A Clucking Success: EVERY Co. CEO Arturo Elizondo baskets international debut for avian alternative

American-based EVERY Co. Founder launches innovative new animal-free egg protein, visits South Africa. 

The Lone Star State isn’t exactly known for its vegan demographic. Standing as the undisputed leader in beef, producing nearly 15 percent of cows in the United States, Texas perhaps registers as unlikely home turf for the founder of the world’s first nature-equivalent animal-free pepsin. 

Laredo-native and Harvard University graduate Arturo Elizondo is the visionary and CEO behind food technology company, The EVERY Co., based in South San Francisco – a team of changemakers reimagining the factory farm model with a more sustainable and kinder alternative. Leveraging precision fermentation to produce meat-alternative proteins from microorganisms, EVERY is on a mission to decouple the world’s protein consumption from the animal agriculture system. As of February 2023 EVERY has raised a total of USD 230 million in venture capital with major investors such as Hollywood star Anne Hathaway backing its platform. 

Having recently gained FDA approval for the company’s egg-mimicking Ovalbumin, this week Arturo Elizondo will be speaking at the SingularityU South Africa Summit on new technologies and entrepreneurship, happening at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg on 21 and 22 October. ProVeg South Africa interviewed Mr. Elizondo about the breakthrough product and his visit to the country: 

EVERY has developed a revolutionary clean protein which has now enabled – among other things – the world’s first animal-free egg whites. Describe some of your core motivations and organisational values that have driven you to bring this to fruition. 

Arturo: The big reason was that this is an issue that nobody was talking about and the more I learned about it and how broken and neglected our food system really is; the more I thought that for me personally there is no more important cause that I can see myself making a genuine difference towards and for me to dedicate my life to. A big part of that is I’m a huge animal lover and always have been, and in realising the environmental toll that farm-animal protein production has on the planet. It’s the number one cause of extinction on earth, deforestation, ocean dead-zones, water pollution and desertification. It emits more greenhouse gases than all transportation combined. This is a huge issue, and there aren’t nearly enough solutions to tackle it the way that there is with the energy sector. I realised I couldn’t just stand on the sidelines, and had to jump into the arena. 

From inception it has been about nine years of research and development to get to a point where you have a product that’s ready for the market. What has kept EVERY going and what is next in terms of distribution and consumer adoption?

Arturo: What has kept me going is that we continue meeting milestones even though we were in deep R&D for a long time. It was just getting better and easier. We were getting closer and closer. Every six months or every year we hit some big milestone. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel just getting brighter and it begins to feel very tangible. The challenge of scaling a deep tech company is really hard when we are dependent on outside capital before we are profitable. Getting to large scale production is a challenge, but we will be in stores nationwide [in the US] next year. 

The EVERY egg white is high in protein, but also mimics precisely the binding, foaming and gelling abilities of conventional eggs. What are some of the food products in development utilising this ingredient?

Arturo: Part of why we chose the egg is because of the great difficulty in replicating its properties. It’s one of the quintessential ingredients of so many products that you find in any grocery store. Even some plant-based meats use egg whites to bind them. They’re so ubiquitous and we’ve actually tested over 90 different applications, because eggs are used in so many of them and we wanted to make something that wasn’t just a one-trick pony. Other ingredients have limitations around them so we said, look lets go to the source and go to egg proteins, which are some of the most functional proteins we have and can be used across applications and for any typical egg-containing recipe. We launched with the prestigious 11 Madison Park restaurant in New York City and they made a whole menu with every dish having an application of our product. However, the ones that will be seen in the market first are eggs and egg whites. There are a lot of use cases for these and you will be able to see them eventually in many applications from some of the largest food companies in the world, such as Unilever.

What does the roll-out in America look like? And what is the outlook for getting the EVERY egg approved in other countries from national regulatory bodies?

Arturo: So far we have approval in the U.S., Chile and Hong Kong. Currently we’ve applied for 10 more countries and are preparing for several others. The strategy is that we identify major partners in respective counties and then work with them on entering that market. Our goal is to target leaders already present in respective markets. 

Will this protein-alternative and egg-replacement be available in South Africa, and when?

Arturo: A hundred percent, yes. Part of why our name is EVERY is that our mission is to make protein for every human on earth and that includes South Africa. We want to go especially into the big animal protein-consuming parts of the world. We know that eating meat is a huge part of African culture and we want to go into the lion’s den, so to speak. South Africa is not in our first list of ten countries to expand into, but we hope to do that as soon as we can. 

You’ve partnered with plant-based brand Alpha Foods to develop a new range of meat analogues using EVERY’s non-animal protein. How do the results compare to say Beyond Meat or the Impossible Burger?

