Josh Tetrick, food tech pioneer and Eat Just co-founder, joins Cheddar News to discuss recent 'JUST Egg' partnerships and when U.S. consumers can expect the company's 'GOOD Meat' products in stores.

Between Bells

Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick Details Recent JUST Egg Partnerships

Welcome back to Between Bells everyone for the second year in a row, eggs are the fastest growing category in the plant based food sector and revolutionizing the food industry, starting with it's just egg products? America's fastest growing egg brand made entirely of plant food and beverage company Eat Just is on a mission to help the planet for the better with the help from its protein alternative, good meat made in a sterile controlled environment from a single cell removing slaughter from the process. The company's mission is driven by its passion and we're pleased to say joining us now discusses each just co founder and ceo josh Tetrick josh welcome to the show. It's, we're so excited to have you got to be in person? Yes, that's the most exciting part. I get to see you in person. So let's talk about just aggregates partnered up with Alfred. It's the cult favorite L. A based coffee chain, launching a modern twist on the classic breakfast sandwich that begins today. How is the partnership going to work? Um, we're gonna be on the menu, um, and lots of influence where people are gonna go there and have breakfast and hopefully they're gonna, they're gonna talk about it instagram about it, tiktok about it and it's yet another step on the pretty long journey of trying to get to a place where the most consumed egg is not from a chicken but from a plant. I want to talk about that. Along with another partnership with Caribou Coffee, the first ever fully plant based menu offering at 400 locations. What has customer reaction been like so far so far, sales have been quite a bit more than we thought. Um, and, and thankfully the primary consumer at Caribou hasn't been vegan, it's been someone who eats animal protein who's just wanting a healthier breakfast. And that's really the key for us. If we just focus on vegans, we're going to be a very small company and if we focus on people who want to eat a little bit healthier, then we could be something else. And that's what we're trying. Are there any challenges to get people to try the faux eggs? I think the biggest challenge is this idea of an egg from a plant is much um, newer, a little bit different than plant based milk and plant based meat. Um, we really created the category of a plant based egg when we launched just egg in 2019. So it's new. Um, you haven't seen it out on the grocery store shelves for three decades. So, um, it's, it's letting people know it exists and it's a little bit healthier and then once we can get people to try it, that's usually goes in one direction, I gotta be honest, I'm allergic to eggs and I'm looking at the video now, this is something I could actually eat and I want to try. I feel like I'm missing out and not being able to eat eggs. So your company is gonna come out. So about is roughly 3% of Americans are allergic to eggs the younger you are, the more issues you have interesting, but ultimately, you know, we're trying this to get it to taste a lot better for it to be more affordable to push it to continue to be healthier. That's, that's how it's gonna work. And your company is the first to commercialize cultivate meat and the first cultivated meat brand available for sale in Singapore. Congratulations on that with your good meat product. Tell me more about that. So cultivated meat is not plant based, so it's not made from a bean, it is an animal products. So if you don't like animal flesh, then you won't, you won't like this. Fair enough. A lot of people know that it is, it is a real animal products. So we receive regulatory approval to sell it in december 2020 we went on to sell it. It is the first time that real meat without the need to slaughter an animal has ever sold anywhere any country at any time. And it was a really historic moment for the food industry and and certainly for us, we've sold almost 1000 people, very small scale. You can deliver it. We work with food, pin on delivery, you can go in nice restaurants, street vendors and it's, it's step one of making this, the meat that we all consume. So, you know, my next question, what does this taste like? Does it taste like real meat? So people when they try it, they say somewhat surprisingly, which is surprising to me that it tastes like chicken, it doesn't taste worse than chicken, it doesn't taste better than chicken, it just tastes chicken. And you mentioned allergies. If you have a chicken allergy and you have one of our chicken bites, you'll have an allergic outbreak. So the point is it is chicken, it is not plant based. Do we expect to see sales here in the U. S. Because I mentioned it's in Singapore currently. Um we're waiting on the potential of regulatory approval so we're hoping to get regulatory approval sometime soon. In the moment. We do, we're gonna be hearing up for launch, we hope you come to cheddar. I'm gonna I'm gonna be here and we're gonna be doing it with chef named Jose Andres. A little chef called Jose Andres don't know if you've heard of him, so we're gonna be, we're gonna be launching one of his restaurants. Very, very cool. So let's talk about Kate Cunningham. He came on cheddar to talk about his partnership with just just last year, do you think we'll see more celebrities and advocates coming out to promote these products. Yeah, definitely. I mean the thing, so we're in 42,000 points of distribution. We've sold over 250 million eggs, but the thing that limits us is awareness. Um and the way to get awareness is to get athletes to get influencers to not just talk about it, but we really want people who enjoy it in their everyday lives and kate is a good example of this. Um we strike deals with them, they become an ambassador and it helps build awareness. I do want to talk about your concerns for climate change. You and I were talking a little bit about this off camera, impacting the plants like the mung bean that goes into creating just eggs product. Talk to me about climate change. So the, when we eat conventional meat, eggs, milk, um you have lots of animals, you have lots of feed and often that feed comes from places where biodiverse rainforests used to stand. So the whole process of getting to the animal that you have on your plate is just environmentally intensive. So what we do with just egg is removed the animal instead grow a bean called the mung bean. I never heard them when I grew up in Alabama, but it's called the mung bean and it uses about 80% less land water and carbon emissions. Then the chicken, all the feeding on the land and all the water, all the everything that goes into the chicken. So the reasons to to consider it, our, it's better for the climate, um it is healthier, so it has a lot less saturated fat and it's free of dietary cholesterol and if you care about animals, we don't mess with animals and just egg. We just we just messed with the bean. Well we really hope you come back to discuss. We really appreciate your time. There are a lot of vegans, vegetarians. Just so many of us trying to eat healthier and cheddar, so we appreciate your time. Eat just co founder and ceo josh Tetrick.