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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

“Ugly” Produce Subscription Service Misfits Market Raises $16.5M

Today Misfits Market, the New York-based company that sells subscription boxes of irregularly-shaped produce, announced that it had raised a $16.5 million Series A funding round (h/t Techcrunch). Greenoaks Capital led the round.

Founded in 2018, Misfits Market sources produce from farms that can’t be sold to grocery stores for some reason: be it because of imperfect shapes, sizing, or just a surplus. Consumers can choose from two box sizes — the smaller The Mischief (10-12 pounds weekly for $23.75, $20 with subscription) or The Madness (18-20 pounds for $42.50, $34 with subscription). The startup currently ships to 11 states. Today it announced expansion plans to move into 8 more, covering most of the East Coast.

So-called “ugly” produce is having a moment. In addition to Misfits Market, companies like Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest also sell cosmetically imperfect and surplus produce through subscription boxes at a reduced cost, while Full Harvest serves the B2B side.

Unlike Imperfect Produce, however, Misfits customers can’t choose what’s in their box — it’s based on whatever the company sources from their farm partners that week. While that could be fun for the adventurous eater, it could also result in more home food waste if, say, you receive a ton of parsnips and are a parsnip hater, or simply don’t know how to cook them. Misfits hopes to introduce a customization feature down the road.

The ugly produce movement has also spurred some serious backlash. Crop scientist Sarah Taber wrote a viral Twitter thread which claimed that the food system is actually really good at using irregular and surplus produce, which often ends up going to underprivileged communities or turned into blended foods like salsa. However, that can depend on the size of the farm — smaller producers can have a trickier time finding people to take their misshapen or surplus foods.

That is where Misfits Market can help. Unlike Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest, Misfits Market exclusively targets local producers, giving them a platform to sell their goods that they might not normally have had. Misfits market is also trying to democratize who has access to fresh, organic food: the company ships to every zip code in the states in which it operates, not just the wealthier urban ones.

Despite disagreements over how to tackle it, there’s no debating that food waste is an overwhelming problem. And Misfit Market’s $16.5 million funding round shows that investors realize it’s also a juicy opportunity.

With Ends & Stems, One Founder Takes on Home Food Waste

Unless you’re very, very organized, chances are you often are left with odds and ends in the fridge after cooking a week’s worth of meals. More often than not, those odds and ends end up in the trash or compost bin.

A new meal-planning service Ends & Stems wants to prevent those leftovers in the first place by providing curated recipes to help optimize perishable ingredients. The startup launched its web app today. For $12.50 per month ($9.50 if you pay for the whole year at once), users will get an email every Friday morning with three recipes to cook the following week. They then select the number of servings (up to 6) and the app will generate a grocery list which can be printed or saved as well as a “prep ahead” list.

The recipes reduce waste by helping users get the most out of their ingredients so that there are no awkward bits leftover at the end of the week. So, for example, two recipes will each make use of half of a cucumber, or all three recipes will use some green onions. The recipes also make use of oft-discarded parts of ingredients, like carrot tops. There’s also a free part of the site where users can recipe search based on any two ingredients they have in their fridge.

The app itself combines two trends we’re seeing a lot of lately: food waste and curated meal experiences. But perhaps the most interesting part of Ends & Stems is that, unlike many startups who claim to be reinventing cooking through apps and other tech, the company’s founder, Alison Mountford, doesn’t have a tech background. She’s also a solo founder, and has self-funded her company. “It’s a big challenge,” she told me over the phone recently.

However, Mountford knows what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur in the competitive food tech world. After completing culinary school she started a meal delivery business in 2005, back when the entire concept of meal delivery was pretty new. Mountford sold it 10 years later and began working at the much larger (now defunct) meal delivery service Munchery. It was there that she saw the massive amount of waste created by inaccurate produce ordering and wasteful food prep. She launched an Instagram featuring tips on how to cut down on food waste, which was the seed that eventually became Ends & Stems.

