Eat Just Layoffs After $16 Million Influx

PR is prioritized as VP keeps sending me annoying emails

(Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash)

On Friday, Bloomberg’s Deena Shanker reported that the company Eat Just (maker of Just Egg and biotech chicken) laid off about 40 employees. This move is a head-scratcher given that just weeks ago, Eat Just received a cash influx of $16 million.

As I wrote about previously, that money came from Satish Karandikar, one of the vegan / animal rights movement’s largest donors.

The company explained the job cuts were necessary “to reduce costs for the purpose of Just Egg sales covering the company’s operating expenses”. Translation: We don’t prioritize our people.

It seems the one department that Eat Just protects at all cost is PR. Over the weekend I received an email from Andrew Noyes, whose fancy title is “VP, Head of Global Communications & Public Affairs” at Eat Just.

Last week, an ex-employee shared on LinkedIn that the company had “a round of layoffs” so I asked if they gave a reason, noting that it seemed odd given the recent influx of $16 million.

For this reasonable question, I was subjected to the following email from Noyes with the subject line, “Your behavior”. (While I hesitate to share private emails, given that Noyes is head of PR for Eat Just, doing so here seems warranted.)

Michele, 

I've always conducted myself with professionalism when interacting with you, but it is callous and classless to harass Eat Just employees on LinkedIn whose roles have been impacted. Please exhibit some level of decorum. 

Andrew

The tone policing here is wildly misplaced. “Callous and classless to harass”? By simply asking a question about the layoffs?

Notably, the ex-employee has so far chosen not to delete my question (several days later), which is certainly his prerogative to do if he felt I was harassing him. So why is Eat Just’s head of PR lurking on a laid-off employee’s LinkedIn post and then contacting a commenter?

And why isn’t contacting me in this manner a form of harassment? Especially considering this is not the first time I have received annoying emails from Noyes, despite his claims of “professionalism”. The last time was when I was quoted in this damning Guardian story from 2021 when I said this about Eat Just and its investors:

“It’s all smoke and mirrors … This company keeps reinventing itself, so it’s a perpetual startup,” she says, adding that investor interest in lab-grown meats seems overblown. “It’s a bunch of men with a lot of money in tech, who got bored with apps and are now excited to put their money towards this so-called solution to factory farming.”

Noyes was not pleased. He emailed me the same day the story came out to say so. (Does he have nothing better to do?) Part of his message to me was:

As I've expressed before, I strongly believe your views of our company and of Josh have been shaped by years old, misleading, and ill-informed reporting. You have a megaphone and I wish you'd use it to lift people up instead of tear them down. 

More tone policing. I am only allowed to use my “megaphone” to “lift people up instead of tear them down”. In other words, only speak of happy things and ignore reality. This is also a classic shoot the messenger tactic. He offered no evidence that the reporting was “misleading” or “ill-informed”, and the fact that the reported scandals are a few years old does not make them irrelevant.

Noyes expressed his disappointment with me yet a third time, when I was quoted in a book about lab-grown meat by reporter Chase Purdy in 2020. I said something similar to what I told the Guardian a year later.

It seems odd to me that Eat Just’s global head of PR thinks his time is wisely spent emailing me his random thoughts about my quotes (which reporters are asking me for) as well as my social media activity. Does he think it will get me to stop telling the truth? It won’t. In fact, *his* “behavior” just made things worse.

And is this where the $16 million is going? To shore up PR for a failing company?