Animal-free egg protein startup Onego Bio is closer to cracking the egg market
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Unfortunately, neither in this article, nor on the company site,
https://www.onego.bio/bioalbumen
is there any kind of estimated price for their "Bioalbumen".
Until a competitive price is announced, any such hopeful press releases are irrelevant.
At the right price, I would certainly prefer to buy ovalbumin extracted from fungi, as this would simplify a lot the problem of composing a vegan diet that contains enough protein, but without providing an excessive energy intake and without being more expensive than a meat-based diet.
The eggs eaten by the vast majority of people in the industrialised world are about as far from decentralised as you can get, and your friends would be unlikely to be able to supply the demand in the absence of factory farming.
As you say, the hatcheries are very centralised, as is feed production.
Where I live, in Europe, tofu and protein extracts are many times more expensive than meat, e.g. 5 times more expensive than chicken breast per their protein content (chicken breast is only twice more expensive than lentils, both having the same protein content).
Therefore neither tofu nor protein extracts are a rational choice for a vegan diet.
I have made countless experiments in the attempt of composing a vegan diet that would not make me gain weight very rapidly and which would also be no more expensive than a meat-based diet.
At the prices from here, I have found only a single solution. I make at home a special kind of bread that is highly enriched in protein, with up to 50% protein. This is made by washing away most of the starch from the dough, enriching the dough in gluten. While it is possible to extract almost pure gluten from wheat flour, the so-called "seitan", this requires more time and more water than I am willing to spend every day. For the protein-enriched bread that I make, about 5 minutes of dough washing are enough.
Fungal ovalbumin would be a good alternative for this process, but I doubt that we would see it at a decent price any time soon.
If you're a professional athlete trying to be vegan, then sure, you'll end up with a weird diet to meet those absurd protein needs, but omnivorous professional athletes tend to have weird diets too for the same reason.
Professional athletes that are actually vegan are 4 sigma outliers. For most normal humans it's not possible to even be a more-that-casual athlete in any competitive sport eating plants. Animal meats contain more than just protein including things like iodine, creatine, vitamin D, etc. A quick google brings up numerous studies on the nutritional deficiencies of the typical vegan diet you would need to rely on external supplementation for. Keto diets and other fad diets are also not great for the competitive athlete.
If you're vegan because you don't want to eat animals there's nothing wrong with it. When the vegans start pointing to the outliers as evidence "it can be done" it's just a deep cope to make everyone as miserable as them.
People approach veganism as "take out the meat", which leads to nutritional deficiencies. You can't do that, you basically have to reboot the way you eat. I tracked all my food for months when switching to learn what mix of foods gave me the nutrition I needed. Now it is habit and pretty easy. The only new thing I supplement with is vitamin B12 and a protein shake after workouts. (I did the protein shake before being vegan so no change there)
It isn't miserable at all, we love how we eat.
Also, look into how much protein is actually recommended per day to be realistic about how much carbs and fat on top is fine to eat. It's not like people eat meat/dairy without a serving of fat and carbs next to it, so it should be fine to get some extra fat and carbs from protein sources then rebalance elsewhere on the plate.
My understanding is if you eat enough calories with an okay diet without thinking about protein, you'll hit the recommended (non-athlete) amounts without trouble and will easily exceed them if you throw in a couple of high protein sources.
> You'd pretty much have to eat some kind of fermented soy product every day to get enough protein through semi-normal meals, which is workable I guess though very boring.
Althetes eat pretty weird and repetitively anyway, lots of chicken and protein shakes. TVP, seitan, tofu and tempeh are versatile, and there's plant based protein shakes too.
For the average person that doesn't lift somewhat regularly, I think this means you're disagreeing with the health professionals from Canada, UK, US and more here.
What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
The horror
> What bad thing is meant to happen if the average person doesn't eat this much protein?
60g (12% of a 2000 cal diet) is the low end of the recommended 10 to 35% protein intake by these organizations anyway. Low end is getting to barely preventing muscle wastage territory. Plenty of upsides and no downsides to taking more protein while plenty of downsides to not taking enough protein. Do your own googling I guess, not particularly interested in convincing you.
I have heard this sentence for years, but nobody has been able to provide an example whose price was not outrageous. I suppose that this sentence is written by people who do not care whether they pay $5 or $50 for their daily food. Such people are not average people.
