It’s a question plant-based eaters often hear, to the point of it being tiresome. But in our case, we love this question. Because we’re proud of our protein and how we make it.

The key to JUST Egg isn’t a complicated recipe or technology. It all comes down to one special ingredient: our mung bean protein. We figured out how to separate the protein from this tiny green legume while preserving its natural ability to make the most perfect, creamy and fluffy eggs. We like to think we simply unlocked what nature always intended.

We carefully mill our mung beans and prepare our protein at a dedicated facility in Appleton, Minnesota. We suppose you could call it a “plant protein plant,” where our talented team works to ensure that our delicious eggs get the protein they need to scramble perfectly in your skillet every time.

Jared Schwebach remembers when the prison in town closed.

It was tough for Appleton, the town in southwestern Minnesota near the South Dakota border where the Prairie Correctional Facility was the city’s largest employer.

Opportunities “dried up” overnight, Schwebach said. But now, in the bones of an old whey processing facility, Eat Just is the second largest employer in Appleton, after the local hospital.

“We’ve been able to really help the job market here,” Schwebach, Eat Just’s Food Safety & Quality Manager at the Appleton, Minn., facility, said.

This small community now has a big job: to produce the world’s most functional plant protein and leading plant-based egg.

Schwebach has worked at the facility for nearly a decade now, but he said most people in town didn’t recognize the name of his previous employer. Now, he said, that’s not the case.

“I would tell people I worked at Del Dee Foods, and they wouldn’t really know what I was talking about,” he said. “Eat Just has done an excellent job getting their name out in this community.”

Schwebach officially started his new role at Eat Just on Jan. 1, 2020. Three months later, the coronavirus pandemic began wreaking havoc. Supply chains began to crash as shoppers everywhere began to hoard everything from toilet paper to kidney beans. Along with the rest of the employees in Appleton, it was Schwebach’s job to ensure JUST Egg rolled out of the facility uninterrupted and into shopping carts everywhere.

“We have a huge responsibility each day,” Schwebach said. “It’s us who makes sure the supply chain is up and running. It’s us who make sure people across the world have JUST Egg whenever they need it.”

In the last few years, we’ve seen outbreaks of bird flu at chicken farms lead to widespread egg shortages and wildly fluctuating egg prices. But with plant-based JUST Egg, the team at the Appleton facility can ensure that delicious eggs are always available to those who want them.

Indeed, a small town in the prairies of Minnesota just a stone’s throw away from South Dakota, might not seem like the obvious candidate to become a leader in producing sustainable food for the world. But that’s exactly what Appleton – and the people there – are doing.

Everything this small town is doing is big – making the world’s most functional plant protein and leading plant-based egg.