’ll be a lot of people like that. And that’s okay.

Jenn Marston: I definitely know some people who, if it tastes too much like the real thing, they don’t want anything to do with it. So that’s definitely a good point.

Josh Tetrick: I think it was a combination of [the product] literally being an animal, not a plant. It tastes very much like an animal. But it literally being an animal, combined with it tasting just like an animal was too much for her to take.

Jenn Marston: On the subject of cultured meat, there have been a ton of developments since we last spoke, including Eat Just serving customers in Singapore.

Josh Tetrick: You know, we’ve served almost 300 people, but 80 percent of the people said they feel good about eating it, about 70 percent of the people who paid for it say they’d be open to substituting [cultured meat] for not only conventional meat, but even plant based. So we’re going to be expanding to more restaurants and building a larger manufacturing facility in Singapore to make sure that we’re able to meet all the [demand].

Jenn Marston: Why did you choose Singapore? Was it just that Singapore was most realistic to get regulatory approval first? Or is there something about that specific market you were interested in? 

Josh Tetrick: There’s a few reasons. Their regulatory approach is often very evidence-based. The more science- and evidence-based you are, the less politics are involved. Second reason is that Singapore is a global melting pot. You have people from all over the world there. So when you’re wanting to learn how consumers think about this, why they like it, why they don’t like it, what is causing them to hesitate, you get lots of different cultures. Within those 300 people, we got people from all over the world, young, old everywhere in between. That’s another important reason. And then the third reason is, you know, more people consume meat in Asia than anywhere else in the world. So that was, that was another important reason why we chose Singapore.

Jenn Marston: Is it is the plan that get into more restaurants next? 

Josh Tetrick: It is.

Jenn Marston: It seems like there is a lot of hype happening right now around cultured meat. And it seems like a lot of folks are very confident that cultured meat is gonna just explode very, very quickly. What do you think of some of these comments about it’s going to reach price parity quickly, it’s going to scale up very quickly. 

Josh Tetrick: Well, there are a lot of factors involved. So I guess I’ll just start with the things that I think are certain, then I’ll go to things that are higher and lower probabilities. 

What is certain is that cultured meat will eventually get to the price and then below the price of conventional animal protein. I do feel certain about that. 

The next [issue] is when we’ll get there [to parity] — a year or five or 15 years. This is where there is not 100 percent probability. But I would say more likely than not, that in the next 10 years, this production process will get below the cost of chicken. Now, in order for that to happen, other things need to happen. And those other things include more countries allowing for the sale of [cultured meat]. If you can only sell in Singapore, your market is restricted to the million plus people on the island. You’re not going to be producing tens of billions of pounds, which is what is ultimately required to get to the kind of efficiencies necessary to get below the cost of chicken. 

And then the third thing has to do with where we are in the US. I can’t tell you whether we are going to get regulatory approval this year or not, or whether [regulators are] going to approve it ’22. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell. A lot of companies will go out of business trying to get there. [Making cultured meat] is incredibly capital intensive, it is not easy. It is not straightforward. It requires hundreds and millions of dollars, if not a billion-plus dollars in investment, ultimately, to get there. It’s not for the faint of heart. And much like electric car production, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of companies making electric cars. You might have tens of thousands of companies making different sub components of electric cars, you know, the engine, the battery, the software.  But we only get to have a handful of companies doing the whole thing. I think that is very analogous to the cultured meat industry. 

The final thing I’ll say is, it is one of the real bright spots for us of what’s happening in Singapore. It’s one thing to talk about where production costs are going if you’re only making stuff for your friends and family and boyfriend and girlfriend and your fancy investors. That was the case for us up until we got clearance, and it’s the case for every other company. It’s another thing when you need to scale up to meet the demands of hundreds and thousands, then 10,000, then a million people. You learn a lot about producing more when you actually can produce more. So there’s going to be a ton of learnings that happen. As that scale up process happens, some things might be surprising on the downside, and some might be surprising on on the positive side, but we’ll learn as we make that happen.

Jenn Marston: How challenging is that? Part of getting consumers on board with this is obviously not just price parity, but also parity around taste and texture and the actual product. So how difficult has has that been for you all?

