What’s odd is that he sounds like he’s talking about software. “The way we create our products - think of it as the way Google pushes out its operating system,” Tetrick told me from Hampton Creek’s headquarters, a modish, open, loft-like workspace tucked away in San Francisco’s SoMa district.

It looks less like a food lab than one of the many startups that populate the area. “We continue to optimize, to push out updates to the items inside,” he said. That’s left to his team of scientists, who have scoured through more than 1,500 types of plants to find the ones most suitable for the recreation of things we eat everyday the egg-substitute that goes into a cookie, an omelet, or a stack of French toast.