To make what’s essentially a one-woman company work, Mountford has to be very strategic about how she invests her resources. For instance, she told me she’s not planning to make a mobile version of the Ends & Stems app because it’s a) expensive, and b) she thinks a responsive website is all she needs. Mountford’s theory is that people typically meal plan from a static place, so there’s not really a need to have it available on-the-go.

She also has to prioritize just how granular Ends & Stems can be in terms of functionality. Users can customize certain aspects of Ends & Stems — like choosing a vegetarian track or opting out of seafood — but Mountford doesn’t offer high levels of personalization à la Innit. This is in part because she doesn’t have the tech abilities to do so, but it’s also intentional. “People don’t want too many choices,” she explained to me.

Ends & Stems isn’t the only one trying to take the guesswork out of meal planning. eMeals, a subscription-based meal planning and shopping service, partnered with publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation last year. Across the pond, Mucho does something very similar. And in the B2B space, Lighter provides plant-based meal planning services to the healthcare industry and athletes.

Ends & Stems’ food waste angle is a smart way to stand out, and might indeed end up saving users time and money while keeping food out of the landfill. But Mountford is up against bigger, more established competitors with entire tech teams and high-level partners. She could also be hurt by the lack of shoppable recipe capabilities and her resistance to a mobile app, which can help increase consumer engagement.

Competition aside, I’m not sure how big the user potential is for meal planning services in general. In a world filled with the (near) instant satisfaction of food delivery or in-retail meal kits, services that only send you recipes and aggregate shopping lists can seem a little, well, antiquated. Then again, as of now Mountford has so little overhead that I’m guessing she doesn’t need a huge number of users to make the company successful.

As of its launch, Ends & Stems had 100 paying beta users. Time will tell if Mountford’s passion and scrappiness can help grow that number — and also shrink food waste.

Goodr Partners with Roadie to Scale Up Surplus Food Donations to Those in Need

Goodr, a startup which uses blockchain to help redistribute surplus food to those who need it, announced yesterday that it has partnered with delivery service Roadie. The new partnership will allow Goodr to quickly expand its services across the country.

It is estimated that 133 billion pounds of food go to waste in this country each year. Goodr helps combat this food waste by connecting large enterprises and venues that have excess food with non-profits who need it.

Up until now, Goodr has coordinated a driver to pick up and deliver food donations. The partnership with Roadie is the first time it has outsourced delivery. Roadie offers a crowdsourced “on-the-way” delivery service that “connects people who have stuff to send with drivers already heading that way.” According to the press release, Roadie’s drivers will provide same day delivery of excess food to donation centers like churches and shelters.

Roadie raised $37 million earlier this year and has already partnered with Walmart to provide same day grocery delivery.

Both Goodr and Roadie are headquartered in Atlanta. However, Roadie’s delivery service options are nationwide, which will allow Goodr to rapidly scale up its food donation services, and in turn make a bigger impact in reducing food waste and helping those in need.

It’s smart initiatives like this that put Goodr on our 2019 Food Tech 25 list of companies creating the future of food.

Newsletter: Food Waste Innovation in 2019, Amazon Go(es) to NYC

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Food Waste Innovation in 2019

Fighting food waste is one of the next important frontiers of foodtech. In the course of just a few years, a question historically left on the periphery of the food industry has become a central issue: How do we curb the billions of tons of food that goes wasted around the world each year?

While no one’s going to solve the problem overnight, it’s encouraging that so many groups, from massive corporations to energetic startups to government bodies, are stepping forward with new ways to combat food waste. In fact, there are so many of them now we put together a market map this week to outline the different areas of food waste innovation. From new approaches to packaging to leveraging apps to the power of upcycling, these are the companies to watch in this important new sector.

Download the map below, and let us know if we missed anyone you think should be added.

Solar Foods CEO Wants to Make Food From Thin Air

Granted, if we start making food from thin air, waste could be considerably less problematic. That’s not wishful thinking on my part, either. As has been pointed out recently, Finnish company Solar Foods is using air and electricity to create a new kind of protein. It’s in a similar vein to what Impossible Foods is doing to create its “bleeding” meat.