While it is possible to compose a vegan diet with enough proteins at a reasonable cost, and I do this every day, it is really hard to avoid gaining weight, much, much harder than with a non-vegan diet, where you have access to cheap pure proteins, like chicken breast or turkey breast.
Ever since I have switched to a vegan diet, a couple of years ago, I have to monitor my weight permanently and I have to take corrective actions frequently, despite the fact that I eat much less than most people are used to.
They are necessary for a vegan diet, but they are not sufficient. They must be combined with some other source of proteins, which must contain much methionine and which must have a better ratio between protein content and calories.
The commercial protein extracts from them are much more expensive than meat, so they are a non-solution.
Using so much energy requires many hours of intense physical activity. When your job requires spending 8 hours or more per day sitting in front of a computer, then it is absolutely impossible to also do enough physical work to consume over 3000 kcal.
Therefore your suggestion is also a non-solution for many people.
It is true however that for most of our ancestors the problem of gaining weight when eating a strictly vegan diet would not have existed. This is indeed just a modern problem, of the sedentary people.
For instance, bread is normally considered to be an incomplete source of proteins, but that is just because one cannot eat enough. Eating bread made from 1 kilogram of flour per day provides enough of all essential amino-acids. It also provides about 3500 kcal/day. Someone doing hard physical work, like it was much more common in the past, could eat only bread without needing any other source of proteins.
Lentils have 26g of protein and 353 calories per 100g, and eggs have 13g of protein and 143 calories per 100g, so the ratio is 13.5 for lentils and 11 for eggs.
Doesn't seem all that different.
On the other hand, lean meat is almost pure protein, so its ratio of protein vs. energy is 3 to 4 times better than for vegetable sources.
Even with whole eggs, you can get much less calories than with lentils, if they are used to supplement cereal proteins, because they have a significantly better lysine to calories ratio, so when the amount of required lysine is specified you can eat less of them than in the case when their amount would be computed to provide a specified amount of protein.
I suppose that in countries where soy is an important crop, tofu may have a competitive price, but not here.
For a sedentary life style it is impossible to compose a vegan diet that has enough proteins without containing too much energy.
It is necessary to use at least one protein source where a special method has been used to separate the proteins from the rest of the vegetable.
There are plenty of such products on the market, like tofu and various protein extracts, but all of them are much more expensive than chicken meat. At the tofu price mentioned by another poster it is 2.5 times more expensive than chicken breast, while other kinds of protein extracts that I have seen around are 5 times more expensive than chicken breast.
The discussion was strictly about how to get vegan proteins cheaper than meat. When you are willing to pay many times more than for meat, then of course it is trivial to eat a vegan diet.
Because all commercial products are more expensive than meat, the only other way is to extract vegetable protein at home. I am aware of only a single source of vegetable proteins where the proteins can be separated without any special equipment or chemicals (excluding soy, which is expensive in Europe), and that is wheat flour, from which the gluten can be separated from starch by simple washing.
But in any case, even paying double meat price for tofu protein, $.05/g of protein, is still "too cheap to meter" in the context of an industrialized lifestyle.
Nevertheless, this is still very expensive in comparison with the food I normally eat. At the prices typical in the European Union, I can eat a very complete, tasty and healthy food for about $5 per day (as a male of average size). This is true only because I cook myself and I buy only raw ingredients. Processed food would be much more expensive.
Chicken breast without bones and skin would cost here between $6 and $7 per kilogram. Even at the maximum $7/kg, that corresponds to about $0.78 per 28 g of protein, i.e. 2.5 times cheaper than tofu at your price. Therefore tofu is much too expensive to compete with meat.
To be able to eat a vegan diet, I remove most starch from wheat flour, making a bread enriched in protein. This is more than 10 times cheaper than tofu at your price, so tofu is something that I would never consider. I spend the money not wasted for something like tofu for vegetables or fruits that are rich in vitamins, which are usually much more expensive than the staple food that can ensure the required daily intake of protein and fat.
I think that's similar to "seitan" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seitan , which is also pretty cheap in Europe (~13€/kg on amazon.it: https://www.amazon.it/Bongiovanni-Farine-bont%C3%A0-naturali... )
Nevertheless you can still find meat that is cheaper than this, per its protein content, e.g. chicken gizzards, so it does not demonstrate the expected efficiency of eating directly vegetable proteins without passing them through animals.
