Besides being one of the most fertile ground for puns, eggs are quite a magical thing. Boil them, fry them, scramble them, heck you can even put them in an Instant Pot along with these other 59 ways of cooking them. While everything is fine and dandy as you dig into your tomato and eggs, it turns out we are somehow we are in the middle of an egg crisis. Due to intense global demands and especially Asia, our egg supply is steadily running out.
I don’t need to tell you that our planet is dying and just as David Attenborough so proclaims in David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet a plant-based diet is the only way to go. Enter OnlyEg from Float Food’s, Asia’s first commercial plant-based whole egg substitute that offers an egg yolk and egg white replacement. Egg substitutes are certainly not a revelation in the plant substitute world. Just a while back, we had JUST Egg which is supposed to mimic the texture and taste of scrambled eggs.
OnlyEg is supposed to do that and more. This ‘egg’ comprises of legumes-based substitutes for both the egg yolk and egg white. They will behave as two distinct components which can be prepared and assembled in minutes into multiple styles of egg including sunny-side-up, over-easy or soft boiled. You would have to agree that the possibilities are eggstraordinary.
What makes OnlyEg even more amazing is that this is the first of its kind to achieve this level of likeness to a real chicken egg. Just take a look at the picture above and try to spot the OnlyEg, that’s right, you can’t.
The founder and CEO Vinita Choolani states that the impetus for the breakthrough was founded on a key vision to create a plant-based food ecosystem within Singapore that caters to the Asian diet.
As she continues, “Eggs play a major role in Asian cuisine. Some of our local favourite ways of enjoying them are on its own, as soft-boiled eggs with toasts for breakfast, or a sunny-side-up served with rice dishes such as nasi lemak or fried rice. Ultimately our goal is to apply food science and innovation to build plant-based products such as OnlyEg that enable cultural relevance and contribute to a sustainable food ecosystem that can be a part of Singapore’s future food plans”.
An idea that was forged during the throes of the pandemic, this was where Choolani experienced first-hand the detrimental effects Covid-19 had on Singapore’s food supply chain. You’ll remember the eggs flying off supermarket shelves during the mad scramble amidst food safety concerns around the world. With rising anxieties about animal-disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for a viable stand-alone plant-based alternative to the table egg has never been more compelling than now
With any plant-based products, the question always boils down to nutrition. OnlyEg is able to offer versatility, functionality and nutritional value that matches that of a whole chicken egg. All while mitigating the potential for animal-to-human disease transmission, hormones or antibiotics residue and supply chain disruption.
At the same time, reducing our carbon footprint and land use while adding to food diversity. It seems there is nothing that OnlyEg can’t do. I know, can we please have OnlyEg on the shelves right now?
Well, Float Foods is currently raising capital through a Series A round as it gears commercial readiness by 2022. With burgeoning technology and innovation, the future of plant-based food and by extension things for our planet are looking up indeed.
Date & Time: OnlyEg is slated to be ready for consumers by 2022
Prices: TBC
