Guest article by Maya Sapir-Mir, PhD
While cultured meat and bleeding burgers grab the headlines, there’s a significant amount of interest in egg alternatives. Food startups are developing innovative ways to deliver the incredible, edible egg—or at least its functional and nutritional properties—without ever laying a finger on a hen.
With more than five dozen companies working on alt-eggs, from humble plant-based powders to high-tech molecular engineering, it might seem the category is saturated. But the food industry relies so heavily on eggs, particularly egg protein as an ingredient, that there’s room for dozens more.
The ubiquity of eggs in packaged foods is due to their versatility: they bind, emulsify, leaven, thicken, moisten, texturize, foam, and gel. They make surfaces appetizingly glossy and toasty. They keep ice cream from crystallizing in the freezer. They add elasticity and color to your fresh pasta dough. They help the breading stick to fried foods. All that, and they add to a product’s protein content.
That’s the opportunity, and also the challenge: no alternative can deliver on every single function and also fill a breakfast sandwich or create a quiche, so startups typically focus on one application such as baking or ready-to-eat.
Alt-eggs are having a moment because the demand for eggs isn’t ceasing yet supply instability is increasing. The egg protein market alone was worth more than $26 billion in 2018, and is estimated to reach nearly $60 billion by 2031.
CPG food companies are ready to embrace alternatives because they’re reeling from increased egg prices, supply chain uncertainty, and avian flu. In 2023, when U.S. flocks were decimated due to flu outbreaks, more than 100 million hens were killed—and egg prices shot up 113 percent. Food processors are scrambling, pardon the pun, to lock down stable supplies of eggy ingredients and that includes new and novel approaches such as fermentation, fungi, algae, and many more.
A Hill of Beans
Plant-based egg replacers are nearly as old as veganism itself and have primarily consisted of vegetable starches and legumes. Today, there’s a new crop of alt-eggs derived from plants, chief among them JUST in the U.S. The company’s egg substitute uses mung bean protein, while Israel’s InnovoPro and Peggs in the U.S. both use chickpeas, and Egg’n’Up, also in Israel, uses a unique combination of plant-based proteins.
For Simply Eggless in the U.S., the magic starts with lupin beans, an ancient Mediterranean crop. Soy and pea proteins are also popular for nutrient density. Singapore’s FLOAT Foods blends the two, while Israel’s Yo Egg uses both soy and chickpeas.
Legumes aren’t the only crop transformed into egg substitutes. Plantible in the U.S. has raised $27 million from investors betting on lemna, an aquatic plant more commonly, though less prosaically, called duckweed. Japan’s UMAMI United uses konjac, the starchy tuber also popular in alt-seafood. In the U.S. there’s even a shockingly realistic “hard-boiled egg” made primarily of nuts.
Whole foods and protein isolates can make a nutritionally solid alt-egg, but food processors haven’t adopted these substitutes in droves yet. Beans and even veggies often have strong flavors that need to be hidden under other flavorings, including sodium. That’s acceptable in a consumer product, but food processors don’t want to add more ingredients than necessary to their labels, nor do they want to reformulate to mask undesirable flavors.
The Science Guys
Precision fermentation is fueling egg alternatives for the food industry. EVERY Co. in the U.S. has raised well north of $200 million for egg whites derived from yeast, showing what a hot space this is for investors even before commercialization. In Finland, Onego Bio has also cracked the code of hen-free egg protein via precision fermentation, and so has Otro Foods in Belgium. In a different biotech vein is France’s Algama, which is bioengineering egg alternatives from algae, as is Canada’s Fiction Foods.
The major obstacles to widespread adoption of these approaches are scale and cost. Manufacturing yields are still small, and the cost of moving beyond the bench or pilot stage is high. Equipping a lab and staffing it with scientific expertise is expensive. Until these efforts reach commercial scale and can beat chicken eggs on price, food and beverage companies have little reason to switch to high-tech alternatives.
Farm to Fork
A third system for creating egg protein is to plant it in the ground, wait for it to grow, and then harvest it. In molecular farming, common crops are genetically engineered to naturally produce a more interesting, higher-value ingredient or nutrient, such as a protein, a pigment, a sugar, or a fatty acid.
While this is still a new segment of food tech, it’s growing, with more than a dozen startups developing chemically identical alternatives to animal ingredients–in plants. Our company PoLoPo is the only one currently focused on egg protein, but that’s likely to change any second because molecular farming is an ideal way to produce protein affordably at scale. To make more, just plant another acre; the crop grows and the target ingredient is extracted using industry-standard processing equipment. In addition to ovalbumin (egg white protein) we’re growing in potatoes, plants also produce high levels of patatin, the potato’s naturally occurring protein. Patatin is used in many of the same applications as eggs, such as emulsifying, gelling, and texturizing.
With so many functions, so much demand, and a multibillion-dollar market to crack open, there’s more than enough room at the table for new companies supplying alt-eggs.
Maya Sapir-Mir, PhD is CEO and co-founder of PoLoPo, a molecular farming pioneer producing proteins directly in common crops, beginning with egg protein (ovalbumin) grown in potatoes. She has nearly ten years of experience in the biotech industry and agricultural R&D and holds a PhD in plant sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She performed post-doctoral work at the Volcani Institute, Israel’s leading agricultural R&D facility, in Protein Identification, Extraction, and Characterization in plants and microorganisms.
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