Facebook投资人盯上新型蛋黄酱市场

    汉普顿河食品公司推出的Just Mayo蛋黄酱使用豌豆蛋白，而不是蛋黄。

    身为一位投资人，阿里•帕托维横跨两个世界。一方面，对技术的激情引导他成为Dropbox和Facebook等公司的早期支持者。另一方面，对粮食和农业的强烈兴趣使他成了迈克尔•波伦粉丝群的盟友。

    帕托维现在发现，像他一样，鸡蛋的植物替代品生产商汉普顿河食品公司(Hampton Creek Foods)也同时栖息在这两个空间。帕托维和他的孪生兄弟哈迪一起向这家公司本周宣布的第二轮融资计划(Series B)投资了100万美元。

    此轮融资共募得2,300万美元，最大一笔投资来自亚洲首富李嘉诚旗下的香港风投基金维港投资公司(Horizons Ventures)。其他投资者包括雅虎公司(Yahoo)联合创始人、前CEO杨致远和谷歌公司(Google)的杰西卡•鲍威尔。第二轮融资推动汉普顿河食品公司的总投资额达到了3,000万美元。

    一些动物蛋白替代品生产商正在实验室中潜心研究依托于动物细胞的“种肉”技术（又名“陪替氏肉”，“培养肉”，“试管肉”），汉普顿河食品公司则采用了另一种方式。这家公司不是在尝试复制某种来自动物的东西，而是主要致力于开发鸡蛋化学用途的替代品。

    “我认为，这家公司的透明度大大减轻了消费者接受其产品的心理压力，”帕托维说。“它并不是在创造某种人工动物，而仅仅是用一种更有利于环境，更具经济性的方式改变了配方。”

    汉普顿河食品公司创始人兼首席执行官乔希•蒂特里克说，全球每年的鸡蛋产量逾1万亿，在美国，三分之一的鸡蛋最终用于生产饼干、松饼和蛋黄酱。蒂特里克决定把113亿美元的全球蛋黄酱市场作为他的主要目标。Just Mayo是这家公司推出的第一款产品，它放弃了蛋黄，转而使用一种豌豆（豌豆的品种多达上千个）的蛋白质作为乳化剂。

    “我们开发食物所采用的系统方式更接近生物技术或软件公司，”蒂特里克去年对《财富》杂志(Fortune )说。“就本质而言，我们是一家致力于食品开发的技术公司。”

    Hampton Creek's Just Mayo mayonnaise uses protein from yellow peas in place of egg yolk.

    As an investor, Ali Partovi straddles two worlds. On one side is the passion for technology that led to him to be an early backer of companies such as Dropbox and Facebook (FB). And on the other is an intense interest in food and agriculture which aligns him with the Michael Pollan crowd.

    Now in Hampton Creek Foods, a startup that makes plant-based egg alternatives, Partovi has found a company that, like him, inhabits both spaces. Partovi and his twin brother, Hadi, together invested $1 million in Hampton Creek's Series B financing that was announced this week.

    The round closed at $23 million and was led by Hong Kong-based venture capital firm Horizons Ventures, which is run by Li Ka-shing, reportedly Asia's wealthiest person. Other investors in the round included Yahoo (YHOO) co-founder and former CEO Jerry Yang and Jessica Powell of Google (GOOG). The Series B financing brings Hampton Creek's total funding to $30 million.

    Hampton Creek takes a different approach to animal protein alternatives than other companies in the space, some of which are working on growing meat in a lab from animal cells (a.k.a. "petri meat," "cultured meat," "in vitro meat"). Rather than trying to duplicate something that comes from an animal, Hampton Creek is focused primarily on creating substitutes for the chemical uses of eggs.

    "The transparency of it is what I think makes it much less viscerally difficult for consumers to embrace," Partovi says. "It's not like there's some kind of artificial animal being created. It's just changing the recipe around in a way that makes it environmentally and economically better."

    More than one trillion eggs are laid every year, and in the U.S. a third of them end up in things like cookies, muffins, and mayonnaise, says Hampton Creek founder and CEO Josh Tetrick. Tetrick decided to make the $11.3 billion global mayo market his primary target. The company's first product, Just Mayo, uses the protein of one of the thousands of varieties of yellow peas as an emulsifier rather than egg yolk.

    "We take a systems approach to food more akin to biotech or a software startup," Tetrick toldFortune last year. "At our heart we're a technology company pioneering in food."