When we started our journey, I imagined a day when JUST would form alliances with some of the biggest food companies in the world to expand their existing toolkits to bring new opportunities to retailers, restaurants and consumers from Birmingham, Alabama to Barcelona.
All along, I’ve said that we alone can’t fulfill our mission of helping everyone eat well. We need partners to work with us to achieve our goal of building a just food system. That’s why I’m proud to share the news that JUST has entered into an agreement in principle with the Italian headquartered Eurovo Group, a leading European producer and distributor of packaged, pasteurized and dried eggs, to bring our award-winning plant-based scramble to consumers across Europe.
JUST and Eurovo, which has large-scale operations in Italy, Spain, France, Poland and Romania, plan to produce and distribute the product to Europeans. Through the arrangement, our product will be marketed and sold alongside Eurovo’s conventional egg brands like le Naturelle, Maia, Novissime, Nonna Anita, and others, and will be available for chefs and foodservice professionals through Eurovo Service.
Our product, which cooks and tastes like conventional chicken eggs, is currently being launched in the United States as Just Egg. In addition to the U.S. and Europe, JUST plans to expand the product’s availability across Asia after a successful launch in Hong Kong earlier this year (find out how you can demand it from your favorite retailer or restaurant here).
When Eurovo’s team visited JUST to see our world-class R&D operation and when I traveled to Italy to tour their impressive egg production and egg processing facilities, there was a sense of mutual respect and admiration for innovation and science. Despite our differences in approach, together we can bring food that’s better for consumers and better for the planet, to more people, faster.
Here’s what Eurovo Group President Siro Lionello had to say:
“The story of Eurovo started in Italy in the middle of the last century and a new and exciting chapter is about to begin with JUST. Partnering with JUST will allow Eurovo to include a non-animal product in our portfolio. Balancing modernity and tradition while embracing changing consumer preferences and reducing our environmental footprint is a cornerstone of our business and this relationship ensures that this approach will continue.
Our alliance with JUST fits into an innovation and sustainability strategy that began more than 20 years ago with Eurovo Group’s investments in alternative farming of cage-free, free-range and organic eggs and egg products, as well as an antibiotic-free egg and egg products portfolio, that positioned us as an industry standard-bearer in response to animal welfare practices and demand patterns of our customers.”
Echoing what my friend Morten Ernst, a longtime egg industry leader who works with JUST on major partnerships, recently wrote in a column for Food Dive, novel and conventional approaches to feed the growing population safely and sustainably is of utmost importance and I hope this is the first of many such arrangements. There is a huge opportunity for global egg companies to support forward-thinking innovators and set a new industry standard together.
— Josh Tetrick, co-founder & CEO
July 2018
