Ask U.S. food regulators, and they’ll tell you that mayonnaise has to contain eggs, as it has for the past two centuries. But Josh Tetrick, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur hellbent on disrupting a host of food staples with his plant-based substitutes, gives a far different response: Who cares? “I think it is stupid we can’t call our product mayonnaise,” Tetrick says of his two-year-old Just Mayo eggless spread. “I think it’s ridiculous. We’re definitely not changing the name.”
That defiant stance seems to put Tetrick’s company, Hampton Creek, on a collision course with the Food and Drug Administration. The agency on Aug. 12 issued a warning letter listing a litany of rules broken by its Just Mayo and Just Mayo Sriracha products, including the use of “Mayo” in the name and the image of an egg on the label that may imply it meets the agency’s standard definition for mayonnaise—eggs and all. “This is one of the most blatant violations of the standard-of-identity rules that I’ve seen in a long time,” says Elizabeth Campbell, a former acting head of the FDA’s office of food labeling, who now works at EAS Consulting Group.