Josh Tetrick: Certainly at some point, whether it’s 5, 10 years (I sure hope it’s not 30 years), cultured meat will be below the cost of traditional meat. The second thing that I am certain about is we’ll eventually get to the point where not a single person can tell the difference because there’s literally no difference at all. Today, in the work that we’ve done, about 70 percent of the people think it tastes as good or better than traditional meat. There’s still a lot of work we want to do on texture. We’re going to be rolling out a chicken breast, which is a more advanced structural product.

But even if we solve for taste and texture, there’s also consumer perception: the feelings, the ideas that make people want to buy the product. It’s a confusing process, making cultured meat. It’s an unnatural process. I’m not saying these things are right, I’m just saying this is what a consumer feels. And I think ultimately, you could get your costs right, you get the taste and texture just perfect. But you’re still left with the most important thing: Do the consumers want to buy your product. The process of lab-grown meat might be holding them back. So it’s really important that we address that stuff. Now. We built a brand around addressing that stuff head on. We know many consumers will think it’s unnatural. That’s okay, let’s deal with it. And we want to deal with it by explaining our process, contrasting it to the conventional meat-making process. Eventually, having a digital platform allows consumers to really interact with stuff a little bit more, so they can get familiar with it. We need to normalize this method of production, so it’s not so opaque to consumers. When it’s confusing, their brains will naturally jump. In the case of cultured meat, many brains will naturally jump to, ‘This just isn’t natural.’ And we have found quite a stark difference between consumers over the age of 20 and consumers under the age of 20.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I get a lot of a lot of folks who just look at me like I’m crazy when I asked them if would you eat meat grown in a lab, but I think it’s, you know, what more do we do to sort of educate consumers? How do you start talking to everybody in a way that’s going to make it have the same appeal, as, say, Doritos?

Josh Tetrick: A big component is allowing people to experience it. So I’ll use a car analogy. Imagine I was in Birmingham [Alabama, where he grew up] and I was talking to some of my friends and I said, ‘Would you would you want to drive a pickup truck doesn’t have an internal combustion engine? Would you be down with buying that?’ I’m almost certain my friends would say, ‘Hell no.’ But then Tesla comes out with that pickup truck that I saw them demoing. If my friends could go to a Tesla store in Alabama, get into that truck, and take it on the back country roads, then there’s an experience of something and there’s a perception change.

The most important thing we think you can do to change perception is allow people to experience in a concrete way, not in a theoretical abstract way. We need to get out in front of more people, right, more restaurants and more retailers and allow people to have the ability to actually access their other meat analogues. 

The second thing is, I think you need to talk about this in a way that is not so technical that you lose people, but is concrete enough where you’re not hiding things from people. And that’s the hard balance. Because the more you unpack, the more you’re being open about it. But the more you unpack, sometimes people can just get lost in the science. It’s about finding the right balance of not getting so technical that people’s eyes just glaze over, but concrete and technical enough that people don’t walk away from that interaction thinking something has been hidden from them. That balance applies whether it’s a label interaction or commercial interaction or menu interaction, or a one to one interaction. One thing that we’ve actually found to be effective is to say, ‘Yes, it is true, the meat is made in a large stainless steel [container], that true statement.’ That statement can be both a little off-putting to people and a little liberating to people. But when you contrast that to how conventional meat is produced, people tend to feel a little bit better. So I think, experience number one, people just got to experience that. And then two, I think talking about in a way that is a little bit more relatable.

Jenn Marston: Something that I think there’s a huge need for more of translating the science into something that isn’t gonna insult folks intelligence or lied to them, but it is also going to, you know, the average person needs to be able to understand it.

Josh Tetrick: Especially if some of our folks are over the age of 20, if you describe the process of culturing meat, the vast majority will say it is strange. And I think the first step to effectively communicating is to acknowledge that is true. To most people, it sounds bizarre, it sounds strange. That’s okay. Let’s now let’s deal with it. Right?

Jenn Marston: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Tetrick: The more we effectively address it, the more we move [the industry] forward. For example, I understand why my mom would think it’s strange. In her mind, meat has been made her entire life (and the history of humanity) by slaughtering an animal and then cutting up their flesh. Cultured meat is different. Let’s just acknowledge that.

