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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

Get Food Waste-d: Toast Ale Turns Surplus Bread Into Beer

When it comes to food waste, there’s one culprit almost all of us throw away at least a portion of: bread. Maybe it starts sprouting mold or gets rock-hard. Or maybe you just don’t like eating the heels.

In the U.K., at least 24 million slices of bread are thrown away per day, making it Britain’s most wasted food. This can happen anywhere along the food system, from post-harvest cereal losses to bakery waste to you tossing out that stale baguette half.

Toast Ale is trying to divert some of that bread waste from the trash by giving it another life — as beer. The British company was founded in 2016 after social entrepreneur and Toast founder Tristram Stewart happened upon a brewery in Brussels that served a beer made with bread, just like original brewers used to make it 7,000 years ago.

“It was a lightbulb moment,” said Karen Kuhn, Head of Business Development for Toast Ale USA. “He realized we could divert a lot of bread from landfills, and at the same time start a conversation about food waste.” So Stewart developed a recipe and partnered with Hackney Brewery in London to make Toast’s first beer, in which one-third of the grain was replaced with surplus bread from local bakeries. According to Kuhn, bakeries (at least in the U.S.) have to pay to have their excess bread composted, so having a channel to get rid of their old bread for free — and have it go towards a cool finished product — is a no-brainer.

Since 2016, Toast has grown throughout the U.K. and now sells their brews in British grocery chains Tesco, Waitrose, and others. They donate 100 percent of their profits (after they pay the staff and keep the lights on) to Stewart’s nonprofit, FeedBack Global.

Toast’s ales, lagers, and IPAs retail for the same price as craft beer. While I haven’t had a chance to sample Toast yet (though I will when I head to London after SKS Europe!), they apparently aren’t missing anything when it comes to taste. Toast Ale took home a silver medal at the 2018 New York International Beer Competition and currently has a “Very Good” rating on Beer Advocate. 

In July 2017, Toast came Stateside and started producing their beer at a brewery in the Bronx, using surplus loaves from Bread Alone Bakery in Kingston, N.Y. Kuhn made it very clear that Toast only takes the bread that remains after bakeries donate to soup kitchens. “We never take bread from the human food supply,” she said.

A few months after their move to the U.S., Toast Ale released their brews exclusively with Whole Foods in New York City. Since then, they’ve been steadily expanding. In February of this year, they made it onto the menu of Shake Shack’s NYC locations, and recently also rolled out in shops in New York’s Hudson Valley. Kuhn promised the company would be entering more areas in the Northeast before the end of the year, with plans for a presence throughout the U.S. by 2019.

Though the U.S. branch is the only proper subsidiary company, Toast Ales also has a global licensing model which allows breweries around the world to license their brand and recipe so that they can also turn excess bread into beer. Right now, their ales and lagers are being brewed in Rejkavik, Rio de Janiero, and South Africa. They also do collaborations with breweries, bakeries, and other companies, including Eataly, Google, and Five Boroughs Brewing Company. If you’re a homebrewer (maybe you have a PicoBrew?) and have a few slices of bread lying around, you can even try your hand at the Toast recipe yourself.

Toast Ales has roughly 20 people on staff, most of whom work in the U.K.. Kuhn said that Toast just closed a round of funding using a model called “equity for good,” in which investors get back their initial investment and commit on reinvesting it in other social enterprises. While Kuhn didn’t disclose how much they raised, she said that Toast would use it to fund their expansion both in the U.K. and U.S..

“We’re hoping to take beer and use it as a way to start a conversation [about food waste] by printing our story on our can, sharing facts, and introducing an interesting concept that people aren’t familiar with,” said Kuhn. I’ll cheers to that. 

Food Tech News Roundup: Ben & Jerry’s, Food Waste Snacks, and Target Takeovers

It may have been a short week (at least for some of us), but it still feels good to reach the weekend finish line. Let’s celebrate with some food tech news, shall we?