Arturo: Their focus is actually more on chicken alternatives. That said, a lot of companies that want to make their products vegan have to resort to Methyl cellulose, which is an ingredient that a lot of them don’t want to be using. What our product can do is not only help replace Methyl cellulose in those products to make them clean-label, but can also help improve the texture and mouthfeel, because our egg whites can give these products more of a meaty bite and texture. We’ve seen really positive results with Alpha and hope to be able to support other plant-based and conventional animal protein companies. One of the first brands that we’ll be helping support will be The Vegetarian Butcher since they have among the largest plant-based product ranges in the world. 

You will be speaking at the Singularity Africa Summit on Sustainable Prosperity and the Future of Food. Can you share some of the key points you’ll be making? Why come to South Africa to speak on these topics and what do you see as Africa’s role in global food system transformation and sustainability?

Arturo: Animal protein consumption in Africa is growing significantly. The first thing that people do when they enter the middle class is they buy animal protein. And so part of the most effective ways of driving change is to enter before habits are deeply cemented and so we can introduce alternative products while people are on that adoption curve. That’s something which is a very powerful tool for change. With the continent’s potential there’s a lot of opportunity, especially with South Africa leading the way. One of the things that I love about the summit is that it shows that this future is not out of reach. One of our first investors at EVERY always says that “the future is already here – the challenge is that it’s not evenly distributed.” I’ve been inside a flying car already. I’ve been in autonomous vehicles driving around San Francisco. What happens in Silicon Valley seems like science fiction, but my hope is to bring that to South Africa. These advancements are already happening, it just hasn’t made its way throughout the world at scale – but it’s coming. 

Much noise has been made in the last few years about the promise of lab-grown meat as the next big wave of farmed meat alternatives – however it has yet to be available at scale, or at an affordable price. With EVERY, as another lab-cultivated product, are you wary of comparisons? How do you approach those who are concerned about synthetic or processed foods?

Arturo: It’s a very small industry and it’s easy to paint every company in it with a broad brush, but ultimately a rising tide lifts all boats. There are over 300-400 companies in this industry now, all using completely different technologies to develop their products. Part of why I chose fermentation is because it has been scaled for 40 years. All the insulin in the world came from pigs – now it’s all made using fermentation. 90 Percent of the rennet in the world used to make cheese, a protein which came from the stomachs of baby cows, is now made via fermentation. What I love about this technology is that we’re already using it. Fermentation has yet to show its full potential and that’s what I consider our obligation and our responsibility to be: to help show the world how we can make our food system better. That’s why we’re called EVERY – because we want protein for everyone. 

Ovonaut is an AI platform at EVERY that essentially formulates foods at a molecular level, coming up with innovative, novel lab-cultivated foods that have never been tasted before. What kind of results have you seen with this tool and what do you see as the role of AI in the future of the food system?

Arturo: With Ovonaut we can do things faster than we ever could before, and we know so little about the foods that we eat today. What we wanted to do was to identify proteins that have incredible potential to change our food system. Nothing that we make is completely new and all of our proteins exist in nature. However, nature has so much diversity in its own right. There are over 80,000 egg-laying species on earth and we have been using one at scale – which is the chicken. But there are many other proteins out there that have incredible potential. Almost no-one knows that one single egg has over 200 proteins, and some of these proteins are incredibly nutritious. Some of them are not. Some of them are antinutrients. What we want to do is learn about our food system and find nature’s treasures and for us to be able to produce them more affordably.  

Taking a new product concept from ideation to physical reality is fraught with challenges and learnings. ProVeg International recognizes this and runs an annual Incubator for innovators and start-ups, trying to help entrepreneurs develop their new plant-based products and services. Now that EVERY is finally launching into the marketplace do you think you may use this platform to take a leadership role in the non-animal industry and help shepherd other new businesses?

Arturo: We’re actually already doing that by advising several start-ups in the same realm and the best thing we can do for the movement is to help cultivate more success stories. Especially with earlier-stage companies it’s important to identify models to adopt that actually work and for investors to really back something that will produce results. Where I can be most useful to this movement is that EVERY is impactful and that we have a major success story that others can point to, and make money in this space, as a way to help validate it for everyone else.   

ENDS

Media Contact

ProVeg South Africa – Wikus Engelbrecht – Communications Manager: [email protected]; +27 64 172 0120

About ProVeg South Africa:

ProVeg South Africa is the local branch of ProVeg International. ProVeg is an international food awareness organisation working to transform the global food system by replacing conventional animal-based products with plant-based and cultured alternatives.

ProVeg works with international decision-making bodies, governments, food producers, investors, the media, and the general public to help the world transition to a society and economy that are less dependent on animal agriculture and more sustainable for humans, animals, and the planet.