Related Articles
Popular vegan egg and lab-grown-meat company Eat Just is in deep financial trouble. A WIRED investigation bringing together court records, documents, and interviews from former employees suggests that the company frequently struggled with paying its suppliers on time. Now it is being sued by a former partner for roughly $100 million and faces lawsuits from other vendors, some of which are reported here for the first time.
“The biggest issue was absolute financial mismanagement,” one former senior Eat Just employee alleges. Multiple former employees claim that the practice of delaying or withholding payment to vendors was “entrenched” and “endemic” at the company. “We had vendors we were six months behind on. We were constantly having to beg and plead to get our product out of refrigeration and into stores,” says another former senior employee. WIRED has agreed to withhold their names because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Eat Just is one of the leading startups to have come out of the boom in plant-based alternatives to animal products. Since 2011 the startup has raised around $850 million—making it among the best-funded startups in the industry. Its vegan eggs are sold in thousands of stores in the US, and in 2020 it became the first company to sell cultivated meat to customers. In May 2022, a wholly owned Eat Just subsidiary called Good Meat announced it had signed an agreement to build 10 giant bioreactors to grow animal cells for cultivated meat—a project orders of magnitude larger than anything attempted before.
A WIRED investigation can reveal that even as the company embarked on the nine-figure bioreactor project, there were concerns it was struggling to pay vendors and contractors. Ultimately the Good Meat deal would collapse into a legal dispute, with bioreactor firm ABEC alleging that the company owes more than $61 million in unpaid invoices. The startup is also being sued in two separate recently-filed legal disputes. One from an engineering firm for more than $4.2 million for alleged unpaid work and another from a food processing firm alleging more than $450,000 in unpaid invoices for ingredients.
Eat Just, which has backing from the Qatar Investment Authority, hedge fund manager UBS O’Connor, and Charlesbank Capital Partners, is now facing a series of legal cases that could threaten to overwhelm the company. Former employees paint a picture of a Silicon Valley unicorn led by a charismatic CEO, Josh Tetrick, who managed to bring in swathes of venture capital. But all the while, as one former senior employee claims, the company was failing “drastically’ to manage its finances.
Big Promises
Eat Just is no stranger to legal battles. In addition to the lawsuits already mentioned, court records show the company has been sued on at least seven other occasions since 2019. In most of these cases the sums involved were relatively small. One lawsuit filed by food processor Archer Daniels Midland in July 2020 alleged that Eat Just failed to pay a bill of $15,640 for shelled hemp seed and shipping. In early 2021, the laboratory equipment firm VWR International sued Eat Just for $189,244. In March 2021, Eat Just’s landlord sued for nearly $2.6 million in unpaid rent. A month later, FedEx sued the company for more than $72,000. Eat Just’s head of communications, Carrie Kabat, says that all these lawsuits have been settled.
Former Eat Just employees allege these nonpayment lawsuits were the result of the company running up large bills while it waited to land new funding rounds. “It was a pervasive mindset that we could always raise more money, and even if we didn’t have money in the bank, we could push forward on different initiatives,” says one former senior employee. Another former employee says it was common for the company to rack up large debts between funding rounds. “It was a house of cards, and as long as the investor money was coming in, it was fine,” alleges a third employee.
As Eat Just moved into the business of cultivated meat—growing meat from animal cells without requiring the slaughter of animals—it started to commit to more ambitious projects. In December 2020, Eat Just’s cultivated meat was approved by Singaporean regulators—the first approval of its kind in the world. Shortly after, its meat—in the form of chicken nuggets, chicken curry and other dishes—was sold at a restaurant in one of the city-state’s five star hotels. In mid-2021, Eat Just created a wholly owned subsidiary called Good Meat to focus on cultivated meat. Until June 2023, when Upside Foods was also cleared to sell cultivated meat in the US, Good Meat was the only company selling lab-grown meat to the public anywhere in the world.
Got a Tip?
