Hampton Creek had a huge cost advantage, the company said in a pitch deck provided to potential investors. Its plant-based egg equivalent cost about half as much as a real egg. In the case of Just Mayo, that meant Hampton Creek could easily undercut Unilever’s Hellmann’s and Best Foods brands and grab a significant share of the $2 billion U.S. mayonnaise market.
Does this ring false to anyone else? Are Hellman's costs dominated by their industrial inputs? Also: famously, you can make a cubic shitload of mayonnaise from a single egg (I'll find the Cooking Issues cite somewhere). Commercial mayonnaise is almost entirely oil and gets its flavor mostly from acid, salt, and sugar, not from the egg. Does halving the cost of those eggs really give a competitor that much of an edge?