From vegan mayo to ending world hunger

JUST creator Josh Tetrick launched his startup seven years ago. From San Francisco, he decided to try and create vegan products with less impact on the world. His company launched a mayo surrogate that doesn’t use any animal byproducts. Tetrick explained in an interview that the first idea came from a trip to Subsaharian Africa, where hunger dominates and water is so scarce that most people cannot access meat nor raise animals for that use.

At the end of 2018 JUST, inc, is supposed to launch its clean meat, a product that, according to Tetrick, will be less impacting and will need a lot less water to produce. His mission, he adds, is to end hunger.

However, according to Tetrick vegan products created by JUST, inc, can also help people in the developed world. The way most people eat is, in fact, really wrong: «you grew up on nachos, vending machine cinnamon rolls, and fast food chicken sandwiches. Our parents would give us a few dollars. We’d eat whatever tasted good. And more often than not, if it was cheap and tasty, it was also accelerating chronic disease and climate change. That’s how unjust our food system is», Tetrick states on his website.

Mayo came from a yellow split pea from Canada. Tetrick explains how important it is to explore plants, their qualities and their use. Clean meat, however, will be grown from cells in laboratories instead than from plants. «With plants providing nutrients for animal cells to grow, we believe we can produce meat and seafood that is over 10x more efficient than the world’s highest volume. All this without confining or slaughtering a single animal and with a fraction of the greenhouse gas emissions and water use», explains the company on its website.

The process, they add, will be similar to beer-brewing.