Do you have information about Eat Just? We’d like to hear from you. Using a nonwork phone or computer, contact Matt Reynolds on matt_reynolds@wired.com or securely on mattsreynolds@protonmail.com..
Former employees claim that the pressure to achieve industry firsts led to poor financial planning. “The desire to be first in everything drove decisions,” says one employee. In May 2022, Good Meat publicly announced its biggest project yet: It would work with the bioreactor firm ABEC to design and build as many as 10 large bioreactors, each with a capacity of 250,000 liters. In an industry where most companies are using bioreactors that hold just hundreds or thousands of liters, the size of the project was unprecedented.
ABEC’s amended legal complaint, filed in US federal court in August 2023, alleges that the project was estimated to cost Good Meat more than $1 billion to complete. ABEC claims in the lawsuit that it stood to bring in more than $550 million for its work. But by the end of 2022, Eat Just was failing to make timely payments, the complaint alleges. By March 2023 ABEC claimed over $61 million in unpaid invoices. In total, ABEC is suing for more than $100 million, which includes unpaid invoices as well as payments for changes to the scope of the bioreactor work.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
“I think even agreeing to that contract in the first place was part of wanting to have the headlines ‘Good Meat Is Building the Biggest Bioreactor in the World,’” one former employee claims. Tetrick disputed this assertion in a written response to WIRED.
These bioreactors were supposed to be the central part of a large cultivated-meat facility capable of producing up to 30 million pounds of meat annually, Eat Just said when it announced the project. “It’s a huge risk, because if it doesn’t work then you just put hundreds of millions of dollars into something that is now worthless,” says Steve Molino, an investor at plant-based and cultivated meat venture capital firm Clear Current Capital who is not an investor in Eat Just. Molino also sits on the board of Sundial Foods, a plant-based meat company.
“It is unusual and maybe even extraordinary, to enter into contracts—serious, business, commercial contracts for real and important work—and then to not pay,” says Dale Giali, a lawyer who specializes in the food and beverage industry. These kinds of disputes are often settled out of court to avoid potentially lengthy litigation, Giali says. Brady Cole, ABEC’s vice president of equipment solutions, declined to comment on the litigation.
Eat Just’s Tetrick also declined to give an on-record response to the ABEC lawsuit, but did confirm that his company was no longer going ahead with the large-scale cultivated-meat facility or working on large bioreactors. “We invested a lot of capital in the design, engineering, and related construction design work for a large-scale cultivated-meat facility,” he says. “At the heart of our large-scale program was an assumption that we would continue to raise capital for that large-scale facility. That did not happen.”
Instead, Tetrick says that Good Meat will shift its focus to finding ways to build cultivated-meat facilities that cost less than $150 million. (In an emailed response to questions from WIRED Tetrick later changed this figure to “ideally below $200 million”.) “The reality for us now is we need to figure out a way to build large-scale facilities without spending north of half a billion dollars, because it’s simply not viable long-term,” Tetrick says. “There has to be a better way of doing it. And if we can’t figure out a different way of doing it, then what we’re doing won’t work.”
Bigger Issues
Eat Just is also being sued by at least two other companies at the time of writing. A legal complaint submitted by the engineering firm Clark, Richardson and & Biskup Consulting Engineers in September 2023 alleges that Eat Just and Good Meat owe the company over $4.2 million for unpaid work related to a cultivated-meat project it was working on. “CRB Group filed a complaint in Missouri State Court against Eat Just and Good Meat seeking remedies for payment for services provided,” says CRB Group head of communications Chris Clark. Tetrick did not provide WIRED with an on-record response to this lawsuit.