Over the weekend, Mike dug into the details on a podcast with Solar Foods CEO Pasi Vainikka. If you’re wondering when food made from air will actually land on your dinner plate (sooner than you’d think), take a listen to Mike’s interview.

Amazon Go Debuts in NYC — With Cash

Speaking of glaringly large issues in foodtech: the fight around the cashless business model isn’t going away anytime soon, either. And, of course, Amazon’s a central figure in that fight, thanks to its Amazon Go stores, which were originally built on the cashless business model.

That hasn’t worked out so well for the Seattle giant. As more voices have risen in objection to cashless retail (citing the model’s discriminatory nature towards unbanked and underbanked populations), Amazon has felt the pressure. With restaurant chains like Sweetgreen reversing their cashless models and entire cities refusing to grant exemptions to retailers, Amazon has had to pivot away from purely cashless Go stores.

Hence, the new Amazon Go store, which debuted in NYC today. As Chris noted, “Once your shopping is done, there is a counter in the middle of the store where a person with a handheld scanner checks you out, accepts payment and will even give you a paper receipt.”

I have no doubt that at some point in our lifetimes we’ll see the country go cashless. But with digital discrimination become as big an issue as food waste, greenbacks aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Onward!

Jenn

StixFresh Can Double Your Avocado’s Shelf Life with a Sticker

Whenever I head to the grocery store I can’t leave without buying a bunch of bananas. But I find that a) they all get ripe at exactly the same time, and b) I can never eat them quickly enough.

Thankfully this leads to a lot of amazing banana bread, but product waste is a huge problem in this country (and in my house). In the U.S. between 30 and 40 percent of all our food ends up in the trash, with fruit and vegetables being some of the most likely to be wasted.

StixFresh is trying to curb our produce food waste problem with a sticker. Just pop one on a piece of fresh fruit and it’ll extend its shelf life by up to 14 days.

I was initially skeptical too. StixFresh’s CEO and co-founder Moody Soliman explained the technology to me over the phone. “Interestingly, the non-sticky side is the effective one,” he said. The sticker’s coating contains compounds that plants naturally make to protect themselves from predators. When said compounds vaporize, they travel far enough to “cloak” the fruit in a protective compound, inhibiting bacteria growth to prevent premature spoilage and over-ripening.

So far, StixFresh works with apples, pears, avocados, dragon fruits, kiwis, mangoes, and citrus, and Soliman said that they’re working to grow the list. They’re also trying to branch out into more vegetables and the holy grain of food waste: berries. Not only do they spoil quickly, it’s also unfeasible to put a sticker on every single blueberry. “We’re exploring alternative delivery methods,” explained Soliman.

StixFresh has a patent pending for the technology. The stickers are Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) by the FDA, which means they’re cleared to be used in food contact applications. They’re also made of paper, which means they’re better for the environment than all the plastic Chiquita banana stickers out there.

Then again, StixFresh’s end game is for their technology to end up on those branded stickers. “We’re envisioning that you’ll be able to apply our formulation to standard stickers,” said Soliman. “It will have Chiquita or Dole written on it, but it will have our [technology] in it as well.”

In addition to selling to distributors, StixFresh wants to make a consumer-facing option. Theoretically, people could pick up a pack of StixFresh stickers in the produce aisle and stick them on their avocados when they got home. “The simplicity of application allows it to be adapted at any point along the supply chain,” said Soliman.

This versatility is what sets StixFresh apart from Apeel, another produce-saving technology. Apeel creates an edible coating that farmers and distributors can apply to produce to extend shelf life. Which is super cool, but limiting; Apeel has also only been tested on avocados, asparagus, and some citrus fruits. The beauty of StixFresh is that it can be applied to a relatively wide variety of produce at any time, from harvest to home.

Of course, the downside is that you have to use stickers, which will eventually end up in a landfill. But that seems a small price to pay if it could significantly reduce the amount of food waste.

