The EVERY Company Raises $175 Million To Scale Production

Food tech ingredient platform The EVERY Company, formerly Santa Clara Foods, announced this week it has closed a $175 million Series C capital round co-led by McWin and existing investor, Rage Capital. Temasek, Grosvenor’s Wheatsheaf Group, TO Ventures and Prosus Ventures also participated.

Founded in 2014, this latest raise brings the San Francisco-based company’s total funding to date to $233 million. According to EVERY, proceeds from this round will go towards scaling production of the company’s animal-free egg protein technology, developing additional protein ingredients and launching new retail and restaurant partnerships utilizing the company’s alt-protein source.

“EVERY is at a critical inflection point as we transition from R&D to commercialization,” said the company’s founder and CEO Arturo Elizondo in a statement via email. “We will use the infusion of capital to deliver on our expansion plans and penetrate into the consumer packaged goods and foodservice channels.”

What does EVERY do?

EVERY currently produces three precision-fermented ingredients — EVERY Pepsin, EVERY ClearEgg and EVERY EggWhite — which feature proteins identical to their animal-derived counterparts, but created without the use of any animals. Although the products are technically vegan, they use animal-free as the descriptor to avoid consumer confusion about how the protein is created.

Following its rebrand and name change in October, the company has positioned itself as an ingredient technology company rather than a brand making finished CPG products. At the time of the announcement, Elizondo stated that EVERY’s goal is to “democratize” access to alternative proteins and, while it plans to expand the presence of its proteins in retail products, it will also use restaurant and foodservice partnerships to drive education on the behalf of consumers.

These expansion plans will likely be supported by the company’s newest investor, McWin Food Ecosystem Fund and AmRest, which operates 2,300 around the world.

“The restaurant industry is one of the early adopters of new food technologies and their introduction to the consumer,” said Henry McGovern, founder of McWin in a press release. ”Given our deep roots in restaurants and as a prolific investor in the leading alternative protein companies, McWin is uniquely equipped to support EVERY’s ambitious plans to bring its products to menus worldwide. Eggs are not only ubiquitous, but they are also incredibly difficult to replace; we see tremendous potential in EVERY’s revolutionary technology.”

“It’s rare for a company to credibly claim revolutionizing a century-old industry,” added Gabriel Ruimy, Managing Partner of Rage Capital, in a press release. “Arturo and the team at EVERY are doing just that. By leveraging precision fermentation technologies, EVERY is bringing ingredient synthesis from science fiction to supermarket aisles, starting with egg proteins and enzymes.”

What’s next?

According to the company, the funds will largely be used to further scale production and expand the protein’s presence globally. Earlier this year the company partnered with Anheuser-Busch’s fermentation-focused technology group BioBrew to produce the proteins at a larger scale so that they eventually can be manufactured at an accessible and affordable price point.

“We have plans to scale our steady state production beyond hundreds of thousands of liters of fermentation scale in 2022,” Elizondo said. “This work is happening in partnership with, and independent of, AB InBev to deliver the quantity and price points that will enable us to serve the global protein market.”

EVERY said it will also utilize the new funding to support a range of new innovations including retail-product partnerships and the development of new protein platforms created by “mining the egg proteome for novel, hyper-functional proteins,” though the company declined to share details about pending partnerships and innovations. The company noted its intent to expand into new food applications in a press release, but has previously cited its limited production capacity as the reason why it had not increased its amount of product partnerships.

In November, EVERY debuted its first retail partnership with cold-pressed juice maker PRESSED, launching a Pineapple Greens Protein smoothie using EVERY ClearEgg as the protein ingredient. According to EVERY, the focus for ClearEgg product partnerships is on the beverage industry as the company developed the ingredient to fill a space in the vegan protein ingredient market — which largely consists of soy pea or whey protein sources — with a product that has no taste, texture or smell that requires additional, unnecessary ingredients just to make it palatable.

This funding announcement comes only two months after fellow food tech company Perfect Day raised $350 million to execute its “three-pronged strategy” which includes selling ingredients to other food and beverage companies and offering food tech development services to other companies. Alongside that announcement Perfect Day, which also uses fermentation technology to create animal-free proteins, hinted that an IPO may be coming in the future for the company.