Californian food tech pioneer Eat Just’s vegan chicken, called Just Meat, has outperformed conventional versions, and is now available in nearly 4,000 stores across the US.
Eat Just, the maker of the vegan Just Egg and the Good Meat cultivated chicken, has expanded its portfolio with a move into plant-based meat.
This past August, the Californian company soft-launched Just Meat, a vegan chicken made from wheat and soy protein, which it says has beaten conventional chicken in taste tests.
The new products have now landed in over 3,050 Walmart stores across all 50 states and Puerto Rico, as well as being available at Sprouts, H-E-B, Giant, Hannaford, Albertsons United, Tops, and more supermarkets, with a total footprint close to 4,000.
“We are launching broadly into foodservice in December,” Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just, tells Green Queen.
Taste-testers prefer Just Meat over conventional chicken
Just Meat has been six years in the making. “The R&D was [about] building the right tools to form real fibres, to get the bite right, to layer the way animal muscle does,” explains Tetrick.
“We think plant-based chicken should simply taste better than the animal alternative, and if it does that, it wins. That was the gap we saw in the market.”
Just Meat is available in four flavours: original, Buffalo, sesame-ginger, and chilli-lime. It combines wheat protein and soy protein concentrate with sunflower and coconut oils, cornstarch, flavourings and seasonings, modified food starch, soy lecithin, and xanthan gum.
The meat alternative contains 24g of protein per 100g, over 1g of fibre, and zero cholesterol. At Walmart, it’s available in half-pound bags for $5.50 – in comparison, Tyson Foods’s grilled chicken strips are priced at $3.08 for the same size, while Foster Farms’s version costs $3.99.
“Just Meat performs like pulled chicken in every recipe where people already use chicken today,” says Tetrick. “In an independent 24-person preference test conducted by Nichols Research, Just Meat outperformed a leading frozen chicken strip.
Expanding on this, he added: “The majority of participants preferred Just Meat on flavour, texture, and overall liking, making it the first time a plant-based chicken beat the animal version in a direct consumer preference test.”
Just Egg to launch in Europe in January, as Good Meat looks to lower costs
Just Meat’s expansion comes amid a surge in purchases of Just Egg, which has capitalised on the US egg crisis. In January alone, the mung bean egg’s sales grew five times faster than in the past year, while 56% of shoppers returned to buy more (a three-point increase from 2024).
And earlier this month, Eat Just revealed that this growth has only accelerated since. “Just Egg has the highest velocity of all plant-based proteins in the US,” says Tetrick, citing SPINS data from the previous four weeks. “That gives us confidence that when you give people something that tastes good, that is highly differentiated, it will win with consumers.”
Moreover, the vegan egg has made its way into Europe this year, after Eat Just partnered with Vegan Food Group, owner of brands like Meatless Farm and VFC, on an exclusive manufacturing and distribution deal.
Just Egg’s rollout was meant to begin in the UK first (followed by Germany), but the product hasn’t made it onto shelves yet – instead, it has been showcased at events all across the UK in recent months. But Tetrick confirms that Just Egg will begin its rollout in Europe in early January.
Not only did Eat Just pioneer vegan eggs; it was the first company to begin selling cultivated meat anywhere in the world, after securing regulatory approval in Singapore in 2020 (followed by a US green light in 2023).
That brand of cultivated chicken, Good Meat, was available at several foodservice establishments in the city-state before a packaged version with a revamped recipe was rolled out into retail last year. Tetrick confirms that Huber’s Butchery is still selling the Good Meat chicken, adding that the focus here is on “long-term R&D to meaningfully bring the cost down at much larger scales”.
Just Meat is not the only new product format unveiled by the company this year. In May, it launched Just One, a range of protein powders made from the same mung bean base that powers Just Egg, which can also double as an egg substitute in baking.
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