A San Francisco biotech quietly placed yeast-brewed egg protein inside a product on every Walmart shelf in America, the same week bird flu outbreaks were making conventional eggs a national supply chain emergency.
In November 2025, The Every Company announced the close of a $55 million Series D funding round and, almost as an aside, confirmed that its precision-fermented ovalbumin had become an ingredient in a product now sold at all Walmart stores nationwide. The company, founded in 2014 as Clara Foods by Arturo Elizondo and David Anchel, had been working toward this moment for more than a decade. Elizondo, a Harvard government graduate who had previously clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and worked at the USDA and Credit Suisse, started the company with a specific thesis: that the egg, one of the most functionally indispensable ingredients in global food manufacturing, had a structural vulnerability that biotechnology could fix. That thesis had just been proven at the world's largest retailer.
The Every Company's flagship ingredient is OvoPro, a powdered ovalbumin produced by genetically engineered yeast. Ovalbumin is the dominant protein in egg white, accounting for roughly 54 percent of its total protein content, and it is the molecule responsible for most of what makes egg white industrially useful: the foaming in a macaron shell, the binding in a pasta dough, the gel structure in a custard. The company holds a foundational U.S. patent, issued in 2024, covering compositions that incorporate recombinant ovalbumin across a wide range of production organisms and food applications. The FDA has issued a GRAS no-objection letter for the protein, meaning the agency reviewed EVERY's safety determination and raised no concerns.
What OvoPro offers food manufacturers is not a philosophical alternative to eggs. It is a functional drop-in, delivered in powder form with an 18-month shelf life, that can replace liquid egg white without requiring refrigerated logistics. For large-scale bakeries running continuous production lines, the operational advantage is significant. Liquid eggs require cold-chain management and carry a shelf life measured in weeks. The powdered format eliminates that constraint while delivering the same foaming, binding, and gelling behavior. Elizondo told investors that some customers are actually saving money relative to current egg prices, while others pay a modest premium they consider worthwhile for supply chain certainty.
The company manufactures the protein in Europe through a contract manufacturing partner and is actively onboarding a second facility in the United States to build supply chain redundancy, a capability that large multinational food companies have made a condition of scaling further. EVERY has also entered into a strategic partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and fellow precision fermentation startup Vivici to explore a four-million-liter industrial fermentation facility in the UAE, targeting a region where some countries import over 70 percent of their eggs.
When the Series D closed, the timing was not coincidental. Outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza, the H5N1 strain that has devastated U.S. poultry flocks since 2022, had by early 2025 resulted in the culling of more than 150 million birds. Retail egg prices hit a record average of $6.23 per dozen in March 2025, with some states reporting prices above $9 per carton. The USDA committed $1 billion to a five-pronged strategy to combat the outbreak, including $500 million for biosecurity measures and $400 million in direct farmer relief, and the U.S. began importing eggs from Turkey, which had not supplied the American market since January 2023.
The shortage exposed a structural fragility in how egg-dependent food manufacturing actually works. A bakery running commodity meringues or pasta at industrial volume cannot simply swap to a plant-based egg replacer. Aquafaba works in a home kitchen; it does not deliver consistent structural performance across the product portfolio of a multinational. What food manufacturers needed was not a vegan alternative that was "almost as good" but something that was genuinely functionally equivalent. Elizondo was explicit about this when speaking to investors: the pitch to food companies is not about ethics or sustainability. It is about supply chain stability and consistent pricing. "These last few avian flu outbreaks have really woken up a lot of companies," he said in November 2025. "And while other egg replacers work in some specific applications, they don't really function the way that egg proteins do."
The mainstream press covered the egg shortage exhaustively. Waffle House surcharges, theft of organic egg shipments from Pennsylvania farms, state-level suspension of cage-free mandates to boost supply, even an attempt by consumers to smuggle eggs across the Mexican border in rising numbers, all received significant coverage. The story about yeast-brewed ovalbumin sitting on Walmart shelves throughout this period received essentially none.