WIRED can reveal that Eat Just is facing further lawsuits. In October 2022, a legal complaint was lodged against Eat Just by food processor Dakota Speciality Milling. In August 2023, Eat Just was sued by branding and marketing firm CA Fortune Sales and Marketing. On September 20, 2023, the company was sued by food-processing firm Pearl Crop in a legal suit alleging more than $450,000 in unpaid invoices, mostly for “roasting mung beans.” Kabat says the case with CA Fortune Sales and Marketing has been settled but could not provide comment on the other two cases, “as they are still active.” None of the three companies responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
"It was a very poorly kept secret that all employees knew about, that we weren't paying our bills," one former employee alleges. Another former senior employee believes that Tetrick spent money aspirationally. “He felt like because he had some successful fundraising he could just snap his finger and pull money out of the sky,” they say.
Other former employees allege that over the past several years the company tended to pay bills only when it became impossible to ignore them. In one case, a freelance contractor who was owed over $32,000 by Eat Just was paid only after they posted on social media about nonpayment. The contractor agreed a payment plan with Eat Just, which the company later disregarded, leading to them posting on social media.“It really bothered me that I had to present myself in public because they weren’t doing the right thing,” says the contractor, who asked to remain anonymous to protect future work opportunities.
Insiders Reveal Major Problems at Lab-Grown-Meat Startup Upside FoodsBillion-dollar cultivated-meat startup Upside Foods wants you to think the breakthrough chicken fillets it sells are made in a futuristic factory. A WIRED investigation tells a different story.By Matt Reynolds and Joe Fassler
Tetrick says that “well over 75 percent” of the company’s vendors were paid on time and in full. “The vast majority of our vendors throughout the company’s history have been paid on time and in full,” he wrote in a statement emailed to WIRED at a later date. “At the same time, we recognize that if even one vendor is not paid on time and in full, it’s not acceptable and it’s on us to make it right.”
Several employees told WIRED that Eat Just had a covenant with an investor, which required the startup to keep a certain amount of capital in reserve at all times. Over the past several years Eat Just negotiated with the investor to reduce that covenant by roughly half, sources claim, which allowed the company to keep less money in the bank than previously required. In a written response, Tetrick said that the company does not share investor terms publicly.
These financial difficulties are not Eat Just’s first brush with controversy. In 2017, when the company was still known by its earlier name, Hampton Creek, its entire board resigned. This came a year after there were reported revelations that the company used contractors to buy its own mayonnaise off supermarket shelves. The only remaining board member was CEO Josh Tetrick, who went on to rename the company and raise hundreds of millions of dollars first to grow its popular vegan mayonnaise and egg brands and later to support its work on cultivated meat. Eat Just later phased out sales of its Just Mayo brand.
Further Troubles
Ambitious, expensive projects are not unusual in the world of cultivated meat. Israeli startup Believer Meats is working on a large plant in North Carolina, while Upside Foods has selected Glenview, Illinois, as the site of a 187,000-square-foot facility. And while the size of facilities has gone up, the injection of new capital into the space has slowed. Lab-grown-meat startups raised 34 percent less in 2022 than in 2021 as venture capital spending across sectors slowed.
Eat Just had one advantage over its cultivated-meat competitors: It was already selling its vegan egg product in stores across the US and Canada. According to Bloomberg, Eat Just accounted for 99 percent of sales of all-liquid plant-based eggs—a small but potentially lucrative slice of the egg market. The startup also had success with its folded plant-based eggs.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
Former employees allege that as the company struggled to pay vendors, it directed resources toward its egg business—the only part of the company that was generating sizable revenue. But, sources claim, executives couldn’t agree about the best way to better penetrate the market and turn plant-based egg sales into a profit-making business. In 2019 a carton of liquid Just Egg retailed at close to $8, according to Bloomberg. In March 2021 the price of a carton of liquid Just Egg was dropped to $3.99, a price just below the average retail price of conventional chicken eggs.
The decision to reduce the price of Just Egg was controversial within the company, according to several former employees. Executives believed the company couldn’t afford to sell the product at a loss, while others argued that they needed the low price point in order to entice more first-time customers to try the product. One former senior employee argues that the claims of price parity with conventional eggs were “absolutely misleading.” The price of the liquid egg was increased to $4.99 in spring 2023, but Tetrick says that each carton is still sold at a loss at retail. In recent months, consumers have frequently pointed out that it is becoming much harder to find Just Egg on the shelves.
