Did you know that the largest plant-based egg production facility in the world is located in Appleton, Minnesota. Eat Just, the producer of JUST Egg makes about 420 plant-based eggs per minute out of their Appleton location.
Eat Just was created about nine years ago with the mission to make food — starting with eggs — healthier and more sustainable. "Meaning better for the climate at less land, less water and ultimately even more cost-effective than everything else," said Joshua Tetrick, co-founder of Eat Just. Eat Just has 186 employees based in San Francisco, California, and Appleton, Minnesota. When the company started, first on their quest to find the perfect egg substitute was to find a plant that scrambles like an egg, enter the mung bean.
"It turns out that the mung bean naturally has a property called gelation, which is just a fancy word for scrambling," Tetrick said. "And when you remove the protein, it gels, or it scrambles just like chicken egg protein. It took us about four years to find it."
Estimates are that the mung bean has been in our global food system for over 3,500 years. Native to India, it's a small, round, green legume. As you might imagine, Tetrick didn't want to reveal too much of his proprietary information, but basically these legumes have a storage protein inside of them, and when the protein is removed, you get all that eggy-like goodness.
"In order to get the protein out there is a set of processes from milling to centrifugation, and all of that is designed to remove the protein from the fat and the fiber and the starch," Tetrick said. "It's far and away the most important element of our manufacturing process and that protein separation is happening in Appleton, Minnesota."
Eat Just was established in 2011 and in 2020, Eat Just purchased the facility here in Appleton, Minnesota," said Ron Athey, the plant manager of the Appleton facility. In Appleton, Eat Just is located on Munsterman Street, a popular route for semi trucks in town. It's the biggest plant-based egg facility in the world. Athey said they employ about 50 people, All of whom have equity in the company.
"We produce about 30 metric ton of isolate per week, looking expand that process continually," Athey said. "Right now, we're at about 118 hundred metric tons per year and we're looking at an expansion that's gonna put us over 2000 metric ton per year."
Athey said that since production started in Appleton, the facility has made the equivalent of 160 million eggs. Now that might sound like a lot, and that is a lot. But here this:
"Two trillion eggs that were consumed in our world last year, two trillion. And two trillion eggs requires a whole bunch of stuff," said Tetrick. "It requires tens of billions of animals. And those tens of billions of animals are eating and billions of pounds of soy and corn. And the soy and corn is requiring hundreds of millions of acres of land and water, lots of energy goes into it."
Tetrick said that a typical egg facility produces 1.6 million eggs per month at the rate of about 37 eggs per minute. Eat Just in Appleton makes 18 million of their plant-based eggs per month at 420 per minute. There is some mung bean farming happening in Oklahoma, but Eat Just sources from places like India, east Africa, Thailand and Australia.
Tetrick said that Eat Just has a facility in Germany and is building a facility in Singapore. "So the idea that Appleton would cover North America, our facility in Germany would cover Europe and the facility in Singapore would cover Asia," Tetrick said.
"The act of separating protein in a facility in Appleton in some ways can be so abstract, that if you're really double click into it, like what is happening is that the most important element of our manufacturing efforts in the company," Tetrick said. "And it's something that we're pretty grateful for."