Thread by @Babygravy9

THE CEO OF JUST EGG. 🧵

This is the CEO of JUST EGG (and GOOD Meat), Josh Tetrick. I make funny memes about him and his bizarre efforts to get us to eat mung-bean-and-canola slop instead of eggs, and lab-grown tumours instead of chicken breast. But did you know... 👇

That before JUST was JUST, it was Hampton Creek? The company was forced to rebrand after an embarrassing series of scandals.

Hampton Creek (HC) was founded by Tetrick and his childhood friend Josh Balk, in LA in 2011, before moving to Tetrick's garage in San Francisco in 2012.

After an initial round of venture funding, and two years of R&D identifying plant proteins that could mimic the properties of egg proteins, HC's plant-based products, including JUST MAYO, began to be sold in Whole Foods, Costco and Safeway.

By late 2014, HC had raised c.$130 million in funding, but the scandals were about to begin.

In October 2014, HC was sued by Unilever for false advertising over its plant-based mayo. The lawsuit was dropped, but the FDA warned HC it was misleading to call its product mayo.

Then in 2015, several former employees alleged HC had been exaggerating the nutritional claims behind its products, mislabeling ingredients and manipulating employment contracts. One employee called the business "a cult of delusion".

Employees even alleged that Tetrick had used his dog to test the shelf life of his unholy plant-based products.

The next year, Bloomberg ran a story claiming that HC bought its own products from store shelves in order to inflate sales figures when seeking venture funding. HC responded by saying this was simply part of its "quality control program". The Dept. of Agriculture stepped in.

Although HC continued to raise money, reaching a unicorn valuation of $1 billion in 2016, it was clear that a rebranding was in order. HC became JUST, the brand you all know and love. But the scandals kept coming.

First in July 2017, the the entire board of HC had resigned, citing deep disagreements with Tetrick. HC claimed, in response, that this was a voluntary transition to a model of governance based on "advisors".

In 2017, Target stopped selling HC products after a letter alleged food contamination with salmonella and listeria at the company's manufacturing facility.

Target also reported that HC products contained GMO ingredients that weren't labelled as such, although HC denied this was the case.

(If you want to know more about how producers hide GMO ingredients, see the thread below.)

Then, in 2018, JUST was sued by Jaden Smith (kek) over the rights to the JUST branding. Smith had his own company, Just Goods, and claimed that a 2014 trademark agreement with HC had been violated.

Because of this history of unfortunate publicity, JUST struggled to find further investors in the US and had to turn to Asia, including entities in China, to seek further funding for expansion. Partners in Asia and the Middle East have helped to raise c.$400 million.

JUST now has a manufacturing facility in Minnesota, as well as facilities in Asia. The government of Singapore was the first to approve JUST's "cultured meat" for consumption. A restaurant in Singapore called 1880 was the first place to serve it.

Unfortunately, the FDA has now approved JUST's "cultured meat" for consumption in the US.

Anyway, that's the history of the CEO of JUST Egg. Let's hope all those scandals involving food safety and business ethics are behind him now...