Rumors are swirling about ‘lab-grown’ eggs being sold in the US. Here’s what to know

A claim (archived) circulated online in August 2026 that consumers in the U.S. could buy Food and Drug Administration-cleared “lab-grown” eggs and that brands were already secretly including the ingredient in some products.

For example, one Threads user wrote: 

Lab-grown egg proteins have been cleared for sale in the U.S. by the FDA, as companies pour hundreds of millions of dollars into scaling the technology and bringing these “animal-free” proteins into the food supply.

The Threads post and other posts on X (archived) and Instagram (archived) specifically focused on OvoPro, an egg protein The EVERY Company produces. The posts on X and Instagram also claimed that brands did not have to list OvoPro as an ingredient in their products. Snopes readers contacted us about the claims, asking if it was true the FDA “approved” the animal-free egg protein.

The claim was a mixture of true, false and undetermined elements.

Though it was true that egg proteins grown using yeast rather than chickens were available to U.S. consumers in August 2026, products like OvoPro were not new to the market. The EVERY Company, which produces OvoPro, also did not appear to be the only company selling animal-free egg protein to consumers in the U.S.

We found no evidence that retailers could decide not to list the animal-free egg protein as an ingredient in products that contained it, as some claimed. Federal legislation governs what must appear on ingredients labels.

It was unclear whether OvoPro was FDA “cleared” or “approved” — the latter of which is generally a status reserved for drugs, not food. The FDA has many different statuses for food and medical products, and it was unclear which, if any, OvoPro held. While online claims generally said the FDA “cleared” the product, a Snopes reader asked us if it “approved” it.

Additionally, it was unclear whether OvoPro and other yeast-grown egg proteins could correctly be called “lab-grown,” a classification that usually describes products grown from a small sample of the source, as seen with fish, poultry and meat. 

Snopes contacted The EVERY Company to ask for documentation of OvoPro’s status with the FDA and for more information about the product and await a reply.

What is egg protein grown by yeast?

According to its website, The EVERY Company uses a patented method to produce ovalbumin, the dominant protein in egg whites, through precision fermentation. 

The company described this process as “programming” yeast to produce egg protein through fermentation, a process familiar from beer brewing.

It said the process eventually results in “a pure, powdered protein that is tasteless, colorless, sugar-free, and can be used to replace the functionality of eggs and egg whites in a range of applications.”

The EVERY Company received its patent for its method of precision fermentation in September 2024. The company, previously known as Clara Foods, has been working to develop animal-free egg protein since at least 2021.

It unveiled EVERY ClearEgg, a predecessor to OvoPro, in October 2021. The EVERY Company received a “no questions” letter in September 2021 in response to its GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) determination for ClearEgg.

The FDA’s GRAS Notification program allows companies to submit documentation that they believe their product is “safe under the conditions of its intended use.” In the case of ClearEgg, the FDA said in a letter on Sept. 9, 2021, that it had “no questions,” meaning The EVERY Company could market ClearEgg as “Generally Recognized as Safe.”

The EVERY Company got another “no questions” letter in response to a GRAS determination for an egg white protein produced by Komagataella phaffii, a species of yeast, in October 2023. We asked The EVERY Company whether this letter was for OvoPro and await a reply.

Company sold animal-free eggs before 2026

OvoPro and related products have been available to consumers since at least 2021, meaning they were not new to the U.S. market in August 2026, as some claims appeared to suggest. For example, in November 2021, The Spoon, an outlet that reports on the food tech industry, reported that smoothies containing ClearEgg had hit the market.

The next year, The EVERY Company reportedly sold its EggWhite product in macarons and Every Protein (formerly ClearEgg) in juice. By January 2024, the New York Times wrote that The EVERY Company had showcased EveryEgg, a “yellow vegan plant-based liquid” that the paper said, “behaves astonishingly like a whole beaten egg.”

It did not appear that The EVERY Company sold EveryEgg directly to consumers at that point, but rather distributed the product through restaurants.

The new development in 2026 appeared to be that The EVERY Company was selling OvoPro, a successor to EveryEgg, directly to consumers. The company announced on March 11, 2026, that the general public could buy OvoPro through Healthier Comforts, a food retailer, and Amazon.

The company said in June that same year that OvoPro was also available in Walmart and Target.

Brands not hiding use of animal-free egg protein

According to some claims, brands could allegedly decide for themselves whether to declare OvoPro as an ingredient in their products. According to one claim the product was “in things on the shelf, and they won’t say which.”

The EVERY Company’s website page on OvoPro said, in reply to an frequently asked question about how the protein appears on ingredient declarations, that “Final labeling decisions are made by our customers, but we recommend labeling OvoPro™ as ‘animal-free egg white protein’ or ‘egg white protein from yeast.'”

That did not appear to mean that brands that used OvoPro in their products could avoid labeling them entirely. Federal law dictates that products must generally include an ingredients list, with ingredients listed in descending order according to how much of the product’s weight they make up.

Healthier Comforts listed OvoPro as an “animal-free egg white protein,” one of The EVERY Company’s suggested phrasings, on its branded version of the product.

In sum …

Though the claims circulated in August 2026, OvoPro had actually been available to consumers since March of that year. It was unclear what the product’s status was with the FDA, though its manufacturer, The EVERY Company, had previously received three “no questions” responses to GRAS declarations for its products.

Those letters were not the same thing as FDA approval, which is a process whereby the administration approves drugs for consumer use. Rather, they showed that the company had documented to the FDA’s satisfaction that the product in question was “safe under the conditions of its intended use.”

We found no evidence that brands that used OvoPro were leaving it off product ingredients lists. This appeared to be a misinterpretation by some social media users of a statement by The EVERY Company that brands had leeway in how they described the product.

OvoPro is also not the only animal-free egg white protein product available to U.S. consumers.

For further reading, Snopes previously investigated whether Quaker instant strawberries and cream oatmeal contained “beaver butt secretions” or whether McDonald’s apple pies contained an ingredient derived from human hair.

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