And what we’ve seen in other industries and with other products is that something that can be strange can also at some point in time be normalized, and can end up being pretty boring. And eventually, I want [cultured meat] to get to the point where people are sitting down at restaurants or go into grocery stores, and they don’t even have conversations about it anymore. They’re just like, yeah, I want some chicken. Sounds good. Do you have any chicken left in the freezer? Right? Yeah. There doesn’t need to be this philosophical engagement.

I think I think the truth is that whether it’s [about] not slaughtering an animal or an environmental reason, or a zoonotic disease reason, I guess all these things kind of are wound up in, “How does it make a person feel?” All of them — sometimes individually, sometimes in combination — I think, for most people, make them feel better about eating it. But I do think you have to talk about things like health, not using antibiotics, to some extent food safety. Often those things can be a bigger driver than sustainability or animal welfare. With that said, and this was a surprising result from the research that we did, the primary purchase driver, both for US consumers, and consumers in Singapore, was the fact that they could consume this meat without slaughtering an animal. Now, they might have correlated that with lots of other things like food safety and environment. So it might not have been looked at like it’s just like a purely independent variable. But I did find that to be interesting. But yeah, I mean, you have to talk about in a way that people can relate to. If I’m talking to my mom about this (my mom is not vegan or vegetarian), I would focus on you know, ‘Mom, you know, the fried chicken used to make me so it tastes like that. And it’s gonna have less antibiotics, that stuff you want and you’ll probably feel a little bit better by the day.’ That’s probably what I would say to my mom. That’s what I actually have said to my mom.

Eat Just Closes $200M Funding Round

Food tech company Eat Just announced today it has closed a $200 million funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which is the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar. Charlesbank Capital Partners and Vulcan Capital also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Eat Just’s total funding to date now exceeds $650 million.

San Francisco-based Eat Just said it will use the new funds to “build capacity for Eat Just’s pioneering products,” which presumably means the company’s cultured protein business GOOD Meat. Funds will also go towards accelerating research and development programs and continuing to expand internationally.  

Speaking of that international expansion, the funding news comes on the heels of Eat Just expanding distribution of its plant-based egg products north of the border, into Canadian retail and foodservice outlets. The company said in today’s press release it will bring its egg product to “millions more” retail and foodservice locations in 2021. 

Stateside, Eat Just officially debuted its JUST folded egg product in breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks and Peet’s this year. 

Most worth watching is the company’s continued development of its cultured meat business Good Meat. Eat Just won the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat at the end of 2020, and followed that milestone up by actually selling its cultured chicken product at a restaurant in Singapore.

The company said today that it will “dramatically” lower production costs for its cultured meat, which is a goal for many these days. The company says cultured meat could become a $13 billion market by 2030 and that GOOD Meat’s chicken is on a path to price competitiveness with conventional chicken by that time. 

The new funding will also be used to scale Eat Just’s commercial manufacturing operations, and further develop other types of meat in addition to its existing chicken product. 

Eat Just Goes Further Into Foodservice With a Major Canada Expansion

Eat Just, maker of both plant-based eggs and cultured meat, announced a major expansion today that brings its popular JUST Egg product into foodservice formats across Canada. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, that includes distribution at restaurants, hotels, universities, and government and corporate cafeterias.

Foodservice businesses in Canada can now order the JUST Egg — a frozen folded “egg” made from mung bean — through their distributors and sell the product on their menus. The move into foodservice follows Eat Just’s retail debut in Canada, which happened earlier this month. The launch also includes a partnership with Copper Branch, one of the largest plant-based restaurant chains in the world.

Today’s news is also the latest in a string of moves Eat Just has made in the last few months specifically around restaurant distribution. Since January, the San Francisco-based company launched the JUST Egg product at Peet’s and Starbucks in the U.S., and struck a deal with Discos in China to outright replace traditional egg offerings with Eat Just’s plant-based items. 

These partnerships are part of a larger trend happening in the restaurant biz right now as more brands expand the number of fully plant-based meals they offer in response to an uptick in demand from consumers. The ubiquitous breakfast sandwich — sausage, egg, and cheese — is a good example. Previously, only one component (usually the sausage) of that offering was plant-based. Now, restaurants like Starbucks and Peet’s are vegan-izing the whole sandwich, which means other QSRs and fast-casual chains will follow soon. It’s a similar pattern to the original rise of plant-based protein in QSRs that happened a couple of years ago.

