Vega Founder’s Cultivated Fiction Chicken Eggs Will Be Market Ready By Q3

Cultivated eggs will be commercially available before the end of the year, says Fiction Foods, a subsidiary of Cult Food Science.

“It’s not a fake egg, but a whole new culinary experience, that is made from a single-cell organism called euglena that contains animal-like and high-quality protein, but without the animal,” Brendan Brazier, Fiction’s founder, said in a statement. Brazier founded the sports nutrition brand Vega, which sold to White Wave in 2015 for $550 million.

Vancouver-based Fiction Foods is using cellular agriculture to develop a vegan egg alternative without the need for battery hens. The Cult Foods’ portfolio company says its aim is to reinvent the way protein is produced. Its initial product, the “Performance Scramble” is a liquid egg alternative that’s targeted at “mental and physical performance.” 

Cultivated egg

The Scramble works like a chicken egg in all applications, but Fiction Foods says it is “superior” to chicken eggs and will be produced without the environmental impact of traditional eggs. Fiction says the Performance Scramble contains 15 percent more protein than chicken eggs, more omega-3 fatty acids than salmon, more zinc than oysters, more probiotics than yogurt, more antioxidants than blueberries, plus MCT-oil for cognitive performance, and beta-glucan for immune support.

“Cult applauds the accelerated product development timeline out of the Fiction Foods camp,” said Lejjy Gafour, President of Cult. “Their inaugural product, the aptly-named Performance Scramble, has been designed to drive human potential while providing an offset for its environmental footprint. The Performance Scramble prototype is a testament to Brendan’s lifelong pursuit to improve both human health and the environment, evidenced by his thought leader status and successful exits in the food optimization space,” he said.

Cult Foods, an investment platform focused on lab-grown and cultivated food, led a seed investment round into Fiction Foods last November.

Fiction Foods says it’s built on a “data-driven” approach to product development. Its goal is to enhance the nutrition profile of foods while simultaneously decreasing the natural resources necessary for development, a guiding principle the company calls “Nutrient-to-Resource Ratio.”

“Creating a nutrient dense, versatile liquid that can be used in place of a chicken egg has long been an objective of mine”, commented Brendan Brazier, Founder of Fiction Foods. “It’s not a fake egg, but a whole new culinary experience, that is made from a signal-cell organism called euglena that contains animal-like and high-quality protein, but without the animal.”

Fiction Foods says by Q3 of this year, it will see a commercial launch of Performance Scramble. It’s currently securing supplier and manufacturing contracts to support the launch.

Egg alternatives market

The cultivated egg market is also seeing development from California-based Clara Foods. The company says it has developed a cultured egg white that it says is “nature identical” to conventional egg whites.

The market for alternative eggs has been driven by San Francisco’s Eat Just, which produces the popular liquid and frozen vegan mung bean Just Egg.

The company is also at the forefront of cultivated protein technology and the first company in the world to receive regulatory approval for its cultivated chicken. In 2020, Singapore approved the lab-grown meat for consumption, and local restaurant 1880 was first to market with it.

In France, one of the biggest egg-consuming countries, Le Papondu is making vegan eggs with fava beans. The company is currently selling the egg to restaurants before entering retail, the founders told RFI recently.

“We realised there were more and more people that want to replace eggs, people with egg allergies and vegans,” said co-founder Sheryline Thavisouk, “but they had no solution.”

Photo by Estúdio Bloom on Unsplash.