The $55 million Series D brought EVERY's cumulative funding to $294 million, and was led by McWin Capital Partners through its McWin Food Tech Fund. Co-investors included Main Sequence, a deep tech venture fund backed by CSIRO (Australia's national science agency); Bloom8; TO.VC; Minerva Foods, a major Brazilian meat company; Grosvenor Food and AgTech; and SOSV. Martin Davalos at McWin Capital Partners described the milestone plainly: "They're not talking about proof-of-concept pilots here; they're selling metric tons of product at scale to some of the biggest food companies on the planet."
The round closed against a backdrop of contracting investment in the broader alternative protein sector. Funding for the category declined 27 percent in 2024 to $1.1 billion, and the first nine months of 2025 saw only $611 million reach the sector. Fermentation-derived proteins had briefly been a bright spot, attracting a 43 percent increase in capital in 2024, but that momentum had slowed by late 2025. That EVERY closed one of the sector's largest rounds of the year, during this contraction and in the specific moment when conventional egg supply was in crisis, reflects a shift in how institutional capital is evaluating the precision fermentation opportunity. The pitch is no longer about long-run environmental benefits; it is about near-term supply chain risk mitigation for food manufacturers with real exposure to agricultural commodity volatility.
Phil Morle, partner at Main Sequence, said in his statement accompanying the announcement that EVERY had proved what the technology could do: "real products solving real customer problems, at industrial scale, with a clear path to profitability."
EVERY is not alone. In September 2025, Finland's Onego Bio received a GRAS no-objection letter from the FDA for its Bioalbumen, a precision-fermented ovalbumin produced using the filamentous fungus Trichoderma reesei. Like EVERY's product, Bioalbumen carries an amino acid sequence identical to chicken-derived egg protein and can perform the same foaming, gelling, and binding functions. Onego Bio, a spinout of VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, had purchased land in Wisconsin to build a large-scale production facility capable of producing the equivalent protein output of six million hens, and CEO Maija Itkonen described the FDA clearance as confirmation of "our right to commercialize."
Onego's regulatory clearance came nine months after its initial GRAS filing, a relatively fast timeline by FDA standards. The company was also engaged in patent litigation with The Every Company, with court documents revealing that the two firms had at one point explored a merger before intellectual property discussions deteriorated. That dispute, largely invisible to the consumer food press, reflects how commercially meaningful the ovalbumin precision fermentation space has become.
In Germany, Formo, a Berlin-based startup that began as LegenDairy Foods in 2019 under founder Raffael Wohlgensinger, received a 35 million euro quasi-equity venture debt loan from the European Investment Bank in January 2025. Formo's primary focus is precision-fermented casein, the dairy protein responsible for the melting and stretch behavior of hard cheese, but the company is simultaneously developing egg protein alternatives. The EIB loan, backed by the InvestEU program, was described by EIB VP Nicola Beer as supporting "innovative solutions for sustainable consumption" while backing European biotechnology at growth stage.
The Every Company's Walmart placement is not primarily a consumer story. EVERY operates as a B2B ingredient supplier, not a branded consumer goods company. The product on Walmart shelves is a customer's product, with EVERY's OvoPro listed as an ingredient. The specific product has not been publicly disclosed by the company, which shifted its commercial model away from co-branding toward full ingredient supplier status around the time of this funding round. That invisibility is, in a sense, exactly the point. Precision fermentation at industrial scale is most likely to succeed as infrastructure, not as a brand.
What the Walmart placement signals is that the pathway from laboratory production to mainstream retail is navigable for fermentation-derived proteins, not merely aspirational. The Every Company took eleven years to get there, through a rebrand from Clara Foods in 2021, a debut at Daniel Humm's three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park, and a sequence of ingredient partnerships before arriving at the world's largest retailer. The Series D investors are betting that the infrastructure required to scale from metric tons to thousands of metric tons is now financeable, because the demand side of the equation has crystallized.
Egg prices retreated from their early 2025 peak following USDA intervention and improved biosecurity conditions, with wholesale prices falling 64 percent from their peak by late June 2025. But the underlying vulnerability has not gone away. H5N1 remains active, and the biological timeline for repopulating a culled flock, typically five to six months before hens are productive, means that supply recovery from any future outbreak will always be slow. For food manufacturers that processed that lesson in early 2025, a shelf-stable, supply-chain-independent egg protein brewed by yeast is no longer a sustainability experiment. It is procurement diversification.