However, Eat Just is also developing cultured meat products through its GOOD Meat line, and so clearly has bigger ambitions for the restaurant industry than simply selling its plant-based egg products. At the end of 2020, the company became the first in the world to be granted regulatory approval to sell cultured meat. Actual sale of GOOD chicken bites followed shortly after, at a restaurant in Singapore.

Restaurants will be a major part of cultured meat’s expansion from lab prototype to mainstream staple — a point Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick confirmed to me at a talk last year. So while this rapid expansion into restaurants around the world is good for the company’s plant-based wares, it’s vital for the expansion of its GOOD line. 

That expansion won’t happen immediately, of course. Like any other company making cultured meat, Eat Just will have to gain regulatory approval for every single market it plans to enter with its GOOD products, and it is unclear how long that process will take. However, once said regulatory approval is granted, existing partnerships with major foodservice businesses could give the company a big head start when it comes to cultured meat.

Is a Major Starbucks-Eat Just Partnership in the Works?

Over the weekend, I wrote about Starbucks testing a 100 percent plant-based menu at a location in Seattle, a move company CEO Kevin Johnson said was a direct response to consumer demand. But it seems that’s not the only move the coffee giant has made recently when it comes to building a more plant-forward menu. From the looks of it, Starbucks could be pushing for a major partnership with plant-based egg-maker Eat Just, too.

As one does on the internet, I stumbled across a piece of Starbucks news from the end of January that at the time went largely unnoticed. The Dallas Observer reported that Starbucks has expanded the test market for a vegan breakfast sandwich the company quietly piloted in Washington state in October 2020. 

This is apparently not the same breakfast sandwich as the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich Starbucks launched in 2020, which features Impossible’s sausage patty but also uses regular ol’ eggs and cheese. The new iteration is 100 percent vegan and, according to the Observer, is made up of an Impossible patty, an Eat Just folded egg, and a plant-based cheese from an unnamed company. The sandwich is now testing in the Dallas and Forth Worth metro area and available for a limited time.

Further investigation pulled up this Starbucks menu item called “plant-based breakfast sandwich” that looks identical. Though Impossible is the only company named for now, the menu item includes “a plant-based egg patty” that looks suspiciously like Eat Just’s folded egg product.

Eat Just was not available to comment for this story. But nothing about a major Starbucks-Eat Just alliance would surprise. The latter’s folded egg product is an obvious candidate for the QSR realm, given that it requires little prep (heat it up and serve) and has no real competitor right now when it comes to frozen egg products made from plants. It also closely resembles the omelette-like patty found on traditional breakfast sandwiches everywhere, including Starbucks, Dunkin’, McDonald’s, and the independently owned coffeeshop down the street.

Starbucks is also well known at this point for the sous-vide egg bites it sells at most U.S. locations. As it happens, Eat Just recently released its own line of sous-vide bites which for the moment are only in grocery stores but could be customized to fit on a plant-based Starbucks menu.

Starbucks’ Johnson said on a recent earnings call that breakfast drove the high performance of food during the company’s first quarter. Given that plus the fact that a 100 percent vegan breakfast sandwich has been seen and tasted in the real world, it seems only a matter of time before we hear wind of a much more widespread partnership between the two companies.

Eat Just To Launch Vegan Sous Vide Egg Bites in Grocery Stores

Food tech company Eat Just announced today it will expand its retail line of products with the launch of JUST Egg Sous Vide bites, which the company has created in partnership with sous vide food manufacturer Cuisine Solutions.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Cuisine Solutions will produce the Sous Vide bites, which will arrive in the frozen food section of grocery stores in March. Customers will be able to choose from four different varieties, each based on a different geographical region and flavored with plants known to that area. They include America (potato, dill, chives, red and black pepper), India (curry, broccoli, cauliflower, coconut milk, lemongrass), Japan (mushroom, yams, togarashi, soy, tamari), and Mexico (poblanos, chipotle chile powder, black beans, corn, lime). The bites will be sold in boxes of four.  