It is likely that something like seitan should be cheaper to produce than this, since I can do it at home for many times less money than that, but most commercial products for vegans are overpriced.
Reaching the Protein RDA is very easy for me. The RDA for me is 48g per day, but I usually eat >60g. Am I correct in assuming that you have a way higher protein target than that? That is, at least, what your comments seem to imply.
I get about 30g from my breakfast and dinner, where I usually eat cereal/oatmeal with some soy/oatmilk. That stuff is dirt cheap.
Getting 20g and more for lunch is super easy. Here are some examples I recorded in the past:
30g: Ragou (carrots, kidney beans, tomatoes,...) with noodles
35g: crumbled tofu and lentils (as vegan "minced meat"), in wrap with salad
43g: pasta with tomato sauce and a store-bought vegan schnitzel (I don't usually buy those meat substitutes, but I got that one as a gift)
25g: smoked tofu, rice, canned peas with carrots
20g: from a chickpea/potato soup
Edit: BTW, I also tracked the essential amino acids, and I get easily 150 to 300% of the RDA. I get all of them to >80% of RDA from breakfast and dinner alone, the average is 130% of the RDA per essential amino acids.
Oh, and if you are wondering I had an average of 2100 kcal per day.
It's theoretically possible using raw foods only, but very very few things have the necessary protein to calorie ratio. There's lentils, soybeans, peas, and not much else. You can also get processed food (fake meat), if you're willing to eat that and can find it cheap near you.
A single portion of protein powder each day is cheap and it gives you the freedom to eat anything else you want for the rest of the day.
I switched to vegan after 20 years of being a healthy vegetarian. I stuck at it 18 months, but reverted because I wasn't healthy. Colds, coughs were frequent and lasted weeks, often turning into infections. The worst was an on/off respiratory infections that went on for 3 months. Doctors were useless, I was handed antibiotics and inhalers (although the inhalers did help the symptoms) but a week after it had gotten 90% better, I'd wake up with night sweats and a fever and the whole cycle would start up again. I was on a by-the-book vegan diet, watching my vitamins etc. No idea what I was missing, my bloods looked fine, and I was still able to do 10km runs when I wasn't sick. I went back to vegetarianism have been fine ever since (5 years ago), aside from occasional minor colds and COVID. Never again.
Similar are fossil fuels. They're inexpensive, until you realize the aggregate burning of them increases pollution, as well as greenhouse gases. But cost of impact and resolution isn't in the cost of the product.
The point is, competing alternatives that don't have such "cost-free side effects" can't compete until the legacy products' price reflect the true and entire cost of manufacturing.
From the article: "Onego Bio is close to reaching competitive price points to traditional ways of making egg proteins"
That's a fowl way of describing chickens.
I suppose there's also the very small number of people who are allergic to eggs, but it's not clear to me based on my limited knowledge whether their bioidentical substance would get around that problem. Assuming it does, that still doesn't feel like a lot of demand.
I dunno, I wish them well I guess.
That seems like a mildly weird assumption, at least provided you restrict it to producing albumen, which is what they're doing. There's a lot of overhead in egg production related to, well, the chicken, it seems fairly clear that an idealised maximally efficient microorganism solution could beat the chicken. Now, how close their fungus is to that I do not know.
It looks like they're targeting industrial food production, and that's price sensitive, so they can't be a million miles away, cost-wise (there are plenty of fairly cheap albumen substitutes already used in food production, though they're suboptimal).
> A chicken egg at a grocery store right now costs about $.25, so that's the number to beat.
Well, not really; they're producing albumen for industrial use, so there's some extra processing that that egg has to undergo that they get to skip. I would wonder also can they charge a small premium for what is presumably a much more consistent product; they shouldn't have to worry about bits of egg shell or blood spots or differing densities or all the other complexities that come from using a natural product.
Does that mean it would still trigger an egg allergy?
Fun fact from Wikipedia: "Trichoderma reesei isolate QM6a was originally isolated from the Solomon Islands during World War II because of its degradation of canvas and garments of the US army. All strains currently used in biotechnology and basic research were derived from this isolate."
EDIT: I have found a preprint for the paywalled Nature article,
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/347276/Arti...
I suppose that after the publication of that research paper they have further improved the yield in protein of the Trichoderma culture, which has lead to their startup company.
While they have pursued the production of ovalbumin, the main protein of egg white, there are also other research groups who attempt to produce the main protein of milk whey, using other strains of the same fungus.
