Many vegans have complained about the “vegan tax”, the extra money we pay for plant-based alternatives to milk and meat. But suddenly, plant-based eggs broke through this price barrier and fell below the price of chicken eggs.
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Through a combination of inflation and bird flu, the price of “shell eggs,” as they’re called in the industry, rose 81% at the end of 2022 compared to a year earlier. It costs almost a dollar more for a carton of real eggs than for the plant-based equivalent. Consumers responded by trying vegan eggs.
Related: 215 pterosaur eggs unearthed in largest collection ever found
Californian startup Eat Just Inc., maker of Just Egg on mung bean, is a big winner in this shift. The brand accounts for 99% of sales in the liquid vegan egg category, a $30 million market in the U.S. That’s only 0.13% of total egg sales, but still a respectable sum.
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“We’ve invested a lot of time and energy into making our products better, expanding distribution in retail and foodservice, and working to introduce millions of new people to the idea that an egg can come from a plant,” says Eat Just’s CEO. Josh Tetrick, as reported by Bloomberg. “All of this is driving growth and it’s being reinforced at the moment.”
Eat Just does a lot of that reinforcement. It recently took a full-page ad in the New York Times proclaiming: “Plants don’t get the flu.” If you think about it for just a second, you’ll remember that plants are prone to all kinds of diseases and blights, but it’s still catchy.
The faux egg company promotes its product as healthy for the eater, cholesterol-free and better for the environment. According to Eat Just, the company saved about 10.9 billion liters of water and avoided 16,135 hectares of land use by turning mung beans into eggs rather than relying on chickens. Eat Just also takes credit for saving us 52.3 million kilograms of emissions.
Via Bloomberg
Lead image via Pexels
