Hampton Creek Serves Up Another Vegan Mayo Scandal

My sister got married last weekend, and I helped to cook for the 70-some people who came to the ceremony and party held at an idyllic apple orchard in southeastern Iowa. Salad was on the menu, and because the groom is a fan of Caesar, in the days running up to the wedding my parents’ fridge was packed with bottles of Hampton Creek’s egg-free version of the classic dressing. Searching for space to fit the mass amounts of salad and hummus into the overpacked refrigerator was like playing a game of Tetris with the Hampton Creek bottles.

Judging by the news that broke on Thursday, my parents’ pre-wedding refrigerator resembled that of a Creeker—as the company’s contract workers are called—circa 2014: According to documents obtained by Bloomberg, the company quietly funded a program that encouraged employees to buy up its mayo (purchases for which they were reimbursed) and to place calls to local retailers asking them to stock Hampton Creek products.

“We need you in Safeway buying Just Mayo and our new flavored mayos,” Caroline Love, who was Hampton Creek’s director of corporate partnership at the time, wrote in a 2014 email. “And we’re going to pay you for this exciting new project! Below is the list of stores that have been assigned to you.”

Later that year, Hampton Creek closed a $90 million round of venture funding.

According to CEO Josh Tetrick, the buyback program cost just $77,000 and was focused on quality control, not inflating sales figures. “Assessing the product from the customer perspective, more than anything, gets us out of the bubble of typical manufacturing. This was and always will be the primary purpose of it, which is why we’ll continue doing it,” he wrote in an email to Bloomberg. But according to the documents provided to Bloomberg, the buyback program went beyond quality control.

While not technically illegal, Hampton Creek’s buying back its own product has once again left it with egg on its face. While the company has earned fans and praise for its egg-free products—mayo, Caesar dressing, cookie dough, and a host of forthcoming products—Hampton Creek has regularly been in the spotlight for other reasons too. There were the reports of shoddy science, the battles over the definition of “mayonnaise,” and the federally financed American Egg Board trying to stop grocers from stocking the egg-free competitor.

While it has a track record of stumbling into weird problems that aren’t related to sandwich spreads, Hampton Creek usually manages to move past those challenges. After all, despite pushback from big mayo and the FDA, its flagship product is still sold as Just Mayo.