StixFresh recently launched an IndieGoGo campaign, which has exceeded its goal with 26 days left to go. The company is currently doing R&D out of a facility in Belgium and plans to send stickers to their early backers by August of this year. Soliman didn’t disclose pricing yet, saying it depended on how quickly they could scale production, but Early Bird backers on IndieGoGo can snag a pack of 50 stickers for $30.

As always when crowdfunding is involved, we have to have a healthy dose of skepticism about whether or not the product will actually make it to market. But StixFresh is a really good idea and (at least seemingly) pretty cheap to produce. Plus the company has a pending patent and some seed funding to back them up. If they do pull it off and I see their stickers in the grocery store someday, I’d definitely give them a try — even if that means less banana bread for me.

Winnow Launches Computer Vision + AI Tool to Help Commercial Kitchens Fight Food Waste

Winnow this week announced the launch of its new Winnow Vision product, which combines computer vision, a weight scale and AI to help commercial kitchens reduce food waste.

From the press announcement:

Using a camera, a set of smart scales and the same type of machine learning technology found in autonomous vehicles, Winnow Vision ‘learns’ to recognise different foods being thrown in the bin and calculates the financial and environment cost of this discarded food to commercial kitchens.

A demo video on Winnow’s site shows its product in use at an IKEA cafeteria. As unsold food is thrown straight into the garbage can, Winnow’s computer vision sees and identify the food that is being thrown out. The garbage can sits on top of a scale, allowing the system to know just how much food is being tossed.

With this type of information, chefs and kitchen managers can then see what foods they are over-ordering or making too much of and adjust both their inventory management and production accordingly. The hope is that they’ll buy only the ingredients they need and create less food waste in the process.

Winnow isn’t the only company using scales and cameras to fight food waste in high-volume kitchens. LeanPath offers a similar solution, though it requires users to manually enter in the food being thrown out.

With 40 percent of the food in the United States never getting eaten, fighting food waste is a big problem — and as my colleague, Catherine Lamb recently wrote, a there are a lot of startups looking to tackle it.

We’ll now have to see how much Winnow’s computer vision system helps.

Upcycled Flour Co. Planetarians Closes $750K Seed Round, Partners with Barilla’s BLU1877

This week Planetarians, the San Mateo-based upcycled ingredient startup, announced that it had closed a $750,000 seed round with participation from Barilla’s venture/innovation arm BLU1877, Techstars, The Yield Lab, SOSV, and a group of angel investors.

Planetarians takes defatted sunflower seeds — the hulls and fiber left behind after the seeds have been pressed for oil — and upcycles them into high-protein, high-fiber flour.

In a phone interview, Planetarians CEO and co-founder Aleh Manchuliantsau told me that for the past few months they’ve been doing tests in the Barilla facility, using their upcycled flour to make crackers, breads, biscuits, tortillas, and, of course, pasta.

The various products Planetarians has developed with Blu1877.

“With Barilla, we completed scalability tests in an industrial setting,” Manchuliantsau told me. “Next, we expect to do commercial manufacturing.” The company also just won the Most Innovative Startup Pre-Series A award at the Agfunder Agrifood Tech Innovation Awards, which it announced yesterday.

Planetarians will use its new funding to continue developing and trialing new products. They still have their upcycled chip snacks, which they developed with Techstars last year, and have been working with Italian meat-focused company Amadori to develop flexitarian meatballs cut with their defatted sunflower flour.

Upcycling —that is, turning food byproducts into new edible goods — is becoming quite the CPG food trend as of late. Regrained repurposes spent beer grain as energy bars, Renewal Mill (who just raised $2.5 million) turns leftover soy from tofu into baking flour. Even big players like Tyson Foods have gotten into the food waste game with their Yappah! crisps made of chicken breast trimmings. Clearly by investing in Planetarians, Barilla hopes to get their own piece of the upcycled pie.

Last year Manchuliantsau told me that it can be difficult to get consumers comfortable with eating upcycled food waste products, especially ones typically designated for livestock feed. But having a powerful food corporation like Barilla behind them will help Planetarians push their food to the masses  — especially if it’s in the form of pasta.