The other major ingredient, of course, is mung bean protein, which is the key ingredient for all of Eat Just’s plant-based egg products.

Yours truly got the opportunity to try all four flavors recently. The flavor variety — which is executed well — is probably the biggest draw, as the ingredients are a welcome change from the usual cheese-tomato-spinach-or-basil mix that’s in most sous vide egg bites out there. Also, if you’re like me and constantly forget to cook breakfast, they’re a very easy plant-based solution. (Personal fave flavor: Mexico.)

The bites can be heated in a toaster, microwave, or conventional oven.

Eat Just hasn’t yet said which retail stores the product will debut at come March, nor how much each box will cost. (Those interested in getting those details can get updates here.)

Alongside the continuing evolution of its plant-based products, Eat Just has also hit a couple major milestones where its cell-based protein business is concerned. At the beginning of December, the company got the world’s first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultured meat, specifically in Singapore. The company followed that news up with the first actual sale of its GOOD cultured chicken bites at an upscale restaurant in the city-state.

Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick has suggested in the past that the company will continue developing both plant- and cell-based lines of business, rather than focusing solely on one approach over another.

A Leading QSR Chain in China Ditches Chicken Eggs for Eat Just’s Plant-Based Version

Eat Just announced this week its plant-based egg products have landed on the menu of Discos, one of China’s leading fast-food chains. More importantly, Discos won’t just be offering the JUST egg alongside animal-based eggs. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the JUST egg will outright replace its traditional counterpart in several menu items.

Plant-based foods on QSR menus aren’t new — in fact, they’re arguably standard fare at this point. Eat Just’s news is, however, the first time a major quick-service chain has completely switched out an animal-based protein for a plant-based version, which could signal a new shift for the direction of QSR menus over the next several years.

Discos will start the switchover with 500 locations across Bejing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, Dalian, Changchun, Harbin and Hainan provinces. (The chain has roughly 2,600 stores across 32 provinces in China.) The JUST egg will be in three different breakfast burgers, three breakfast bagel sandwiches, and on a western-style breakfast plate.

Discos’ full shift to plant-based eggs also seems a long-term strategic play for the brand. Demand for plant-based meat in China is expected increase by 200 percent over the next five years, according to a December 2020 study by DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences. According to the firm, the change is “driven by consumer values around health, taste, and sustainability.”

The JUST egg, meanwhile, has been available in China since 2019 in both retail and foodservice businesses, as well as through e-commerce sites Tmall and JD.com.

Discos’ chief marketing officer Xie Yahui suggested in today’s press release that the decision to swap out the chicken egg for a plant-based one was a decision driven by consumer preference: “The introduction of JUST Egg at Discos is a product and brand upgrade based on consumers’ increasing interest in nutrition, healthier diets and environmental awareness,” she said. She added that future menu offerings from Eat Just will be based on consumers’ reactions to these first dishes available.

This swap by Discos most likely isn’t a one-off occurrence. Worldwide, demand for plant-based protein has steadily grown for the last couple years, with 2020 being an all-out banner year for popularity and investment dollars. QSRs, meanwhile, are drastically changing, from their store formats to what’s on the menu. Overhauling the amount of animal-based protein on those menus seems a logical next step, for China and beyond.  

Eat Just Makes the World’s First Sale of Cultured Meat

A couple short weeks after getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore, Eat Just announced last night it has made the first commercial sale of its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore, will debut the product this Saturday, Dec. 19, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken product will make its debut in three different dishes, each inspired by a different country: Brazil, China, and the United States. The first diners to taste the dishes will be young people, ages 14 to 18, who “have shown, through their consistent actions, a commitment to building a better planet.”  

The sale to 1880 is not only a first for Eat Just, it’s a first for the cell-based meat industry, which has seen plenty of successful lab prototypes but few opportunities for the public to actually taste the products. Up to now, the latter has been in the form of taste-testing events.

Getting regulatory approval to actually sell cultured meat products advances the entire industry. After all, you can have the tastiest, most environmentally friendly cut of slaughter-free meat out there, but without regulatory approval to sell and distribute it, the product won’t make much of an impact on our global food system. We may be years away from finding a cell-based burger or chicken sandwich in the majority of restaurants around the world, but Eat Just’s news is another significant step in that direction. 

