Big Food Tech Start-up Faces Unsavory Allegations

Is one of the hottest start-up companies in recent memory too good to be true?

To say the rise of San Francisco–based Hampton Creek has been meteoric is an understatement. The brainchild of 35-year-old Josh Tetrick, a former Fulbright Scholar with a law degree from the University of Michigan who spent seven years working for nonprofits in sub-Saharan Africa, the company combined the verve of a savvy tech start-up with a vision for disrupting our behemoth food system by doing something radical: getting rid of eggs and all the attendant environmental ills that go into producing billions of them.

Since its launch out of Tetrick’s apartment in Los Angeles four years ago, Hampton Creek has achieved the sort of success most entrepreneurs can only dream about. Its flagship product, Just Mayo, which uses pea protein in lieu of the yolks used in traditional mayonnaise, can now be found in some of the country’s largest chains—not just in stores you might expect, such as Whole Foods, but at Target, Costco, and Walmart. It has attracted scads of high-profile venture capital cash, raking in $90 million in its most recent round of funding, a bonanza no doubt fueled by glowing press reports and accolades from the likes of Bill Gates, who has lauded the company for its bold reimagining of the future of food. Beyond Just Mayo, the company has been working to replace eggs in a host of products in which eggs long seemed indispensable, from cookie dough to pancake mix.

But on Wednesday, the same day it was announced that Hampton Creek had been named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum—joining the organization’s list of “the most innovative companies in the world,” which in the past has included such tech powerhouses as Google, Kickstarter, and Dropbox—another, much less welcome headline hit the Internet: “Sex, Lies, and Eggless Mayonnaise: Something Is Rotten at Food Startup Hampton Creek, Former Employees Say.”

The purported exposé, published in Business Insider, chronicles the complaints of “more than a half-dozen” disgruntled ex–Hampton Creek staffers, all of whom would only speak on the condition of anonymity.

But readers hoping to witness the downfall of a superstar start-up may have trouble satisfying their schadenfreude cravings on the thin offerings here. The grousing of former employees about the skin-of-the-teeth rush to meet production deadlines, outsize demands on staff to perform under stressful and sometimes jury-rigged conditions, and the hard-charging office culture fostered by CEO Tetrick feel more or less like par for the course at any successful start-up. That Hampton Creek appears to have flouted FDA regulations by listing “lemon juice” as an ingredient as opposed to “lemon juice concentrate” doesn’t exactly feel like a smoking gun.

Other allegations are potentially more damning. Two former staffers claim they caught a senior Hampton Creek employee switching out the second page of their employment contract in the company files, effectively cutting their severance package from three months to three weeks (the original terms were later restored, according to the article). The salacious “sex” part of the article’s headline seems to refer to an affair Tetrick allegedly had with an employee, who staffers say received unmerited promotions as a result.

Then there are the charges that Hampton Creek’s vaunted technology apparatus isn’t, well, all it’s cracked up to be. As a Washington Post feature on the company earlier this year reported, “Hampton Creek has a database of 4,000 plant samples and their molecular structures, built in part by ex-Google maps engineer Dan Zigmond. Hampton Creek biochemists extract proteins from those plants and experiment with thousands of powder and liquid formulations in search of the blend that will offer the optimum taste, texture and performance to rival a chicken egg.”

That proprietary database of “4,000 plant samples”? According to one of the former employees who spoke to Business Insider, “It was probably closer to 400. At least five times less than it was claimed, and that’s conservatively.”

Whether the allegations published by Business Insider are enough to tarnish Hampton Creek’s stellar reputation, only time will tell. But one person to ask would be the editor in chief of Business Insider itself, Henry Blodget, who, according to the Hampton Creek press release, was among the “notable members” of the committee that selected the company as a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.