Humans are omnivores. Without eating animal products society would collapse.
I'm not a vegetarian (I eat an egg every day!), but wow, what a confident assertion. I'm open to your evidence behind this, but it seems absolutely preposterous to me.
I think it would be easier to argue that our addiction to meat consumption is one culprit fueling society's collapse already given the environmental and ecological impact that meat production creates.
Further, "long-term" is a weasel word that is meaningless to people starving right now. The hungry want to hear food is coming, not some hifalutin agriculturally illiterate fantasy thought up by hung over trust fund kids.
Short if giving a specific date and objective success criteria, long-term means never.
> Onego Bio plans to sell Bioalbumen to companies that would then create the food products.
The processed food industry is very cost-sensitive and both industrial egg albumen and various substitutes are already available; if they're not price competitive they'll die quickly.
It doesn't seem at all unlikely that they'lll get to being price competitive quickly. They're producing a single protein with a fungus. There's another well-known example of this; quorn. Quorn's actually a bit more complex in that, once they've produced their protein they need to add stuff to make it palatable, and their processed output still comes in at about the same cost as processed chicken, and generally a bit cheaper than other processed meat. These people seem to be literally just producing albumen, so it's close to an ideal case.
There are recipes for egg-equivalent online, typically involving Kala namak aka black salt, if you want to try doing it yourself.
By monetary valuation, the global alcohol market is over 30x the size of the global meat market. Does this mean we should discourage people from replacing getting drunk with healthier alternatives?
Source for meat products market size estimated at 1660.64 billion in 2023: https://www.precedenceresearch.com/meat-products-market
Source for alcoholic beverages market size estimated at 1949.2 billion in 2021: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/alcoholic-beverages-...
... Wait, how does that follow? Like, if everyone stopped tomorrow, sure, maybe; it would at the very least be a massive economic shock, and would likely lead to critical shortages as well. But phased out over time, it's not clear why this would be the case.
Its worth pointing out that there are methods for avoiding this, by detecting the male chicks when they're still essentially a foetus in the egg. These work so well that France, Germany and Italy banned culling chicks a few years back. Unfortunately they're more expensive than determining the chick's sex after they are hatched so other places don't do it.
Not necessary. https://www.soos.org.il/
I believe there are. The people buying the chickens for their lovely free range or backyard thing are specifically only buying female ones. The males get killed, usually in somewhat gruesome ways shortly after hatching.
That might not be an ethical problem for you but it is for me.
> On 18 July 2021, French Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, announced chick culling would be banned from 1 January 2022.[70] Both maceration and gassing will be prohibited, and the French government would grant chicken breeders subsidies of 10 million euros combined in order to acquire in-ovo sexing machines instead (leading to extra consumer costs of about 1 eurocent per box of six eggs).
Industrial farming use different breeds for egg-laying and meat, so they would find early culling more economical.
The problem is that a replacement product that doesn't contain the identical substance can replace the original only in some recipes. With "vegan products" in general, you'd have to pay more attention when cooking because it will often not cook exactly the same way as the product it imitates.
But nutritionally speaking, I don't think we can find anything that compare. It's quite an amazing food.
https://www.eatthismuch.com/food/nutrition/egg-yolk,105/
also: organic is in your own best interest
If you have a source of pure protein, like this fungal ovalbumin, you have a much greater freedom of choice for the rest of your food, becoming able to select other items only for their vitamin content, without caring that they may contain too little of the major nutrients.
Therefore, with such artificial complete proteins it would be easier to eat enough vitamins, not more difficult.
As a general rule, it is much easier to compose a diet from various food items, each of which is rich in a single nutrient, than to compose a diet from food items that contain a great variety of nutrients, but a few of the nutrients are missing in each food item, so you must make a complex balance of the quantities in order to have neither too little nor too much of each nutrient.
Your spreadsheet means bupkis when it comes to culture, tradition, and tastes.
From the article (I realise, of course, that on this website it is considered highly improper to actually read them), it looks like they are at least initially targeting industrial egg users (bakeries, processed food), so that's hardly relevant; these are industries which specifically want albumen because of how it behaves, but as long as it's albumen the end product won't be significantly impacted.
Hey, at least you can admit this to yourself! That's further than most people get.
Most of the world isn't going to rip up the deep cultural roots associated with their food traditions because some extropian techbro dyed some soy protein pink.
I just love playing with words.