Singapore is a logical place to start. The city-state has been at the forefront of much food tech innovation over the last year, with the Singapore government pouring millions of dollars into its 30×30 initiative aimed at increasing local food production. And since the bulk of Singapore’s meat is currently imported, there’s no “Big Meat” producers and lobbyists pushing back on alt protein the way there is in the U.S.

All that said, I also have an eye on Israel as another important location for the advancement of cultured meat. That country is home to a number of cell-based meat companies, with SuperMeat even opening its own test-kitchen-meets-restaurant initiative in Tel Aviv where guests apply to visit the restaurant and taste the food in exchange for detailed feedback. (Dishes on the menu are not yet for sale.) Additionally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently tasted cell-based meat and wants to establish a national policy for alternative protein.

Eat Just has not yet mentioned locations beyond Singapore where the company will sell its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. But given the above, Israel would be an obvious next country for the company to expand both the regulatory approval and sale of its cultured meat products. In the meantime, GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken will be available to 1880 customers over the coming weeks and months.  

Eat Just Gets the World’s First Regulatory Approval to Sell Cultured Meat

In a first for cultured meat, Eat Just has received regulatory approval to sell its cell-based chicken product. The company, best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, announced last night that its cultured chicken product has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites. Other cultured chicken products are planned for the future.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this approval deems Eat Just’s cell-based chicken as “safe for human consumption.” To achieve this, and to the demonstrate safety and quality of its end product, the company spent months documenting its proprietary process for making cell-based chicken. An analysis included information on the identity and purity of the chicken cells, the full manufacturing process, as well as the nutritional components of the end product. 

Eat Just worked with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. The company said it has also struck deals with “well-established local manufacturers” to finish the product before it goes out to restaurants.

Heading into restaurants first is in keeping with Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s timeline for cell-based meat, which he outlined for us at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Cell-based meat companies don’t simply jump from a successful prototype in the lab to mass commercialization. Rather, there are a number of stops along the way, the first of which is to get the prototype out of the lab and into a place like a restaurant. However, the journey for cell-based meats as they evolve from prototype stage will be lengthy: Tetrick put the timeline “somewhere north of 15 years” for when the buying public will find cell-based meats as ubiquitous as, say Coca-Cola products.

Getting regulatory approval is paramount to commercializing cell-based meat, so today’s news marks a significant milestone not only for Eat Just but for the entire cell-based meat sector, which has seen an astounding amount of investment over the last several months. 

Commenting on Eat Just’s milestone, Good Food Institute Executive Director Bruce Friedrich said, “Cultivated meat will mark an enormous advance in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure, and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way on this transition.”

The regulatory approval will allow Eat Just to launch its forthcoming GOOD Meat brand in Singapore, the details of which are forthcoming at a later date.

Eat Just Is Offering a Plant-Based Take on Meal Kit Deliveries for NYC

Two things we’ve seen increase during the pandemic: online food deliveries and demand for plant-based protein. Alt-protein company Eat Just is bundling those two ideas together with a new delivery offering that’s looks to be part meal kit and part virtual cooking session for homebound NYCers in need of brunch. The company is giving away free “Brunch in a Box” kits to residents of the Big Apple via a hotline users can text to get their meals.

Each kit contains ingredients for one of three recipes developed by Eat Just: eggs Florentine, eggnog French toast, and buckwheat crêpes. To get one, users text BrunchNYC to 35344, designating which of the above three meals they would like to cook. A spokesperson from Eat Just said all kits include every ingredient needed to create the recipe. The kits will be fulfilled by Amazon Prime Now.

An accompanying series of online cooking tutorials led by Chef Bec shows users exactly how to prep and cook the meals.

The idea is to help consumers recreate brunch at home, which I suspect will be happening a lot now that cold weather is here and the pandemic continues to restrict restaurant dining rooms. Bringing brunch indoors via delivery is one way to do that. “Our team wanted to help make the transition back indoors easier by sharing some new recipes featuring seasonal ingredients and healthier twists on brunch classics,” Eat Just’s spokesperson said of the new program.

