Within Silicon Valley’s Mayo Marketing Madness

In 2013, The San Francisco-based Hampton Creek startup, now known as Eat Just, launched its first plant, May, based on plants, without eggs. The press release says it is “the first food product to use a plant protein that is constantly surpassed by an animal protein.” This is despite the fact that their functional capacity in soybean food — both animal feed and human food — has been eradicated since the 1940s. In any case, journalists he went wild.

It was like people had never seen a condiment. The Guardian wrote founder Josh Tetrick “who wanted to disrupt the world’s food industry by replacing eggs with plants.” CBS News reported that the startup had “tested 300 different types of plants” before hitting the formula for this egg-free mayonnaise.

Tetrick first approached investors with a company that promised to build the world’s largest plant database with a short deck to bring plant-based foods to market. To get there, Tetrick eventually turned his attention to Google and Stanford’s Big Data staff. TechCrunch reported that it has reviewed the company’s properties More than 4,000 plants 13 to find 13 with “the right characteristics needed for consistency, flavor, and lower costs”. This database of plants, which was initially said to have the potential to make licensing agreements, has yet to be realized, and these Big Data guys have since stopped creating other companies.

It was a great example of the new era of good food missionaries. They promise to reverse climate change and end our reliance on animals to eat protein, and then race to raise funds, hire staff, and sell these to the consumer to achieve those goals faster.

The thing is, in this case, the mayors without eggs already existed. Vegenaise – a mashup of words vegan and mayonnaise—It was first developed in the mid-1970s by Follow Your Heart in the San Fernando Valley, California.

Before it became the strength of a vegan product, it is now; it sells salads, cheese and yogurt (among others) made from coconut, potato starch, canola and so on. . The cafe sold freshly made fruit juices, vegetable soups and avocados, tomatoes and sprout sandwiches, and there was plenty of rich, juicy Maya. But instead of the Hellman egg the cafe used a fake mayo called Lecinaise, made by a guy named Jack Patton. It was made from soy lecithin — essentially a fat emulsifier — and was used by Bob Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Follow Your Heart. He called it his “secret ingredient”. Spreading the creamy white was very crucial to the success of the cafe, Goldberg believes, at one point the cafe bought about 40,000 pounds.

Goldberg began to hear the rumor that there were eggs in this supposedly eggless Maya. He turned to Patton, the owner of Lecinaise, who assured him that he was free of eggs, preservatives, and sugar. Patton sent a letter to Goldberg verifying the accuracy of his label.

Goldberg calmed down. There was no California Department of Food and Agriculture. In the dark of night, the agency searched the Lecinaise facility in Patton and found workers soaking them with conventional mayonnaise labels to use and sell under the Lecinaise brand name. (Patton was tried and punished fraud, A 30-day prison sentence and a $ 18,500 fine)

Goldberg was on the ground. The secret ingredients were not only eggs, it was full of sugar and preservatives. The well-known sandwiches of his whole wheat would turn into dry skin. So Goldberg turned to other manufacturers for help. “Everyone insisted that there was no way to make it without Mayan eggs,” he says.

Goldberg reluctantly tried So Imitation Mayonnaise, but it was a by-product that had no emulsification, the key to flavor. “We tried different ways to make it tastier, adding sweeteners or vinegar or lemon juice, but the results were always very disappointing,” he says.