Imperfect Produce Launches Pilot Program to Reuse Your Delivery Boxes

Whenever I get home to find my Imperfect Produce box waiting for me on my doorstep, I congratulate myself on being a good person. After all, the box is filled with surplus and “ugly” produce — that is, fruits and vegetables that are cosmetically flawed and can’t be sold in regular grocery stores — so by purchasing them I’m supposedly saving them from ending up in a landfill.

However, after I put away all my virtuous vegetables, I’m always left with a big, bulky box, often much larger than it needed to be to fit my single-person order. Sure I recycle said box, but I can’t help but feel like I should be doing something more sustainable than just shoving the broken-down box into my recycling bin and going on with my day.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s been feeling some guilt over my cardboard consumption. Today I got an email from Imperfect Produce announcing a new initiative in Seattle (where I live) to reuse said boxes by giving them to Seattle Food Lifeline. The non-profit uses boxes to pack up and deliver donated food to food banks and shelters. According to Imperfect, Seattle Food Lifeline currently buys all their own boxes.

But starting today they’ll be getting reused Imperfect boxes to help them shuttle food around. For the next month, Seattlites can leave their clean, non-damaged Imperfect boxes in the same places they were delivered and one of the Imperfect drivers will pick it up on their next delivery. The boxes will go back to the local Imperfect warehouse until they’re picked up by the Seattle Food Lifeline. According to the Imperfect website, the company is doing the same thing in the Portland area with the Oregon Food Bank.

Imperfect Produce got some serious flak last year when a New Food Economy op-ed accused the company of a) diverting produce that was intended for food banks (an issue that was found to just be a result of a typo on the Imperfect website), and b) putting local farms out of businesses by undercutting CSA business. Initiatives like reusing cardboard boxes could help give the startup some much-needed positive PR.

Photo: Imperfect Produce.

Which isn’t to say that Imperfect’s pilot program is just a marketing ploy. It’s actually a pretty smart move: Imperfect gets to close the packaging loop, shore up its sustainability image, and give the boxes to a good cause. I’m not sure how many people will actually remember to put their box out at the pickup spot at the right time, or that the boxes won’t get stolen or ruined before they get grabbed.

But despite my qualms, the whole “reuseable packaging” idea is a solid one — both financially and environmentally — that more companies should be taking advantage of. With the advent of the robot revolution, it could become a lot easier to do so. The CEO of Korean company Woowa Brothers has outlined the idea that food delivery robots should pick up your recycling and return them to their origin where they can be reused or properly recycled.

Maybe Seattlites will eventually be able to load up their boxes into wee self-driving Amazon delivery bots, who can shuttle them to a warehouse where they can be reused to send you more stuff.

Can Tech *Actually* Help Solve Our Astronomical Food Waste Problem?

When we come across a problem that seems insurmountable, it’s easy to hold up technology as a cure-all.

That seems to be the case with food waste. Recently Eater published a story stating “Food Waste is the Next Great Gold Rush,” referencing Bloomberg’s post about how food waste startups raised more than $125 million in the first 10 months of 2018.

Neither of these pieces made the direct claim that tech will drastically reduce food waste; only that the fight against waste is has been getting a lot of investment of late. However, it got me thinking: many others have argued that tech could cut down on food waste — including ourselves. Is tech the key to solving our overwhelming food waste problem, where we throw out one-third of all food globally?

If only. Unfortunately, I think that framing technology as a panacea for our waste is overly simplistic. While there’s no question that the fight against food waste is a moneysaving opportunity for growers, distributors, and retailers, startups are mostly tackling waste upstream in the food system — when in fact we need serious help reducing food waste at home.

That’s not to say that companies fighting food waste before it gets to our kitchen aren’t doing important work. Many are leveraging technology to reduce wastage up and down the supply chain, from:

Harvest and Distribution

  • Agshift uses deep learning to inspect nuts and seafood and help establish across-the-board food ratings, which can help the supply chain route food more efficiently.
  • Full Harvest is a B2B marketplace that sells imperfect produce to companies like juicers that accept “ugly” fruits and vegetables.
  • Apeel makes an edible coating that doubles the shelf life of produce like avocados and citrus.
  • Spoiler Alert helps large food manufacturers and distributors better manage their inventory to optimize purchasing.

