Nearly a decade ago, Josh Tetrick was crashing on the couch in his friend Jill’s studio apartment, experimenting with plant-based ingredients in his quest to replace conventional eggs with a more sustainable option.
Tetrick spent his days testing ingredients using microwaveable muffin cups from Target
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“There’s a handful of people we would not be here today without and she’s definitely one of them,” Tetrick said with a laugh.
“Here” encompasses a growing swathe of the globe. This month, the company that grew out of his experimentation sold its 100 millionth plant-based egg, announced a new round of financing, rolled out distribution in Canada and outlined plans to turn a profit by the end of the year.
A group led by the Qatar Investment Authority has invested $200 million in Eat Just, boosting the total amount raised by the company to just over $650 million since its start. The new investment group also includes Vulcan Capital, which is the investment arm of the estate of the late Microsoft
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Qatar’s quest for food security
Qatar ranks high for food security, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Food Security Index, because it’s a wealthy country where most residents can afford to buy food and have the ability to absorb sudden price spikes because of supply chain issues.
That said, a blockade imposed in 2017 cut off Qatar’s border with Saudi Arabia and started the country on a path to expanding its domestic food production. Today, the country is growing about 30% of its own produce, up from about 10% before the blockade, much of that coming from climate-controlled greenhouses, Al Jazeera reported last year.
Qatar’s government has also worked to increase dairy and poultry production, but there’s a limit to what can be produced there because there aren’t large swathes of land that can be turned over to agricultural production.
“Similar to what we’ve seen in Singapore, there’s a deeper understanding and awareness about food security and how to build a system that doesn’t require all the land and resources to produce the food supply,” Tetrick said.
In addition to securing a more sustainable food supply, the investors also see the prospect to reap returns on their investments.
“From their perspective as investors, there’s money to be made,” Tetrick said.
There are no firm plans yet to expand production to Qatar, but it’s a possibility as the company eyes new markets in the Middle East.
What’s Next for Eat Just?
While Eat Just’s board will grow to include two of the new investors, the agreement doesn’t mean the company will cede any of its autonomy over decisions on the business model or growth strategy, Tetrick said.
“This kind of company and mission requires a long-term view of where we’re going,” he said. “Many critical decisions have been made through the board, they’re a great group of shareholders, including those who just came on, but we do have that autonomy over decisions.”
Eat Just has raised more than $650 million since its launch nearly a decade ago, and the nature of securing capital has changed along with the company. In the early days, without a proven product, it was tough to get prospective investors to see the value in a market that basically had yet to be created.
“Pre- Just Egg launching, we were trying to tell people with access to billions of dollars that the ubiquitous chicken egg has issues and we can make an egg that comes from a plant. It’s one thing to say that today and quite another when not a single egg from a plant had been sold,” Tetrick said.
Even if investors were convinced that there was a need, they still needed to be persuaded that there would be a market — that enough consumers around the country and around the world would trade their familiar chicken eggs for a plant-based alternative.
Flash forward from those early days to this month, when the company is gaining a growing global recognition for its flagship product and recently sold its 100 millionth plant-based Just Egg. In addition to growing in North America — Just Egg products began rolling out in Canada earlier this year — the company is focused on expanding in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Another difference from those early days is that, with the product developed and facilities in Minnesota and Germany and one under development in Singapore, the capital being raised now will be used for further scaling production and distribution.
The funding will also help the company grow its fledgling GOOD Meat brand of cell-based chicken, which late last year became the first cultured meat to win regulatory approval for sale to consumers in Singapore. Since then, the product launched on a restaurant menu there and, along with Just Egg, will be a flagship product the company expects to expand to new global markets in the future.
In some ways, the launch of the cultured chicken harks back to the company’s early days of raising capital. Before GOOD Meat hit the market, investors were much more interested in Eat Just’s plant-based eggs, which had a proven track record.
Those investors grew more excited “when the meat actually launched and people could see that actual sales were being rung up and there was real data on sales,” Tetrick said.
Ninety-one percent of U.S. restaurant operators surveyed said they would be willing to source cultured meat, and 72% of U.S. consumers expressed a willingness to try it, according to surveys done for the company, data that bodes well for the day when GOOD Meat wins U.S. regulatory approval.
Still, Just Egg is the product that will get the company to profitability, he said, and it’s also been the vehicle that has propelled Eat Just along the learning curve that began back on that sofa and carries on today as the company continues to perfect and scale its technology and formulas and take lessons from its interactions with regulators around the world.
Before the end of the year, Eat Just expects to hit another key milestone — profitability.
The company has remained privately held since its inception and Tetrick doesn’t see an acquisition by a bigger player in its future, but an IPO is the likely path once the company turns a profit, he said.
Tetrick sounds even more sure when he talks about another aspect of the company’s future.
“Ultimately it will become the egg people will grow up eating, and we’ll prove you don’t need to slaughter an animal to eat meat.”