The “Brunch in a Box” kits will be available for a limited time for free. Adding another virtual layer to the project, the company is working with local influencers to get the word out. Those include Priyanka Naik, NYC food blogger Dominek, and Vegan in the Hood.

The company’s most recent NYC outreach isn’t strictly limited to the online realm, though. Last week, Eat Just along with a handful of other alt-protein companies announced their Plantega project. Through it, the collective will offer grab-and-go options at the local bodega, with the goal of getting plant-based foods to areas of the city where they might otherwise be harder to access. 

“Everyone, regardless of their zip code, should have the opportunity to enjoy food that is good for their bodies and good for the planet,” Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick said in a statement emailed to The Spoon. “Growing up in the South, eating meals that were convenient and cheap but bad for my health, is what motivated me to start a company that could help bring meaningful change to the food system.” 

Plantega will include offerings from Eat Just as well as Beyond Meat, No Evil Foods, Miyoko’s Creamery, Good Catch, and several others. Goods are available now in Brooklyn at the Don Polo Meat Market and Gourmet Deli, as well as at My Deli Gourmet & Grill in the Bronx. 

Eat Just said it that the success of these initial locations will depend on whether the Plantega project expands to locations in the future, in both NYC and beyond. 

Crackd to Launch Its Plant-Based Egg in the U.K.

Plant-based egg brand Crackd will soon launch its 100 percent vegan liquid egg replacement at stores in the U.K., according to Green Queen Media. The company’s product, called Crackd The No-Egg Egg, will be available at select retailers in December.

Crackd uses cold-pressed pea protein, nutritional yeast, and black sea salt for its signature egg product, which the company says “cooks, bakes, acts, and tastes just like an egg.” Among the items Crackd says you can create with its egg are quiches, cookies, Yorkshire pudding, and sponge cake. It can also be turned into scrambles, omelettes, and other traditional egg dishes, though Crackd says on its FAQ page that it takes about 15 minutes longer to cook than a regular chicken egg.

The company’s claims that Crackd can be used in a variety of cooking scenarios are big, since eggs have 22 functions, some of which are difficult to mimic with a plant-based substitute. Baking, in particular, requires functionalities like binding and aeration that are hard to recreate in plant-based egg products.

We have not yet tried Crackd’s product, but I’m waiting eagerly to hear customer reactions around how the well the product translates to that wide variety of food items — and how those finished products taste. Making a sponge cake with a plant-based egg is one thing. Making a sponge cake that tastes good and doesn’t have the ol’ plant-based aftertaste is another.

Crackd joins the likes of Zero Egg, which just launched in the U.S., and Eat Just, probably the most well-known player on the plant-based egg scene right now. Interestingly, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick told me at SKS 2020 that his company is “about two years away” from a plant-based egg you can bake with. 

We’ll have a better idea of how Crackd stacks up to these other plays come December. Crackd The No-Egg Egg will be available at Marks & Spencer stores nationwide across the U.K., as well as at online specialty store The Vegan Kind.

Eat Just and Impossible Foods Both Made Major Expansions to Asia This Week

Two alt-protein heavyweights in the U.S. took major steps this week in their expansions across Asia, underscoring the growing demand (and need) for alternatives to animal protein in that region.

At the tail-end of yesterday, San Francisco-based food tech company Eat Just announced a partnership with a consortium led by food investment fund Proterra to expand JUST Egg across Asia. Via the partnership, Eat Just will build its first production facility in Asia.

The consortium will invest up to $100 million and Eat Just will invest up to $20 million to build the production facility in Singapore. According to the press release from Eat Just, the factory will “generate thousands of metric tons of protein.” From this deal will also come the subsidiary Eat Just Asia, which will serve JUST egg manufacturing and distribution partners across the region. 

The new production facility is the largest of its kind in Singapore and will serve a growing demand for plant-based protein in Asia. Eat Just’s flagship plant-based egg product is already available in South Korea, Thailand, and Hong Kong. The company also mentioned, via the aforementioned press release, a “yet-to-be-announced” partnership in mainland China, where it already sells products via e-commerce. 

Eat Just and Proterra are also in talks to expand commercial production of cell-based meat, which Eat Just is already in the midst of developing.

Also at the end of yesterday, Impossible Foods announced that its plant-based meat products will be available in retail stores for the first time in Asia. Impossible’s Beef product is now available at 200 grocery stores across Hong Kong and Singapore. 