Grocery

  • Wasteless uses dynamic price tags at grocery stores to help incentivize the sales of soon-to-expire produce.
  • Walmart has its Eden Technology, which tracks its produce from farm to shelf so managers can divert older fruits and vegetables to closer retail locations.
  • Afresh uses AI to help grocery managers optimize all fresh food stocking.

Restaurant

  • Leanpath works with high-volume kitchens to help them track when and why they waste food so they can reduce their waste.
  • Similarly, in the U.K., Winnow helps restaurant track food waste so they can figure out ways to eliminate it.
  • Karma works with restaurants in the U.K. and Sweden to sell prepared meals at drastically reduced prices at the end of the day after the restaurant closes.
  • In the same vein, Too Good To Go is an app-based marketplace for surplus food.

Catering

  • Goodr uses blockchain to track surplus food that it redistributes from corporations to locals struggling with hunger.
  • Copia helps companies that make large amounts of food manage their inventories and find non-profits to which to donate excess food.

There are also a smattering of startups that are upcycling food waste products, turning them into everything from insulation to cookies to beer.

Yeah, that’s a lot of companies fighting food waste. But here comes the “but”…

Comparatively few companies are effectively tackling food waste at home. And unfortunately, that’s where most of the waste occurs. In fact, according to ReFed, 43 percent of all food waste happens in the home.

Yes, some companies are coming out with products and services aimed at cutting down on the amount of food we toss in the trash. Services like meal kits claim they’ll reduce waste by sending you exactly what you need to cook a recipe: no more, no less. However, sometimes people order a meal kit too far in advance and their plans change, so they have to throw it away. Meal kits also create a different kind of waste: packaging waste (though this is changing thanks to in-retail meal kits, which are the fastest-growing sector of the meal kit industry).

There are also tech startups working to cut down on home food waste by helping you keep better tabs on your fresh food. Ovie makes LED-lit tags that track your food and give you a heads-up when you need to hurry up and eat it. Similarly, Silo has a smart kitchen storage/vacuum seal system that keeps track of food freshness and also helps your food last longer.

But not everyone is going to buy these food-tracking devices, and even if they do, it’s no guarantee that they’ll actually eat those leftovers that have been lingering in the fridge for the past five days.

Bottom line: What we need is a behavioral shift. The American culture right now is one of abundance. Our fridges and pantries have to be constantly full. With the rise of grocery e-commerce and mega-stores that force you to buy in bulk (sorry, Costco, love you), it’s easier than ever to stock up on large amounts of fresh food. And unless you’re really good at buying exactly what you need or are feeding a hungry family, this mentality will inevitably lead to you throwing at least some of your food away.

That “some” can add up to quite a lot. Twenty percent of food Americans buy is never eaten. The National Defense Resources Fund found that Americans throw out more than 400 pounds of food per person per year, which can equate to up to $2,200 per household.To make any sort of concrete dent in our massive food waste problem people have to be okay with buying things when they need them — and buying less. We also have to be better about making use of all parts of the food we buy, from broccoli stalks to chicken bones.

Easier said than done, I know. Especially if you live in a more remote area where you don’t have the luxury of being able to swing past a grocery store on your way home from work. But I truly think tech is just a band-aid to paste over our food waste problem — albeit a flashy one. The real solution is a lot less sexy, and will be a lot harder to achieve.

Alpro Lets You Have Your Plant-Based Fried Chicken (and Eat the Bucket, Too)

I went vegetarian a few years ago, but one meaty food I still miss is fried chicken. The good news is that starting tomorrow, I’ll have a plant-based option to feed that craving — if I’m willing to take a flight to the UK, that is.

