Josh Tetrick
Founder & CEO, Hampton Creek
Cheap and convenient
When I flip the light switch on in the morning, the light is made possible by a coal-fired plant 21.5 miles from my fingertips. And I flip it morning after morning, not because I’m uncaring, but because it’s cheap and convenient.
When my Dad walks the grocery aisles this Tuesday to buy mayo or chocolate-chip cookies, the chicken eggs or milk or that make them possible often come from bizarrely cruel places. He fills his cart in this way not because he doesn’t care, but because cheap and convenient will always fill his cart.
And when the leaders of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers do things that are seemingly out of step with your values, it’s not because they don’t care, it’s because doing the right thing — for the planet and for our bodies — is hard.
A different approach
Here’s the most important lesson I’ve learned: Give people an easy, delicious path to do the right thing, and they will. Make the path expensive and disgusting , and they won’t. That lesson applies whether you’re a 52 year old mother of three in Springfield, Missouri or the Vice President of Purchasing for the largest food manufacturer in the world.
But making it outrageously easy for people to eat well requires a different approach. The only way the good food choice wins is if the good choice is also the best tasting choice and the affordable choice. That philosophy is what’s driving a new food revolution, and is the reason why Michelin star chefs and world-class data scientists and biochemists call Hampton Creek home.
Better food, better future
11 Fortune 500 food companies have signed agreements with us to provide better food to millions of people in cities and towns across the globe. The thousands of human beings that make up these companies that pump out hundreds of millions of products and serve billions of meals to our children have names. They have families. They are you. And much like you, they are just trying to figure things out.
Five years ago, when we started, I thought people were the problem. And I was wrong. It turns out that when you create a path that makes it easy (and even profitable) for good people to do good things — they will do it.
That’s how we built one of the fastest growing food companies in the world.