Who’s who in 2014: Six people who changed the way we eat

Josh Tetrick

Josh Tetrick founded Hampton Creek Foods in 2011 to concoct plant substitutes for egg products. Three years later, he became a magnet for national news stories. In February, the San Francisco company announced a $23 million round of investment from some of the world’s most powerful figures in tech; an additional $90 million came in earlier this month.

With Hampton Creek’s first commercial product, Just Mayo, now on the shelves of 20,000 stores, the company introduced a second product, Just Cookies, in August. In November, Unilever, which owns Hellman’s and Best Foods, sued Hampton Creek for false advertising — because Just Mayo does not include eggs — and then dropped the suit a month later. Scaring a multinational corporation with just one product? Now, that’s impressive.

Connor Casey

It’s hard to have a conversation with a local beer geek without hearing praise for Cellarmaker Brewing, which 28-year-old Connor Casey opened in SoMa in October 2013. While Casey and brewmaster Tim Sciascia had intended to specialize in barrel-aged beers, they’ve become titans of the new pale ale.

They’ve secured some of the most hip of hops (sorry, couldn’t resist) and are producing dozens of IPAs and other hop-forward beers that come off as aromatic, even tropical, while remaining lean and low in bitterness. These are beers that age poorly, so Casey sells them mostly on tap and distributes them to a handful of bars, with the caveat that the keg must be tapped within seven days. This is never a problem, swears Hog’s Apothecary beer buyer Sayre Piotrkowski, just one of Casey’s fans.

In 2015, look for Cellarmaker’s barrel-aging plans to come to fruition.

Corey Lee

The chef-owner of Benu has had a busy year. The former French Laundry chef de cuisine has earned national honors as well as four Chronicle stars for his extraordinarily finessed Asian-Western food. This year, he unleashed his Francophilia with Monsieur Benjamin, a bistro in Hayes Valley serving sweetbreads grenobloise and beef tongue dijonnaise.

Better still, the effort did not sap any of the energy or quality from Benu, which earned a third Michelin star in 2014. Amid all that excitement, Lee is also working on a Benu cookbook, which Phaidon will publish next spring.

Anya Fernald

Anya Fernald plays a long game. For the past three years, the former Slow Food Nation organizer has been at work building Belcampo - a company with a Uruguay ecotourismresort, a rum project in Belize and, more locally, Belcampo Meat Co. The latter controls every stage of meat production: raising the animals in Northern California, processing them in a slaughterhouse that Belcampo built, and sell meat at a network of shop-restaurants. Belcampo’s first location opened in Larkspur in late 2012, but 2014 was the year the project came to fruition, opening sites in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles; a sixth butcher store-cafe in Santa Monica is in the works, as is a cookbook. works, as is a cookbook.

All of this has taken place in the middle of a 1,200-year drought that has made ranching a perilous investment. Oh, and the New Yorker profiled her in November.

Jennifer Colliau

Jennifer Colliau proves that you don’t have to call yourself a mixologist to make cocktails as erudite as they are delicious. A longtime Slanted Door bartender, Colliau created a company called Small Hand Foods six years ago to supply her colleagues with better versions of orgeat and pineapple gomme syrup. When the Long Now Foundation (co-founded by Stewart Brand) turned its Fort Mason headquarters into a cafe-bar called the Interval in the summer, Colliau came aboard to design one of the most interesting cocktail programs in the country.

Though she has been quoted saying that she “unextincts” cocktails, that doesn’t mean simply bringing back drinks that have vanished from the roster. Colliau meticulously researches significant moments in cocktail time — the Havana of Hemingway’s era, say, or the way the martini evolved through the decades — and then re-creates them. It’s curation in real time, behind the bar.

Chris Ying

Being the executive editor of Lucky Peach, the San Francisco quarterly food magazine, has paved Chris Ying’s way onto the culinary A list. He’s everywhere: at the Beard Awards, watching his contributors pick up a clutch of awards; at the prestigious MAD Symposium in Copenhagen, giving a presentation.

In addition to seeing the magazine’s circulation head north of 100,000, Ying helped write the Ivan Ramen cookbook, which was published this year, as well as the Mission Chinese Food cookbook, out next year. Lucky Peach plans to launch a website with daily content in January.

In the fall, Ying announced the creation of a nonprofit called Zero Footprint. Working with San Francisco restaurateur Anthony Myint and carbon-emissions expert Peter Freed, Ying will help restaurants reduce or offset their impact on global warming.