“If what was happening on the cultivated side took down the plant-based egg side, that would be a huge shame,” says Molino.
Former Eat Just employees also raised questions about what they perceived as unnecessary levels of spending. One senior employee mentioned a 2022 advertising campaign featuring Jake Gyllenhaal and Serena Williams—both investors in the brand. The contracts were for several million dollars, the employee claimed. In a written response to WIRED, Tetrick said that Eat Just did not share vendor contract terms publicly.
Another former employee questioned the decision to serve cultivated meat at the United Nations COP27 climate conference in Egypt as an extremely expensive marketing tactic. “There was just an insane amount of money spent on marketing,” they said. “It was really just an incredibly unsustainable model of trying to chase publicity and trying to chase buzz at a very expensive cost.”
Tetrick says that his company’s “single most important objective” is now to figure out how to generate revenue at high enough margins to cover costs, first for eggs and then for meat. “Our goal is to do that before the end of 2024,” he says. “Any decision that increases the probability of achieving that objective, so long as it’s moral and ethical, we will make that decision.”
Eat Just will be doing so with a depleted workforce. The company confirmed two rounds of layoffs this year—in February and September. Around 80 employees were made redundant over the two rounds, Bloomberg reports. Several senior members of staff have also left the company in recent months. Tetrick says of his remaining team: “It’s a really solid team that’s putting their head down in a really, really challenging, cash-constrained environment” and working to cover business costs by generating revenue, which Tetrick describes as a “non-burn” approach.
Most PopularGearThe Top New Features Coming to Apple’s iOS 18 and iPadOS 18By Julian ChokkattuCultureConfessions of a Hinge Power UserBy Jason ParhamGearHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Polestar?By Carlton ReidSecurityWhat You Need to Know About Grok AI and Your PrivacyBy Kate O'Flaherty
Eat Just “ran into financial pressures, but so did most of the bigger players in the plant-based space that made decisions based on growth projections for the industry that failed to materialize,” wrote board member Larry Kopald in an emailed statement to WIRED. “Good news for us is that we’ve had an infusion of capital, with more likely on the way,” he added, referring to a reported $16 million capital injection.
Depending on how the ABEC lawsuit plays out, that $16 million will not stretch far. “That’s a drop in the bucket for a company that has tens of millions of outstanding bills to pay,” says Molino. Still, one former employee says it is far too early to count Eat Just out. “Josh never gives up, and I’m sure he’s doing everything he can to bring that round in,” they say. Multiple sources expressed their respect for Tetrick’s ability to raise money and to communicate his ideas in the media.
Other former employees question whether Tetrick is still the right person to lead the company. One calls his leadership “impulsive and dogmatic.” Another gives him a “failing grade” when it comes to management. A third source says that Tetrick has a “very non-collaborative working style” that keeps people uncomfortable. “I think he really does believe in the mission,” says a fourth source, adding that he’s “too big to fail in his own mind.”
In response to questions from WIRED, Tetrick wrote “We proactively encourage folks to speak up, even more so when they disagree,” and included a screenshot of an email he sent to Eat Just employees on October 9, 2023. In the email he implored staffers to be clear with each other about tradeoffs in the business. “Speaking for myself, if it’s not brought up directly, my assumption is everything is moving forward without issue,” he wrote in the email to employees.
In response to the criticisms raised by WIRED’s reporting, Tetrick underlined his commitment to a change of direction at Eat Just. “It’s critical to operate the business as if survival always depends on sales covering operating burn on a monthly basis, which I did not do,” he wrote in an emailed statement. “Capital was allocated too quickly in an effort to accelerate our work.”
“Moving forward requires consistent, daily execution of our zero burn plan—as well as a longer-term vision to build a food system that is less harmful to animals and our planet,” he wrote in the emailed statement. “It’s up to me to ensure this gets done.”
