Eggs do crucial work in a lot of baked goods, and vegan alternatives like flax seeds don’t taste or perform quite the same.
By bioengineering yeast cells to create egg white protein via fermentation, South San Francisco startup Clara Foods is ready to offer the food industry a new option.
The company announced Thursday that it’s secured a second round of financing — an undisclosed sum led by Ingredion, a global ingredient supplier headquartered in Illinois. This follows $15 million in another funding round in 2016. Thanks to the influx of cash, Clara expects to hit the market as soon as early 2020. With the commercial partnership with Ingredion, the plan is for Clara’s egg proteins to make their way to large bakeries and companies that produce protein bars and shakes.
Clara Foods is one of several Bay Area companies that have made the region a global leader in food innovation, with companies that are developing substitutes for traditional animal proteins using a range of technologies. In addition to Clara, local companies working with yeast fermentation — also known as acellular agriculture — include San Leandro’s Geltor, which sells a lab-created version of gelatin and has raised $23 million in funding, and Berkeley’s Perfect Day, which makes a cow’s milk equivalent and has raised $61.5 million.
That innovation was what attracted Clara CEO Arturo Elizondo to San Francisco to start his company. He got interested in food tech while living in Geneva and studying diplomacy and food security. He learned about the global demand for protein and didn’t see how the world’s dwindling resources could satisfy it.
“I booked a one-way ticket to San Francisco,” he said. “I thought this is where the future is happening.”
Elizondo landed at IndieBio, a San Francisco firm that helps biotech startups grow and raise investment, and Clara Foods was born.
Clara plans to debut two products. One is a protein it found within the egg that has a clean, versatile flavor, Elizondo said. Clara says that unlike the protein powder that’s often added to smoothies, it’s not grainy or chalky, qualities that beverage companies usually try to cover up by sweet, milky ingredients. Elizondo envisions Clara’s product enabling lighter, Gatorade-like protein beverages.
The other product is an egg white replacer, prime for creating foams, meringues and properly leavened cakes. There is a liquid version — less gooey than a chicken’s egg whites — and a powdered version.
For companies looking to make their ingredients vegan, Clara’s products will likely cost more than standard eggs initially. But as Clara grows, “our technology has the potential to undercut and match the prices,” said Elizondo.
Clara has no plans to go directly to consumers via grocery stores. Its rollout would therefore be somewhat similar to that of Impossible Foods’ burgers or of the Just Scramble egg replacer from Just, Inc. (formerly known as Hampton Creek). Both of those companies, which specialize in high-tech plant-based versions of beef and eggs, released their products to restaurants first.
In the future, Elizondo plans to experiment with producing other animal proteins — via bioengineering — at Clara.
Elizondo grew up in Texas eating two eggs for breakfast every day until college, but he’s been a vegan for the last six years. His parents aren’t so keen on trying his lab-grown proteins.
“They’ve been scarred,” he said. “For so many people, whenever you talk about vegan food or health food, it’s always like, ‘It’s going to taste like crap.’”
That’s why Elizondo believes that making the most sustainable, ethical product isn’t enough. It needs to also be the most delicious.
“That’s where you reach an inflection point of people really choosing these products,” he said. “They don’t even have to think about it.”
Janelle Bitker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: janelle.bitker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @janellebitker