In Hong Kong, consumers can buy Impossible products at 100 ParknShop locations and ParknShop subsidiaries, as well as for delivery online at parknshop.com. Customers in Singapore can find the company’s plant-based beef at 100 FairPrice stores and on grocery e-commerce platform RedMart.

Impossible debuted in the Asian market at restaurants in 2018, but this week’s news marks the first time the company’s products will be available to home chefs.

But while Impossible may be expanding its plant-based empire, one area we shouldn’t expect to see the company branch into is cell-based meat. In fact, when asked about cell-based meat at last week’s Smart Kitchen Summit, Impossible CEO Pat Brown flatly said, “It’s never going to be a thing.” Brown called it “irreversibly expensive” and added that meat grown in a lab would never be a commercial endeavor.

Eat Just doesn’t share the same view. Company founder and CEO Josh Tetrick, who was also at SKS, shared his views on the eventual reality of cell-based meat and gave us a rough timeline and included steps his company and others have to take in order to go from prototype to retail shelves with cell-based meat. It won’t be soon. Tetrick said “north of 15 years” for cell-based meat, and others have cited similar timeframes.

Were cell-based meat to become a commercial reality, Asia is an obvious region to aim for. Increasing urbanization and population growth, particularly in Southeast Asia, has led to a growing demand for animal proteins. This demand has consequences both for the environment and for human health.

Those are challenges plant-based proteins can address, too, hence the quickly rising number of companies in Asia, from Omnipork to Black Sheep Foods and now Eat Just and Impossible. While we wait for cell-based proteins over the long terms, we can expect both demand for and production of plant-based products to continue rising in Asia and beyond.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on the 4 Phases of Bringing Cell-Based Meat to the Masses

When will cell-based meat be available to the masses?

It depends on who you ask. At one SKS 2020 panel this week, participants said maybe 10 years. In another, Impossible CEO Pat Brown more or less said never.

Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just, reckons the timeline is “somewhere north of 15 years.” 

Eat Just, which is best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, is in the process of developing its own cell-based meats, including chicken nuggets and chicken breast. The north-of-15-years timeframe for those and other cell-based meat products comes from an important factor Tetrick pointed out when we chatted this week at SKS: that a successful prototype in a lab does not automatically equal commercial success. 

A lot must happen in between those two endpoints, prototype and commercialization, and during our talk, Tetrick broke the journey down into four distinct phases. These are as applicable to other food businesses as they are to Eat Just.

The first is getting that prototype out of the lab. Launching in a single restaurant is one example. To do this, companies need to have not only developed a prototype, they must also have gotten regulatory approval for their product. Tetrick told me that Eat Just hopes this step happens for his company this year or next.

The second phase moves companies out from a single location and into some restaurants, say 50–100, and perhaps smaller retailers. At the moment, there are no cell-based meat companies with products at this stage.

Phase three is even further off. That’s the point when a company’s products are on food retail shelves across the country, from Whole Foods in San Francisco to Walmart in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Eat Just is currently at this point with its plant-based egg products, which are in more than 17,000 locations in the U.S.

That final phase is what Tetrick calls “the Coca-Cola phase.” The product is available everywhere and at a low cost. He believes this is “the phase that will transform the planet,” meaning it will curb the larger population’s reliance on animal protein. To get to that kind of world, phase four is ultimately where Eat Just and other companies need to be.

Not that getting there will be easy. Tetrick doesn’t agree with Pat Brown’s statement that cell-based meat “is never going to be a thing,” but he does concede that it’s no easy feat. In fact, he equated the process from prototype to ubiquity with scaling a really tall mountain. “[It’s] not confusing what needs to be done, it’s just really hard.” 

That climb, so to speak, will require the right investments in cell line development, media, and bioreactors. It will require “a thoughtful approach” to working with regulators and an effective marketing strategy. It will involve enormous amounts of risk and millions if not billions of dollars.

Ultimately, Tetrick believes companies that can get us through this enormously difficult process will enable the majority of the population to live in a world where eating meat doesn’t necessarily mean slaughtering animals or destroying the planet. For many, getting there will be a mountain worth climbing.