From Just Egg to Just Meat, the CEO of sustainable food start-up Just is now making his toolkit available to Hong Kong’s budding food entrepreneurs
The Just Egg came first. And soon Just Chicken will hit the shelves. With these products, Josh Tetrick wasn’t trying to answer an age-old question, but rather was trying to solve an increasingly pressing challenge: to fix the world’s food system and make it more sustainable. There’s plenty more to be done. But what that is, could now be up to you…
For Tetrick it all began with Just Mayo. In 2013, under what was then Hampton Creek, Tetrick launched his first product, a mayonnaise-like condiment made from Canadian yellow field pea, a type of split pea with properties that mean it emulsifies in a similar fashion to eggs. But Just Mayo was egg-free, cheaper to produce than normal mayonnaise and did not involve animals. It had been two years in development and it saw the likes of Bill Gates and Li Ka-shing clamouring to invest. The latter’s interest was what bought Tetrick to Hong Kong for the first time four years ago. Earlier this year Just chose Hong Kong as the place to launch its Just Egg, a vegan egg substitute created from mung beans, which have an uncanny ability to scramble.
Just Egg was received well in Hong Kong “People in the US have never heard of a mung bean, so you really have to explain what it is,’ says Tetrick, “whereas folks in Hong Kong have. It’s more of a ‘wow, this is a mung bean, I’ve had this growing up’.” Hong Kongers had never had it quite as Just was preparing it, but it proved to be a hit.
Just is about providing opportunities for people to eat healthy food that is not destructive to the environment, that tastes good and that they can afford—addressing the major issues of the current food system. For Just, it began with exploring the plant kingdom where there are more than 357,000 species of plant, less than 1% of which have been explored for how they can make food better. Looking at the molecular features of plants, the way to their proteins and their functional characteristics, provides a comprehensive toolkit with so much potential.