Is This Cookie Dough Better for the Planet?
Just Cookie Dough is just what it says, with a twist. Unlike traditional cookie dough, it doesn’t contain any eggs. Yes, that means you can eat it straight from the container without fear of salmonella poisoning. But the company’s founder didn’t have the legions of raw cookie dough fans in mind when creating the product. Instead, he was thinking about the environment.
The ingredients used for Just Cookie Dough (which is also dairy free) require less water and less land compared to the ingredients in conventional cookies. Just omitting eggs makes a huge difference, said Josh Tetrick, chief executive officer and founder of Hampton Creek, the company behind Just Cookie Dough.
Most eggs, he explained in a video produced for Bill Gates’ YouTube channel, come from chickens that are “fed massive amounts of soy and massive amounts corn, which require massive amounts of fertilizer, which require massive amounts of oil. So we see a system like that and we say this is just absurd. Instead of trying to incrementally improve upon that system we want to create a whole new model that makes the current system obsolete.”
Just Cookie Dough targets pregnant women in many of their social media posts. (Photo: Just Cookie Dough)
The solution, he said, is plants. “How do you take a variety of plant-based components out there in the world, bring them together, and replicate this miracle of nature called the egg?”
Tetrick and his company, which launched in 2011, quickly gained a reputation for wanting to disrupt the food industry. Hampton Creek attracted financing (over $120 million to date) from the likes of Gates and Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Asia, and has been hiring high profile tech talent, including Dan Zigmond, the former lead data scientist behind Google Maps. According to Zigmond’s LinkedIn profile, he “built the data science team” for Hampton Creek and “built the data infrastructure for collecting and analyzing plant biological data, and creating machine learning models for predicting culinary applications of plants.” He is currently a strategic advisor to the company.
To date, Hampton Creek has brought three egg-free products to market: Just Cookie Dough (available in chocolate chip, sugar, peanut butter, and oatmeal raisin), Just Cookies, and Just Mayo. Ranch dressing is slated to be the next introduction. Tetrick told Yahoo Food that he wants his company to be known for rethinking packaged foods. “If you were to step back and say, ‘We’re going to start over and forget all the preconceived notions,’ what would you do? You’d create good food that is better for the body and more sustaining for the planet,” he said.
But these products can’t just be substitutes for the original thing. They have to be as good or better, he noted. “People didn’t move from the horse and buggy to a car because they cared about the horse,” he said. “The car was better for their lives.”
Tetrick will be one of the featured speakers at Bite Silicon Valley, the food + tech conference taking place June 5-7 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. Tickets are on sale now for the event, which will include a variety of talks, panels, demonstrations, and tastings from a range of industry innovators.
Yahoo Food is a media partner of Bite Silicon Valley, so check back for coverage of the event next month.
Read more about other people disrupting the food world:
Why food luminaries are heading to Silicon Valley
