What’s the story with Eat Just selling cultured chicken bites in Singapore – are they being sold at a loss, and/or does the product only contain a small amount of the chicken product?
Here are some lines from the article:
They were sold at 1880 Singapore, a social club at InterContinental Singapore.
A private tasting session will first be held at JW Marriott Hotel Singapore South Beach next week.
“One thing I’m worried about, though, is the price point, since it is manufactured in a lab. Hopefully, the meat will still be affordable to the public when it is sold in hawker stalls,” she added.
Someone I know has a “personal aesthetic, world view or ideology” that’s absolutely ruthless and skeptical when it regards situations related to business and money—particularly and especially when they are (conveniently) adjacent to “non-profit” narratives[1][2].
This ideology would read in between the lines of this article quoted above, and call these actions performative.
For example, this event is consistent with not having a viable commercial path and instead is trying to “get buzz” as part of a larger business strategy to support investment and interest.
This doesn’t indicate anything positive about the feasibility of the product (especially in the context of substantial existing impartial analysis) and isn’t an update.
Like, informed from decades of interactions with multiple instances of people in small businesses, non-profits, enterprises, big corporations, FANGs, e.g. working with the middle and upper management, marketers, from each of these instances
So the reason why this footnote and the above footnote exists is that this person specifically claims these experiences and model of the world is powerful and much faster than tracking down/interviewing/investigating, because they can read things almost immediately that are being telegraphed.
The below are just straight from the middle of the article (bold is mine):
From the outset he showed a knack for raising capital but had a tendency to rapidly “blow through” the money he raised, says Javier Colón, the original operations manager and third employee of the company. Colón claims he tried to rein in the spending and Tetrick fired him; he says he has been a detractor of Tetrick’s leadership ever since.
The company gained early fame after it fended off a lawsuit from the food giant Unilever, who sued over the use of “mayo” in the product’s name. By 2014, Tetrick had impressed investors by getting Just Mayo on to the shelves of major supermarkets including Whole Foods and Safeway.
But controversy hit when, in a series of 2016 articles, Bloomberg reported the company had instructed employees to buy up huge quantities of Just Mayo – sometimes 140 jars a day – in a scheme allegedly aimed at driving up revenues as Hampton Creek was seeking further investments. The company claimed it was only buying small amounts for quality control testing. Investigations by the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission were eventually dropped.
A former scientist at the company, who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, confirmed similar details to those reported by Bloomberg, saying employees were called to an “all hands” meeting and asked to buy out a store’s entire mayonnaise stock, offering an explanation to store managers such as procuring supplies for a company picnic.
“That sort of thing was pretty common. It was the way the place was run,” says the scientist, who adds that it wasn’t unusual to see slide decks for prospective investors that overstated the company’s capabilities, or to be asked to avoid disclosing the real facts to board members when they came to visit headquarters.
When employees complained about misleading practices, the scientist says “managers would just say: ‘This is supposed to be aspirational. It’s just marketing.’”
By early 2017 nearly all the company’s directors had resigned, leaving only Tetrick on the board. Bloomberg reported that the resignations followed months of infighting, during which directors and investors “lost faith in the aggressive founder they’d previously hailed as a visionary”.
In a statement, Andrew Noyes, Eat Just’s spokesman, said the Bloomberg articles were based on false charges by disgruntled former staff.
Several other former employees say they did not find Hampton Creek’s practices particularly questionable, with one former manager describing its ethics as typical for Silicon Valley.
“I think it’s a normal Silicon Valley story of a company that was over-hyped and has lived through this rollercoaster of hype and scandal and now it’s just plodding along,” says the former employee, who asked not to be named because he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
“Josh is a normal Silicon Valley huckster. He stays on the legal side of the line. But he straddles that line,” he says. “It’s just like Uber. People keep saying it’s a house of cards and it’s going to fall down. But it just keeps standing.”
In response to criticism of his leadership, Tetrick says he is driven by an ambitious vision for the company, even if that vision has yet to be fully realized. “Some companies are going to take longer to get to profitability than others,” he says. “But it’s really important that you have a path.”
....
Pelling believes that the problems inherent to lab-grown meat can someday be solved, but he worries about companies like Eat Just rushing to market with solutions that haven’t been scientifically vetted or transparently explained to the public.
“My concern is this could blow up at some point,” says Pelling, “And what might have been a real solution – maybe not the whole ecosystem, but maybe part of it – might never happen, because trust gets destroyed and wiped out.”
Here are some lines from the article:
Someone I know has a “personal aesthetic, world view or ideology” that’s absolutely ruthless and skeptical when it regards situations related to business and money—particularly and especially when they are (conveniently) adjacent to “non-profit” narratives[1][2].
This ideology would read in between the lines of this article quoted above, and call these actions performative.
For example, this event is consistent with not having a viable commercial path and instead is trying to “get buzz” as part of a larger business strategy to support investment and interest.
This doesn’t indicate anything positive about the feasibility of the product (especially in the context of substantial existing impartial analysis) and isn’t an update.
Like, informed from decades of interactions with multiple instances of people in small businesses, non-profits, enterprises, big corporations, FANGs, e.g. working with the middle and upper management, marketers, from each of these instances
So the reason why this footnote and the above footnote exists is that this person specifically claims these experiences and model of the world is powerful and much faster than tracking down/interviewing/investigating, because they can read things almost immediately that are being telegraphed.
I haven’t heard or read anything about Eat Just’s business or the founder before.
After writing the above comment, I found this Guardian article and read it for the first time:
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jun/16/eat-just-no-kill-meat-chicken-josh-tetrick
The below are just straight from the middle of the article (bold is mine):
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