Animal-Free Egg Whites to Debut in 2019

San Francisco-based food technology startup Clara Foods will debut a vegan egg white by the end of 2019. The company raised $1.75 million in investment capital to perfect its flagship product, which is made by brewing yeast and sugar in a lab-based setting to reproduce proteins found in egg whites without the use of chickens. “I looked into how incredibly unsustainable animal agriculture is—it really blew my mind,” Clara Foods CEO Arturo Elizondo said. “There are more chickens in the US than people, each confined to the area of a piece of paper and never seeing daylight.” Within the next year, the food industry will be augmented by companies that aim to replace traditional animal agriculture with new, slaughter-free technologies. California startup JUST recently debuted its mung bean-based egg replacer JUST Egg and plans to debut slaughter-free chicken (grown in a lab-setting using a small amount of animal cells) by the end of 2018.