After $90M Funding Round, Hampton Creek Aims Its Simulated Egg at Asia

The lab at Hampton Creek. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Inside a small building on the edge of San Francisco’s South-of-Market district—the old industrial area that’s now home to so many new-age startups—Hampton Creek is rebuilding the chicken egg using natural plant proteins. The aim is to systematically create something that’s cheaper, healthier, and far easier to produce than the real thing.

If you stop by, the startup’s in-house chefs, Chris Jones and Ben Roche, will cook you an omelet using this creation, and though its not perfect, it tastes pretty good, particularly when you add a little hot sauce.

The company doesn’t sell its egg as an egg—it sells mayonnaise and cookie-dough made from much the same stuff—but this will change. CEO and Founder Josh Tetrick says Hampton Creek is now planning to sell its “scrambled egg” mixture in Asia, after securing $90 million in additional funding, much of it coming from large Asian food companies and other Asian investors. With Hampton Creek, Tetrick’s ultimate aim is to streamline the world’s food supply chain—to cut out many of the health hazards as well as the costs—and the Asian egg trade, he says, is a prime place to start.

Due to health concerns surrounding chickens in places like China—as well as expanding human populations across the continent—Tetrick says there’s a “heightened” awareness of the benefits that come with the company’s scrambled egg mixture, a reasonable facsimile of a beaten egg based mainly on proteins from the Canadian yellow pea. “We are very aware of population growth—a hungry world—in Asia,” Tetrick tells WIRED. “If I had to pick anywhere in the world to release the scramble, it wouldn’t be Charlotte, North Carolina or even San Francisco. It would be in a market in Asia.”

The company is just one of a growing number of US startups accepting funding from Asian investors, with an eye towards expanding into the Asian market, but Hampton Creek’s push into this market is particularly pointed. This past February, Li Ka-Shing, perhaps Asia’s richest man, led the company’s $23-million funding found, and now, he and his venture capital firm, Horizons Ventures, have pumped still more money into the company, alongside Asian food conglomerate Uni-President Enterprises Corporation and another local food-and-beverage company, the Far East Organization.

Horizons has already helped move Hampton Creek’s products into PARKnSHOP, the largest grocery store chain in Hong Kong, and Tetrick says the company’s latest Asian funding will fuel additional expansion across the continent. He calls this a “strategic” funding round, explaining that a company like Uni-President has both the manufacturing facilities and the distribution channels needed to expand Hampton Creek’s operation in a big way.

The company does not intend to sell its egg mixture in grocery stores—at least not yet. The plan is to sell it to food service operations, operations that prepare food in large quantities. “Think restaurants, universities, hospitals,” Tetrick says.

Ping Li, a partner with Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm Accel Partners, says this sort of Asian focus isn’t the norm for Silicon Valley companies and other US-based startups—Silicon Valley is still the “epicenter” of the VC world, he says—but the thinking behind the company’s latest funding round makes good sense. “You want your money to be strategic, not just money,” Li says.

But for Bryan Johnson, the founder of The OS Fund, a venture capital firm that’s part of Hampton Creek’s latest funding round, the more important point is that Hampton Creek aims to do more than just make a buck. “They’re working on a really audacious problem,” he says. “They’re trying to feed the world.”