/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Splashy deals involving plant-based food companies tend to make the biggest headlines when they’re with big-name companies — Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC. But we should also pay attention to more low-key agreements with less recognizable names that arguably have a bigger effect on our food system.

Case in point: Thursday’s announcement that Just, a leading producer of plant-based eggs, has partnered with massive international food service provider Sodexo to bring plant-based eggs to the schools, office buildings, hospitals, and other institutions Sodexo serves.

You probably haven’t heard of Sodexo, though they serve 75 million meals every day at 34,000 locations worldwide. And you may not have heard of Just, though the San Francisco-based company told me they’re outselling all branded almond and soy milks to be one of the bestselling plant-based food products in the supermarkets where they’re available.

But the deal is worth paying attention to. It will replace a lot of eggs, making it in many ways better news than a flashier deal with a brand-name restaurant. Egg agriculture gets less attention than meat, but it causes just as many problems — making egg replacements a top priority for environmental and animal activists.
Eggless eggs can’t do everything eggs can. But they can do enough.

Eggless eggs took longer to develop than veggie burgers because eggs are tricky to emulate, and there aren’t many plant-based protein sources that behave the way eggs do.

Just makes their plant-based eggs from mung beans. It took a lot of work to find a protein that would scramble (food scientists call it “gelation”), foam, and cook just like eggs — and even though the Just Egg now makes an omelet just like the one you’d get from a chicken egg, there’s still work to do to imitate all egg functions.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/6/21126419/eggs-just-sodexo-plant-based-protein