Uber project manager Grace O’Brien worked in the company’s San Francisco office until the Covid-19 pandemic forced remote work. First she moved back to Los Angeles. Then she and her boyfriend, who also has a job that transitioned to remote work, started Airbnb cabin hopping to places where they could hike.
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When O’Brien, 23, and Ryan Schools were in Bend, Oregon, this fall, there were wildfires that also put hiking off the table.
“I’m a young 20-something in a pandemic: the things that filled my free time, like socializing with friends, have completely disappeared,” says O’Brien. “I wanted to fill my extra time with a meaningful project.”
O’Brien took the opportunity to address an issue that has long concerned her: the lack of high-quality vegan eggs.
With her newfound time, $3,000 of her own money, and the internet, O’Brien set out to create a new kind of vegan egg replacer in her kitchen. With no prior experience in food science, O’Brien now has a viable product, Peggs, and is attempting to raise funds through her Kickstarter campaign to turn her passion project into a business.
A problem that needs to be solved: a better vegan egg
“I always wanted to live a completely vegan life, But “I don’t want to give up eggs,” says O’Brien.
She didn’t like the available vegan egg options: They had unnatural, confusing ingredient lists, or could be used for baking but not scrambled eggs, or were mostly relegated to specialty stores, O’Brien says.
“I wanted to make sure there were options so people would lean more towards a plant-based lifestyle and not have as many “buts.”
O’Brien also felt there was a big opportunity and market for vegan eggs. “You go into a grocery store now and half the milk aisle is made up of some other plant-based milk — from hemp to almond milk. And when you go to the egg aisle, there’s hardly any innovation.” (From 2017 to 2019, the plant-based egg category grew 228 percent, but was still the smallest of the plant-based food categories, according to the Good Food Institute.)
So O’Brien began researching in September, housebound in her Airbnb in Bend, on weekends and after work. She documented the properties of “normal” eggs, such as their mouthfeel and their multifunctionality, meaning you can eat them for breakfast but also eat them to bake cookies.
Then O’Brien drove to the local Walmart, purchased a bunch of ingredients, opened a spreadsheet to document the results, and began testing the product.
Although she had baked and experimented with recipes from a young age, “I learned everything about egg alternatives through reading, trying, and talking to people with more experience,” she says.
“Chickpeas, not chicks”
Pretty quickly, O’Brien and her first taste tester, Schools, ruled out soy. (Schools, who works for the agricultural technology company Plenty, has formal experience with taste testing.) Many existing egg alternatives are soy-based, but O’Brien and Schools didn’t like the taste.
They chose a base made from chickpeas – hence the company slogan, “Chickpeas, not chicks.” – and kala namak (also known as black salt), turmeric, onion powder and nutritional yeast for flavor.
“Kala Namak is a special salt with a strong sulfur flavor, which is crucial in giving the product an eggy smell and taste,” says O’Brien.
O’Brien was happy with her progress, but knew there was still something wrong with the texture and mouthfeel. She needed help from someone with technical experience.
That’s how she found Hugo Lisboa, a chemical engineer with a doctorate. in polysaccharides and experience in materials science and food processing on an online platform called Kolabtree for hiring freelance scientists and experts. For a small fee, Lisboa offered to help make suggestions. He advised her on some gums and specialty ingredients, all of which O’Brien was able to find and purchase online.
“Grace developed a product that tasted great and wanted the texture to be as close to a regular egg as possible using vegan ingredients,” says Lisboa. “I just gave her notes on how some macromolecules (which are large molecules like starch or protein) would behave during cooking and after cooking. I also provided her with a method to test and further develop her product.”
Some of the recommendations sent O’Brien on a deep dive on the Internet.
“I have a whole cupboard of very strange specialty ingredients that I’ve been testing because this is the cheapest, easiest way to do this in a pandemic,” says O’Brien. “I especially order things from Amazon. The good thing about the internet is that you can get almost anything you need within two weeks.”
After further tweaking, O’Brien cold-mailed her concoction—a powdered egg mixture mixed with water—to family, friends, and vegan influencers via Instagram.
“We sent them the product just in the hope of getting feedback, but many (of the influencers) posted on their own initiative,” says O’Brien.
They were a hit: Turnip Vegan, with 121,000 followers, posted a video of him making an omelette with Peggs and said he loved chickpeas; WeAreVeano, with 15,200 followers, has made vegan egg muffins and described them as “SO close to the real thing,” to name just two.
Launching on Kickstarter for Veganuary – and beyond
Soon, O’Brien felt she was ready to test Peggs on the market. She had a friend make a video and launched a Kickstarter campaign in January to coincide with “Veganuary,” a trend in which people start the year with a plant-based diet.
O’Brien’s Kickstarter campaign focuses on Peggs’ sustainability and the fact that it can be used in cooking and baking. Peggs are soy-free and have a powder shelf life, which is also a selling point. However, Peggs currently contain less protein than real eggs, which is something O’Brien is working on. O’Brien plans to sell Peggs by the bag for the price of about a half-dozen eggs.
As of Friday, Peggs has raised just over $20,000 on Kickstarter from nearly 300 donors. (Various donations will provide donors with the equivalent of a dozen eggs, plus merchandise or a virtual cooking class, depending on the dollar amount.)
She has six days left to reach her goal of $35,715, which will go toward manufacturing in a professional food packaging facility, official vegan and allergen-free certifications, recipe perfection and marketing — O’Brien isn’t sure she’ll achieve her goal. Because she has created an “all or nothing” campaign, she will not receive any part of the money pledged if she does not reach the funding goal.
But that doesn’t faze O’Brien.
“I think one of my mistakes is that Kickstarter is not the place where you typically discover new food. So I think part of it is a learning curve for me as an entrepreneur, figuring out where my customers are,” she says.
Still, “Some investors have reached out to me to follow up on them; or I can just slowly expand the company with my own money,” she says.
Peggs is not O’Brien’s first project.
When she was 14, O’Brien said, she founded the nonprofit NGO Ears for Years, raising money to donate solar-powered hearing aids to “a few hundred” deaf children in developing countries. Although she says she still cares for the children who got hearing aids, she discontinued Ears for Years when she came to Stanford.
The constant need to raise funds to sustain a nonprofit operation sparked O’Brien’s interest in starting a profitable business.
And whether O’Brien’s Kickstarter reaches its goal or not, she’ll keep trying to deliver Peggs. She wants everyone who backed Kickstarter to have it.
“I don’t want to give it up,” O’Brien says.
“I think it’s all about iteration. You find different ways of what works and what doesn’t,” she says. “Every entrepreneur comes across things that don’t work as expected or you missed something. But at the end of the day, it’s all about you moving on.”
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