In honor of Plant Power Day — which is apparently a thing and falls on March 7 — British vegan food company Alpro will unveil a Plant Based Bucket (PBB), which is essentially a meatless take on the ubiquitous UK staple of fried chicken and french fries (or as the Brits say, “chips”). The meal will include nuggets made of mushrooms and Alpro’s almond milk, as well as sweet potato fries and a creamy vegan garlic dip (h/t Metro).

But the culinary experience doesn’t stop with what’s inside the packaging. The actual bucket is edible, too, made of a combination of nuts, spices, and seeds. Watch the video below to see how the feast is made, plus some nice footage of a hungry diner digging first into the meal and then the bucket it came in.

Alpro is a CPG company that makes plant-based dairy and doesn’t have any brick-and-mortar stores. Therefore, the PBB will be available only through Deliveroo. Diners in London and Manchester can snag an edible bucket of their own for £5 ($6.59). The company hasn’t specified if the PBB will just be available for Plant Power Day or if it will become a longer-term offering.

They’re not alone when it comes to reinventing traditional meat products using plants. In both the UK and the U.S., a couple other companies are taking advantage of plant-based-mania and making vegan versions of fried chicken. Seattle Food Tech makes plant-based nuggets to sell in institutional dining halls, and the Cap’n himself is hopping on the fried chicken bandwagon: KFC is reportedly developing a vegan fried chicken option which will roll out on U.K. menus as early as this year.

The PBB also highlights another trend in the food world: eco-friendly packaging. A lot of fast-food packaging isn’t recyclable, which means it ends up getting tossed into a landfill. To address a growing outcry over the massive amounts of plastic in said landfills, QSR and major food corporations like McDonald’s and Starbucks are scrambling to develop recyclable or biodegradable packaging. Even KFC has promised to convert to renewable plastic sources by 2025 (though sadly they haven’t made any promises about edible fried chicken buckets). By going beyond just recyclable and making their packaging edible, Alpro is getting itself some sustainability points — as well as a “wow” factor.

I’m not sure how good the bucket will actually taste, or if I’d want to eat something that had been hanging out in a random Deliveroo courier’s bag and seems to have the Alpro logo painted on its exterior. But nonetheless, edible/biodegradable packaging is certainly an interesting concept, especially when it comes to food and meal kit delivery. I wonder if the PBB will start a trend that turns into more bread bowls for soup or lettuce leaf-wrapped sandwiches.

Until then, it might be time to hop on a plane to London to try this PBB out for myself to see if it satisfies my fried chicken cravings. And my bucket cravings.

Beyond Food Uses Giant Metal Pods to Turn Surplus Fruit into Vegan Protein Powder

Considering the amount of food wasted in North America (that’s 170 million tons per year), we need more people willing to get up and do something to keep all that perfectly good food from going into the landfill in the first place.

That’s exactly what Dr. Darren Burke and TJ Galiardi did a little over three years ago. The pair was discussing the absurd amount of food waste in North America’s landfills, and out of that frustration came the idea for Beyond Food (no, not affiliated with Beyond Meat). Using a cutting-edge technology developed in-house, the company rescues produce from grocery stores destined for the trash and upcycles it into consumer products.

“We asked ourselves, How could we figure out how to upcycle this potential burden on the planet, and turn it into something of high value?” Dr. Burke, CEO of Beyond Food, told me over the phone.

The Halifax, Nova Scotia-based company’s first product is a plant-based nutrition powder. It launched with Canada retailers in September of 2018. Each 30-gram scoop (one serving) contains 20 grams of protein and six servings of fruits and vegetables.

All of that protein isn’t coming just from upcycled produce; Beyond Food adds protein from pulses (think: pea protein) into their powder. As of now the company purchases the protein from a supplier, but Dr. Burke told me that eventually they hope to make their own.

A two-pound container of the powder costs $69.99 CAD ($59.99 USD) and is available in over 1,000 stores throughout Canada; the company plans to expand into the U.S. over the next few months. Currently, Beyond Food targets athletes, but they eventually want to expand outside the sports vertical and develop upcycled products for the snacks and wellness markets.

