Eat Just, Inc., a company that applies cutting-edge science and technology on a mission to create healthier, more sustainable foods, today announced it has closed a new round of financing led by VegInvest/Ahimsa Foundation, a mission-aligned organization that supports companies striving to replace the use of animals in the food system and other industries.
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JUST Egg and GOOD Meat (Photo: Eat Just, Inc.)
The fresh funding will enable the alternative protein leader, which created one of America’s fastest-growing egg brands, made entirely of plants, and the world’s first-to-market meat, made from animal cells instead of slaughtered animals, to continue improving the quality and profitability of its products.
“We founded this company to take the animal out of the equation, and today, we’re proud to continue this vital work with an investor who has shown an unwavering commitment to this ideal. Our work is not easy and not certain, but it’s what is required,” said Eat Just co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick.
“Eat Just and its leadership in the industry play a critical part of building a kinder, safer food system. We’re proud of this investment and the continued partnership to make products that consumers love without causing the harm inherent in animal agriculture,” said Shaleen Shah, President, Ahimsa Foundation.
VegInvest/Ahimsa Foundation is a pioneer in partnering with innovative companies like Eat Just to remove animals from our food system. VegInvest/Ahimsa Foundation’s initial investment and partnership enabled JUST Egg to move from lab-scale to commercial launch and grow to the point of selling the equivalent of 400 million eggs, saving more than 14 billion gallons of water, 69 million kilograms of CO2e and 21,000 acres of land.
JUST Egg is the dominant player in the plant-based egg space, accounting for more than 99% of the category, and brand’s repeat purchase rate remains strong at 51%. JUST Egg products are now available in more than 48,000 retail points of distribution in North America, including 4,000 new doors across major retailers year-to-date. Branded partnerships with other CPG companies have added an additional 10,000 points of retail distribution. Foodservice sales for JUST Egg grew 15% and 39% in Q1 and Q2 of this year respectively, with major airline, coffee chain and college and university launches.
GOOD Meat, Eat Just’s cultivated meat division, received a landmark U.S. regulatory approval this summer, which allowed the company’s chicken to be sold to American consumers for the first time in history. This builds on the firm’s first-in-the-world clearance and commercial sales in Singapore in late 2020. Now, the team is focusing on addressing key scale-up challenges with the goal of producing tens of millions of pounds of meat before the end of the decade.
About Eat Just, Inc.
Eat Just is a food technology company with a mission to build a healthier, safer and more sustainable food system in our lifetimes. The company’s expertise, from functionalizing plant proteins to culturing animal cells, is powered by a world-class team of scientists and chefs spanning more than a dozen research disciplines. Eat Just created one of America’s fastest-growing egg brands, which is made entirely of plants, and the world’s first-to-market meat made from animal cells instead of slaughtered livestock. The company has been recognized as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies,” Entrepreneur’s “100 Brilliant Companies,” CNBC’s “Disruptor 50” and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. JUST Egg has been named among Popular Science’s “100 Greatest Innovations” and Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas” and the history-making debut of GOOD Meat was heralded as one of 2020’s top scientific breakthroughs by The Guardian, Vox and WIRED.
For more information on JUST Egg, visit https://ju.st/newsroom.
For more information on GOOD Meat, visit http://goodmeat.co/newsroom.
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