October 12, 2018

JUST, a San Francisco-based food technology company, and Hong Kong-based global venture accelerator Brinc have formed a partnership for an Asian food tech accelerator that will expedite discovery and prototypes of emerging food products.

Brinc will invest more than HK$500,000 (US$63,755) per team for up to 10 teams with two cohorts per year. Additionally, as with other Brinc programs, they will provide learning and mentoring opportunities, follow-on funds, services arms, and access to the Asian market. JUST (formerly known as Hampton Creek) will provide access to its pipeline of discoveries, and the company’s data, tools, and raw materials to aid in the development of new products. Finished products from the food tech accelerator will be branded with a “Made JUST” logo.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Brinc to help grow a new crop of food founders in the world’s most populous region: Asia,” Josh Tetrick, CEO and co-founder of JUST, said in a blog post announcing the partnership. “The task of building a more sustainable food system is so enormous that it requires the energies of a generation. Working with mission-driven partners who share our goal of facilitating large-scale, permanent adoption of healthy and more sustainable food is the only way we succeed.”

Founded in 2011, JUST – which makes products like vegan eggs, dressings, spreads and treats, and is working on lab-grown meat – is a startup itself and was labeled a “unicorn” in 2017 after the company closed a round of funding that valued it at $1.1 billion. Through its unique research in plant and seed proteins, the company derives new flavors and properties by experimenting with different processing methods. Through partnerships with accelerators like Brinc, JUST taps into local markets and feedback from local people to come up with the right product, JUST’s lead research chef Thomas Bowman told Food Dive.

“We find stuff, we make our stuff, we put JUST on it,” Tetrick told Food Dive this summer. “Then we find these forward-thinking companies around the world that have this exponential potential, we transfer the technology to them, and we ask them to go do their thing and hopefully we step back, and in a handful of years, we’ve done our part to make the food system a little bit better.”

For Brinc’s part, they work with founders who are building innovative food ingredients, food formulations, and food technologies and align with their investment area: ‘What We Eat’. Their goal is to build more sustainable food supply by investing in plant based alternatives to animal agriculture, dairy and seafood, according to their website. They offer comprehensive programs tailored for IoT, connected hardware, drones, and robotics startups looking for speed, access, and the know-how to build successful companies.

The egg-celerator

JUST is on a mission to build a food system where everyone eats well. CEO Tetrick told CNBC earlier this year that securing a better way to feed Asia’s growing population is what motivates him to challenge the status quo of the food industry. And the multi-billion-dollar egg industry has provided opportunities for this. In February of this year, JUST partnered with Green Common, a plant-based casual dinning and shopping store with six locations in Hong Kong. JUST introduced consumers to its Just Scramble product, which is made from mung bean – one of Asia’s most familiar beans – that looks and tastes just like an egg. Sales have been brisk, and distribution is planned for mainland China, India, and Japan.

With a strong belief that Asia will lead in the adoption of food sustainability, JUST has put more than just “eggs” in that basket, with an eye towards China’s adopted policies to cut meat consumption by 50 percent in less than 12 years. And it’s a burgeoning market where Asia’s middle class is quickly growing and developing, and maintaining strong cultural ties to food. A 2017 study by the Brookings Institute cited by US News and World Report, noted that 88 percent of the world’s next 1 billion people to enter the middle class will be Asians. By 2030, there will be 3.5 billion people in the continent’s middle class — 65 percent of the world’s total. But the Asian middle class is already outspending its counterpart in the United States — representing 17 percent of global middle class spending, versus 13 percent in the U.S.

-Michelle Pelletier Marshall

Michelle Pelletier Marshall is the managing editor for Global AgInvesting’s quarterly GAI Gazette magazine and a regular contributor to GAI News. She can be reached at mmarshall@globalaginvesting.com.