The plant-based protein powder aspect is interesting, but it isn’t really the point of Beyond Food. Dr. Burke was insistent that the company’s main technology has “much larger implications” than just making a few CPG products from old fruits and vegetables. That’s where the company’s Zero Waste Pod comes into play.

The pod is a closed-loop system: put fresh fruit and vegetables in, and it spits out dehydrated produce powder. Water extracted from the produce can be saved and used to irrigate crops. Dr. Burke wouldn’t go too far into the technical workings of the pod, but I’m imagining a higher-tech, much-bigger version of the machines in grocery stores that grind up coffee beans or peanut butter.

Beyond Food only has a prototype pod right now, but they intend to set up a fleet of pods within grocery partners’ warehouses, doing away with the need to ship fragile, almost-rotten fruit and vegetables to a central processing hub. “We have to be in the location where the waste is being produced in order to do this the right way,” said Burke.

The company will sell the pods to grocers, who will feed in their surplus produce to reduce food waste and do away with the cost of having to pay a company to truck the rotten produce to a landfill. Beyond Food will then pick up the resulting powder, though the grocer will get credits to use a percentage of the powder to either sell to one of their brands or use to develop their own white-label product, should they so choose.

Beyond Food plans to deploy its first pod in September of 2019. The company has $3 million CAD ($2.26 million US) in funding, mostly from friends and family and government support, including a $1 million raise last November.

I have to wonder about the long term viability of Beyond Food’s mission. After all, there are several companies already working to reduce waste further up the supply chain. Spoiler Alert helps food manufacturers and distributors better manage inventory to reduce waste. And on the grocer side, Farmstead and Afresh use AI to optimize fresh food stocking and reduce surplus, while over in Europe Karma and Electrolux have teamed up to install smart fridges in grocery stores to sell food destined for the landfill. If these initiatives take a large enough bite out of food waste, there might not be enough late in life produce for Beyond to make their business model viable.

Since Dr. Burke didn’t disclose pricing details, it’s hard to tell if the cost will be low enough to make the hassle of adding a large pod into a warehouse and managing it worth the extra workload for grocery companies. Then again, ReFED reported that food waste is an $18.2 billion profit opportunity for grocery retailers, so paying a price to upcycle said waste just might be worth taking some action after all.

Too Good To Go Raises €6M to Rescue Food in 16 Countries

Too Good To Go, the Denmark-based company fighting food waste, recently announced that it had raised €6 million ($6.8 million) in internal funding.

I spoke with Javier Amigo Miranda, CMO of Too Good To Go (TGTG), who told me that the fundraise was powered by private investors, including Mike Lee, co-founder of fitness tracking app My Fitness Pal, with participation from TGTG’s own CEO and Chairman of the Board. Amigo Miranda told me that this latest funding brings TGTG’s total warchest to roughly €18 million ($20.4 million).

TGTG is essentially a surplus food marketplace. At the end of the day businesses can post leftover food on the TGTG app at a discount. Hungry people can use the consumer-facing side of the app to search local restaurants and grocery stores for surplus food, place an order, then swing by and pick up their discounted grub in a pre-set collection window.

TGTG currently serves 9 countries and has aspirations to expand to 16 by the end of the year. According to Amigo Miranda, the company has saved over 10 million meals from the landfill since it was founded in 2016.

Europe is becoming a hotbed surplus food rescuing companies. Winnow optimizes BOH kitchen operations to reduce food waste, and Olio facilitates free food surplus sharing among neighbors and businesses. TGTG’s biggest competitor is Karma, based across strait in Sweden, which also connects local restaurants with deal-hungry consumers looking to purchase leftover food at the end of the day.

TGTG may have a bigger reach than Karma — which is only available in the U.K. and Sweden — but the latter seems to be experimenting more widely with new marketplaces for surplus food. In August of last year Karma raised $12 million, and a few months later Karma partnered with Electrolux to install smart fridges in grocery stores filled with discounted surplus food. Hopefully TGTG will use some of its new funding to not just expand geographically, but also explore new ways to get excess food out of the landfill and onto consumers’ plates.