Food tech company Hampton Creek should have a lot more money to spend soon, or at least that’s what Josh Tetrick, the startup’s founder and chief executive, tells us. And when the money comes in, as it inevitably will, it will fund Hampton Creek’s transformation from a producer of a passable mayonnaise substitute into a full-on food innovator.
Which is pretty exciting.
“I’d say it’s not about the mayo,” Tetrick told VentureBeat yesterday in an interview. “We have a platform that’s helped to identify plants to make food better. Mayo is just one use case. There are like, 17,000 that we could do — cookies, pancakes, muffins, high fructose corn syrup, [and] something also that’s better than that. There are just so many things.”
Such capabilities give Hampton Creek and potentially other food-tech startups, like Beyond Meat, more of an upside. They could turn out to be more than just food makers. They could bring a new model to the production of food.
With a new batch of money, the company will surely keep hiring. It employs 61 now, and within a year or so that number should come to around 120, Tetrick said.
New employees can help with distribution. Hampton Creek products already sit inside Whole Foods, Safeway, Kroger, and Costco stores, and even PARKnSHOP grocery stores in Hong Kong. Products are coming to Walmart and Target stores.
“I mean, we’re going so many places with it,” Tetrick said. “There’s seven fast food restaurants that we’re talking to. We’re talking to the largest food-services companies in the world.”
But Hampton Creek also boasts of a formidable technological backbone. Dan Zigmond, vice president of data, was previously lead data scientist for Google Maps and is now building a data science team in Hampton Creek’s San Francisco office. But people more well versed in plants — computational biologists, specifically — also contribute their intellect to the challenge of weeding through thousands of plants to figure out how to make food better.
“The better we can can link data with biochemistry and food science, the better,” Tetrick said.
The team is running experiments, collecting data, integrating the data into its models, and filtering it all 24 hours a day. And it all will get more extensive with more money on hand.
“That piece of it we’re scaling up from where we are in the lab to larger pilot plant equipment,” Tetrick said. “That part of the platform and just really fucking smart people in data and biochemistry that are part of it, too.”
Oh, and the pancakes, if you must know, are on the way.
“I’m not sure [when] yet — no scheduled release,” Tetrick said. “Probably sometime next year, but I’m not sure yet.”
