Eggs is one of the world's most common foods, used in cooking in nearly every culture for its protein and its unique properties. But environmentalists say industrial egg production is un-economic and is harming the planet. Now, one US food-tech company says it's developed a real alternative.
For centuries, chickens have produced an important source of protein for people around the world.
But one food tech company believes the egg isn't all it's cracked up to be.
"We actually give the animals we eat more feed than we do the 1.3 billion people who will go to bed hungry every single night.18% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from this system and we don't think we need to put an animal in a cage and grow all of these crops that require all this land in order for them to lay an egg that goes in our food products," Josh Tetrick, CEO of Hampton Creek Foods, says.
At Hampton Creek Foods, researchers scour the world for plants that are as functional as an egg.
"Some plants are good at foaming, some plants are good at emulsification. And it's these sorts of functionalities that we are trying to create," Joshua Klein, Director of Biochemistry of Hampton Creek Foods, says.
These researchers say they looked at more than 1500 plants and deemed just 11 of them highly functional, including a certain type of split pea.
The discovery is a key ingredient in Hampton Creek's first product, Just Mayo, which is currently hitting the shelves of US grocery chain Whole Foods for about three dollars a jar.
The company's egg-less cookie dough will also be hitting stores in a few months.
The plant-based products have other advantages, no risk of avian flu, less chance of salmonella poisoning, and the big ones, no cholesterol and more protein.
"This is not frankenfood, this is taking what an egg does which is emulsify and replacing it with what a plant does and doing the same thing. The chef says an egg can do a thousand functions, so I think we've got a thousand more things we can potentially do," Chris Jones, Culinary Director of Hampton Creek Foods, says.
Of the 33 staff here at Hampton Creek Foods, 26 are actual scientists. But all the talk about recreating the structure and emulsification properties of an egg is no good if it doesn't taste good.
"When it comes to using the conventional egg as an ingredient, we think we have the taste of the egg beat. Now when it comes to making a scrambled egg which comes from one of the plants we've identified we think we are a 7 out of 10. We’ve still got some work to do," Tetrick says.
The egg industry is wary of that work.
But Hampton Creek Foods is also finding plenty of support in its quest to go beyond the egg, with backers that include both Microsoft Founder Bill Gates and Facebook's first investor Peter Thiel.