The man who replaced the hen with a fermentation tank - and got Walmart to carry it.
Co-Founder & CEO, The EVERY Company. Building protein without farms, at a scale that makes factory farming unnecessary.
Arturo Elizondo runs a company called The EVERY Company. He will tell you it is a food-ingredients business. What he means is that he is trying to make the chicken obsolete - at least for its protein.
The product is egg white protein, molecularly identical to what comes out of a hen, produced entirely inside a fermentation tank using engineered yeast. No farm. No feathers. No cage. His customers are food brands - the people who make protein shakes, baked goods, pasta, and sports nutrition bars. They swap in EVERY protein and their label reads clean. Their supply chain gets shorter. Their carbon bill gets smaller.
As of late 2025, those products sit on Walmart shelves across the United States.
"Our vision is a world where we're not using factory farms to make food, where we don't have to stack animals on top of each other and have them suffer in ways that are just unimaginable - and yet we're doing it at the quantities of billions, and our planet is dying because of it."- Arturo Elizondo
He studied Government at Harvard, not molecular biology. He interned at the White House, the USDA, the Supreme Court, and Credit Suisse - all before he was 24. Then he met a cell biologist at a food-tech conference, and the detour became the destination.
The company he co-founded in 2014 as Clara Foods is now The EVERY Company - a name that says what he means. Animal-free protein, for every person, everywhere. He has raised $471 million to get there. The most recent round, a $55 million Series D closed in November 2025, was led by McWin Capital Partners. Before that, the world's largest bakery company (Grupo Bimbo), one of the world's largest brewers (AB InBev), and an Academy Award winner (Anne Hathaway) all wrote checks.
Elizondo was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year for the Bay Area in 2023 - chosen by a panel of previous winners and sitting CEOs. Newsweek called him one of America's 50 Greatest Disruptors. Smithsonian listed him among Ten Innovators to Watch. His hometown of Laredo, Texas gave him the key to the city on Earth Day 2022.
The man is mid-stride. He is not waiting for the food system to change. He is reprinting the supply chain, one fermentation tank at a time.
Laredo, Texas is one of the busiest land ports on Earth - 156 miles from San Antonio, directly across the Rio Grande from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. Arturo Elizondo grew up on both sides of that line, in a Mexican-American community where the border was a daily fact of life, not a political abstraction.
He gave a TEDxYouth talk at around age 18 called "Carne Asada's Shadow" - tracing the environmental cost of the beloved cookout staple back through the supply chain. It was his first public argument that the food system needed rebuilding from the ground up. He did not yet know that he would be the one to build something different.
Harvard gave him government and politics. The USDA gave him a window into food policy. The White House gave him a sense of institutional scale. Credit Suisse gave him a spreadsheet lens on global markets. None of it pointed obviously toward a fermentation startup.
Then, in 2014, food-tech connector Isha Datar of New Harvest introduced him to David Anchel, a cell and molecular biologist, at a food-tech conference. Within months, they had a company name (Clara Foods), an application to IndieBio - the world's first biotech accelerator - and a pitch. Within three months of founding, they raised $1.7 million from angel investors.
The question Elizondo and Anchel were asking was deceptively simple: if yeast can be programmed to produce insulin (it has, since the 1980s), why can't it produce egg white protein? The biology says yes. The economics were the hard part. A decade of work later, the economics are catching up.
The EVERY Company's core process is called precision fermentation. It is not a new idea - doctors have been using fermentation-produced insulin since 1982. What Elizondo and his team did was apply that same logic to the food system.
Take the DNA sequence that codes for egg white protein. Insert it into a microorganism - in EVERY's case, a species of yeast. Feed the yeast sugar. The yeast expresses the protein as a natural byproduct of fermentation. Purify it. You now have protein that is molecularly identical to what a chicken produces, at any scale you want, with no farm required.
The first commercial product was EverWhip - a functional egg white protein for food manufacturers. The 2023 follow-up, EVERY ClearEgg, went further: it is described as the world's first animal-free liquid egg protein, with culinary functionality and versatility that, in Elizondo's words, "surpasses what is possible with plants and animals."
The products are certified kosher, halal, gluten-free, allergen-free, antibiotic-free, hormone-free, and zero-sugar. They are also highly soluble - a property that plant-based alternatives struggle with. Bakers, brewers, and nutrition brands use them for foaming, gelling, emulsification, and protein fortification.
The pitch to B2B customers is not ideology. It is performance, reliability, and a cleaner label. The planet-saving is a side effect of making a better ingredient.
"At EVERY, we combine the ancient art of fermentation with the technology of today to make the proteins of tomorrow."- Arturo Elizondo
The DNA sequence coding for egg white protein (ovalbumin) is isolated and mapped.
The sequence is inserted into a host microorganism - a specially selected yeast strain.
Yeast is fed sugar and ferments in large tanks - the same vessels used to brew beer. Protein is produced as a natural output.
The egg white protein is separated, purified, and dried. The result is a powder or liquid molecularly identical to conventional egg white protein.
B2B customers - bakers, brewers, sports nutrition brands - integrate EVERY protein into their products. No chicken. No farm. Full functionality.
The EVERY Company started life in 2014 as Clara Foods - a reference to Clara, the first hen hatched in a research lab whose genetics inspired the protein project. Elizondo and David Anchel built the company through IndieBio, the world's first biotech accelerator, and attracted early backing from SOSV.
By 2021, they had a working product and a bigger vision. The rebrand to The EVERY Company was deliberate: a declaration that the mission was not to make one ingredient for one market, but to serve every person, everywhere, with protein that does not require a farm.
The B2B model is strategic. Rather than fighting for consumer shelf space, EVERY sells to the brands that already have it - bakeries, beverage companies, sports nutrition brands, and food manufacturers. Every bag of EVERY protein that goes into a partner's product is an indirect route to millions of consumers.
The investor roster reads like a deliberate coalition. Grupo Bimbo, the world's largest bakery company, invested because they need functional ingredients at industrial scale. AB InBev invested because fermentation is their core competency. Temasek invested because food security is a strategic asset. ZX Ventures and Minerva Foods followed. And in February 2023, Anne Hathaway made her first-ever B2B investment - joining The EVERY Company not just as a check but as a named strategic partner and public advocate.
The latest milestone: a $55 million Series D closed in November 2025, led by McWin Capital Partners through the McWin Food Tech Fund. Products are commercially available at Walmart stores nationwide. Revenue is reported at approximately $14 million annually, with 120+ employees across the Daly City, California headquarters.
The regulatory path has been cleared: EVERY's products carry GRAS status and hold kosher, halal, gluten-free, and allergen-free certifications. The animal-free egg protein is no longer a prototype. It is an ingredient in your grocery store.
Our vision is a world where we're not using factory farms to make food, where we don't have to stack animals on top of each other and have them suffer in ways that are just unimaginable - and yet we're doing it at the quantities of billions, and our planet is dying because of it.On factory farming and the mission
At EVERY, we combine the ancient art of fermentation with the technology of today to make the proteins of tomorrow.On precision fermentation
In launching EVERY ClearEgg, we have surpassed what is possible with plants and animals, to create a groundbreaking new protein that offers brands culinary functionality and versatility they've never seen before.On EVERY ClearEgg launch, 2023
By replacing factory farming with fermentation, we can sustainably meet the growing demand for protein without the environmental toll of animal agriculture, which drives deforestation, extinction, and land use.On global protein demand and sustainability