— Hampton Creek,
a tech-food startup that aims to replace animal products in food with more sustainable plant ones,
has recently faced a slew of negative coverage
accusing it of classic Silicon Valley hubris and overreach:
— The company was running a large scale and very secret operation
in which it sent contractors to purchase hundreds of jars of its own products…
— Josh Tetrick,
a vegan with a background in the nonprofit world
who once worked for the Liberian leader Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,
started the company in 2011 with $3,100 in his bank account.
Since then,
he’s raised $220 million
from Silicon Valley investors like Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff.
He believes that most supermarkets are full of foods that provide poor nutrition,
and is built on industrial farming and excessive water and land use.
— Wow, it’s chilly in here.
So what are we seeing?
— It’s a plant library.
This is where our entire world starts.
There are about 353,000 species of plants all around the world.
Most of us are used to soy, corn, and wheat.
And that’s about it.
The very first step in our process
is to bring those plants of the world that we’ve kind-of forgotten about in,
and this is where we store a portion of them.
For us to be able to test them,
to look at molecular properties,
to look at functional properties,
we have to mill them down.
What we’re really looking for is,
can we find a plant that is nutrient-dense,
can we find a plant that will make a really good cake,
or a plant that will make healthier, more sustainable mayo
without as much degradation to the environment?
And that’s a challenge.
— The milled plants are run through an automated lab,
and end up in a kitchen where chefs,
mostly hired from the molecular gastronomy restaurant Moto in Chicago,
try and make them into foods that are as good, or better, than the ones they are replacing.
— So tell me what this is.
— This is our “Just Scramble.”
It is a plant protein, a little bit of water, some minerals, a little bit of salt.
Have a taste, first.
— Looks like an egg, it smells like an egg…
— And how does it taste?
— Tastes like an egg.
Maybe like a falcon’s egg or something.
— So far, Hampton Creek Sells mayonnaise, dressings, doughs, and mixes,
and plans to release scrambled eggs and lab-grown chicken, steak, and fish in the coming years.
A series of articles have accused Hampton Creek of buying its own products to boost sales figure—
and the company’s entire board stepped down last month,
with little explanation.
The company itself has said it’s been the victim of a smear campaign by the American Egg Board.
It’s true that after emails detailing the AEB’s campaign against Hampton Creek
were released in 2015,
the board’s chief executive stepped down.
As with many technology stories, the broader truth is hard to discern.
Is this the usual chaos of any ambitious startup,
or something else?
— You’ve been quoted as saying that, there are no rules that apply, really,
to building a business this way.
One of the rules is, don’t buy a shitload of your own product,
and of course you’ve been accused of doing exactly that
for the purposes of seeming more successful.
What would you say to that allegation?
— There’s a lot of hand-to-hand combat in the world of retail.
We used to have lids falling off and all sorts of QA/QC issues.
They would buy some of the products that had those issues,
and in the process of doing that, they might buy extra jars.
— So, just to clarify that,
what you’re saying is…
if you send people in to buy the product,
the supermarket thinks, “We’re selling a lot of product,”
and they wanna give you more shelf space.
— You got it.
— And how does that relate to the recent departure of the board of Hampton Creek?
— Not really connected.
You know, the board,
all of whom are still advisors to the company,
and the one venture capitalist continues to have a seat on the board.
Not really connected—
I think it was really a situation where we step back and ask ourselves first,
from a company’s perspective,
does it make sense to carry on like we’re doing
and, in some respects, we asked folks to leave,
and others, they decided it was the right thing.
— And again, from an outside perspective,
it perhaps doesn’t look great,
it doesn’t seem like a gesture of faith in the company and its progress,
that the entire board steps down.
What do you think?
— If you give me the choice between 100 percent chance
of getting it sold for $1 billion,
or a 20 percent chance of doing something more extraordinary,
we’re always going to choose that.
The people that decided to do it with us get that,
and many people have said, “That is not for me.”
Good morning.
— He’s right that other retailers,
especially startups,
have bought their own products too.
We reached out to the board members who recently departed.
Only one,
the former health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, responded.
She declined to comment,
but sent a statement from the company on behalf of the directors:
Tetrick says that much of the recent turmoil
was based in his trying to get control of his company
so he could focus on the most ambitious plans,
including the holy grail of lab-grown-food:
meat and fish.
Tetrick says that Hampton Creek has found a way to feed animal cells with plant products.
They brought us into their meat lab,
but would only let us film in a small corner of it.
— Globally, meat consumption is going up, not down.
It’s going to be going up by 100 percent by 2060.
So it sort-of begs the question,
how does one solve that?
— What you’re trying to do is basically make chicken more efficient.
It’s a really inefficient way to get chicken onto the plate,
to raise the chicken, feed it, kill it, and then ship its parts to supermarkets.
— Yeah, exactly.
we’re only really using about half of the carcass,
which means a lot of wasted energy,
as well as a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions that come with it.
And so, all of that is avoided by having a more efficient process
that grows just the parts that we want.
— How is it different from,
you know, corn or whatever other meat alternatives
you might be able to pick up on a supermarket shelf?
— It’s meat, yeah.
It’s not plant-based.
It is 100 percent meat.
— So within about a year we’re likely to see
“Just Chicken,” “Just Kobe Beef” or “Just Blue Fin Tuna” on a shelf?
— It’ll certainly be an animal product.
I don’t know if it’s going to be one of those three specifically.
I think more likely than not it’ll be in the avian family.
— Let’s look 10 years into the future.
Do you wanna be bigger than General Mills,
bigger than Kraft, or Nestlé?
— I want us to be an extraordinarily large company.
But at the end of the day,
we can make plants that scramble in a pan all day long,
we can make meat from a cell,
but if we do not get it on aisle seven in the frozen section,
the refrigerated section,
if we don’t get it into the hands of kids in West Africa…
it’s all bullshit.