A San Francisco biotech is making real egg proteins without a single hen. The yeast, it turns out, does not know the difference. Neither does the meringue.
In a contract manufacturing plant somewhere in the American Midwest, a stainless-steel tank is brewing something that has, for roughly 100 million years, only ever come out of a chicken. Inside the tank: warm sugar water, a custom yeast strain, and the patient agitation of an industrial fermentation cycle. Coming out: ovalbumin - the same dominant protein found in egg whites - in a form a pastry chef would describe as indistinguishable, and an organic chemist would describe as identical.
That tank belongs to The EVERY Company. So does the strain. So does the patent. The chicken does not enter the building.
The egg is one of the most functional ingredients ever assembled by evolution. It binds. It gels. It foams. It whips. It carries flavor and emulsifies fats and stiffens a meringue into a structure that looks impossible. A pastry kitchen without eggs is a sad place.
The egg is also a supply chain that depends on roughly eight billion hens, a single avian flu outbreak away from price chaos. In 2022 and 2023, U.S. egg prices roughly doubled. Bakeries reformulated. Restaurants raised prices. The yolk, you might say, was on us.
The EVERY Company's wager is that you can keep the protein and leave the bird. The technology - precision fermentation - is the same trick humanity has used for decades to make insulin, rennet for cheese, and most of the vitamins in your morning smoothie. You teach a microbe to produce a specific protein. You feed it sugar. You harvest the protein. It is, in industrial terms, deeply unromantic. That is the point.
Arturo Elizondo and David Anchel started the company in 2014 under a name only a biotech founder could love: Clara Foods. (The Clara was a chicken. The chicken was hypothetical. The hypothesis: she would never need to exist.) Elizondo had been working on agricultural policy in Washington. Anchel was a molecular biologist with a habit of asking what would happen if you simply rerouted a yeast cell's metabolism for fun.
They went through SOSV's IndieBio accelerator, raised a seed round from people who like long timelines, and spent the better part of a decade doing the thing biotech founders rarely talk about in public: making yeast not die when you ask it to do something unnatural. The company rebranded to The EVERY Company in 2021. Anchel later stepped back from day-to-day operations. Elizondo, last we checked, was still answering email from arturo@every.com like a person with something to prove.
The current EVERY catalog is short, which in this industry is a sign of seriousness rather than scarcity. OvoPro is the company's flagship - a functional egg protein that binds, gels, foams, and whips its way into baked goods, pasta, protein bars, and frozen foods. EVERY Egg White is a soluble variant aimed at beverages and cocktails (yes, a foam-capable Pisco Sour without a hen). EVERY Protein, sometimes called OvoBoost, is the taste-neutral fortifier slipping invisibly into juices and drinks. EVERY Pepsin is an animal-free version of the digestive enzyme used in food processing - the kind of unglamorous B2B win that, if you squint, quietly rewires whole supply chains.
All four are made by fermentation. None require a chicken. All of them are FDA-acknowledged GRAS. The ovalbumin protein - the actual molecule, not a stand-in - was patented in October 2024.
The company spent the back half of the 2010s being very quiet and the first half of the 2020s being noticeably less so. A rough sketch:
You can tell the story of a biotech company two ways: the press releases, or the cap table. Both have their charms. The funding history of The EVERY Company is the rare case where the press releases actually undersell the chart.
The customers, meanwhile, look less like a science-fair and more like a buying committee. Pressed Juicery has a beverage on shelves. AB InBev has explored protein-forward concepts. Grupo Bimbo - the largest bakery on the planet - is both an investor and a long-running partner. Ingredion handles distribution muscle. And as of late 2025, the most American of retail signals: an EVERY-powered product walked into a Walmart and stayed there.
The official line is that EVERY exists to decouple animal proteins from animals. The unofficial line, which you can extract from any 20-minute conversation with anyone in the building, is that the global food system is engineered around a set of biological assumptions - chickens lay eggs, cows lactate, fish school - that were never designed to feed nine billion people sustainably.
Precision fermentation is not a moral argument. It is an industrial one. You take an existing biological function, copy the relevant genetic instructions, and ask a microorganism to run them inside a tank that you can clone, scale, and locate near a customer instead of near a barn. The animal welfare benefits are real. So are the land-use benefits, the supply-chain benefits, and the pricing-stability benefits. The EVERY Company would like all of them, please.
If The EVERY Company is right, the second half of this decade will see a quiet substitution in places you wouldn't think to look. The protein in your post-workout drink. The binding agent in a cookie. The foaming agent in a hotel-bar cocktail. The pepsin in a digestive supplement. None of it will announce itself as fermentation-derived. Some of it already isn't announcing itself.
That is the strange thing about ingredient companies. They succeed by becoming invisible. The end consumer doesn't know who EVERY is, and that is exactly the win condition. Walmart sells the cookie. Pressed Juicery sells the drink. EVERY sells the molecule.
Back to that tank in the Midwest. It is still humming. The cycle takes days, not weeks. Somewhere downstream of the harvest, a powder is being measured into a pre-mix. Somewhere downstream of that, a baker is folding it into a batter and saying, out loud, that the eggs were excellent this morning. They weren't eggs. He doesn't know. He doesn't need to.