Inspired by his six-year-old son, Goose Wohlt has been vegan for over a year. The 42-year-old lives in Indiana, USA, and is the president and CEO of a software firm, Echo Systems, Inc. World over, however, he is known as the aquafaba man.

Goose Wohlt

In 2014, after Joël Roessel, a French tenor singer, discovered that the water in a can of beans could foam up like egg whites when whipped, he made meringues using the canning liquid as a foaming agent along with corn starch and vegetable gum. “Shortly after that, I heard about a video where people were using liquid from cans of chickpeas as foam for a mousse dessert, and I wondered if I could use it in my meringue experiments,” says Wohlt in an email interview. Wohlt then set out on a quest to make a vegan egg substitute that could be used to make meringues or fry in a pan.