We’re still riding a high from the announcement of the FoodTech 25: twenty five companies we think are changing the way we grow, source, cook, eat, and think about food. But lots of other food innovation news popped up around the web as well! Here are a few of our favorite stories, from Ben & Jerry’s new sustainability initiative to BYO homebrewing packs.

Chobani incubator to focus on food tech
Lately, quite a few CPG brands have been launching food-related incubators — including Greek yogurt darling Chobani. This week Chobani announced new incubator program which will revolve around our favorite subject: foodtech. The Food Tech Residency will be the company’s fourth incubator initiative, and will run parallel to their original incubator class. They’re currently searching for startups involved in agtech, food safety, innovative packaging, and other areas to improve the food system. Once selected, participating companies will have access to all Chobani Incubator programming, including factory visits, mentorship, opportunities to pilot new products, and a chance to pitch for funding. They have three spots open, so if you’re an emerging food tech or agtech startup, get on it!

 

Tyson Foods rolls out snacks made of food waste
Poultry giant Tyson Foods has created a snack brand which makes “Protein Crisps” out of food waste such as chicken breast trim, spent grain from beer brewing, and excess vegetable purée from juicing. Dubbed “¡Yappah!,” the brand will be used as an umbrella under which Tyson will release other sustainable food products. Each individual 1.25-oz serving has 8+ grams of protein and is packaged in a recyclable aluminum can. The crisps launched on IndieGoGo on May 31st, and are available to back now with a projected ship date of July 2018. Clean meat, food delivery startups, and now food waste snacks? Tyson Foods continues to work to be on the cutting-edge of all emerging food innovation trends.

PicoBrew now offers DIY PicoPaks
Countertop homebrewing startup PicoBrew rolled out DIY PicoPaks this week via Kickstarter, an option that lets Pico users load up their own ingredients to make beer and fusion drinks. The new bring-your-own ingredients option – which will work with the new Pico U as well as the existing Pico Cs and Pico Pros – provides an option for those in the Pico community who have wanted brewing flexibility beyond want preconfigured PicoPaks allow. The reward bundle includes containers for both beer brewing and PicoPak minis to create “fusion drinks” at home such as kombucha or goldenmilk. Post-Kickstarter, it will be interesting to see if PicoBrew offers brewers a variety of DIY container bundles depending on their preferences and brewing frequency.

Three new Targets to open up in Seattle area in 2019 & 2020
Target will add three smaller, grocery-sized stores in the Seattle area over the next two years, according to the Seattle Times. These are in addition to their original urban format store, which opened in Seattle in 2012. Their new stores are designed to fit into dense cityscapes and will stock products tailored to the surrounding neighborhood. This, as well as their recent expansion into same-day delivery, smart home-powered replenishment service, and acquisition of Shipt, is another way that Target is trying to keep up with the shifting grocery game and fight against Amazon.

 

Photo: Ben & Jerry’s.

Ben & Jerry’s works to offset their ice cream’s carbon footprint
Customers at Ben & Jerry’s scoop shop in London’s Soho neighborhood now have an opportunity to counterbalance the carbon footprint of their waffle cone of Cherry Garcia or Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. For each purchase, Ben & Jerry’s will pay a penny to offset the carbon used to raise the cows, produce the ice cream, and ship it to the shop. Customers then have the option to donate a cent of their own and double the impact.

According to Forbes, the ice cream company is partnering with a not-for-profit who is helping them use blockchain to divide carbon credits — which are typically quite large — into smaller transactions which can link up to each ice cream purchase. They’re even developing an app to help customers keep track of their person carbon offsets.

 

Photo: Anova

Anova finally opens new Anova Kitchen
We’ve been monitoring the retail ambitions of sous vide specialist Anova closely, so we were intrigued to learn this past week that the company will finally open the Anova Kitchen for a sneak peek on June 6th. A company spokesperson told The Spoon that the new space will be used for events and will have some public-facing retail space, but that we shouldn’t expect the Anova Kitchen to be open to the public every day.  This contrasts with Brava, who plan to open a full time retail space early this summer.  Either way, we’re intrigued to check out the Anova’s new retail/event space. If you are too, make sure to RSVP for next week’s event and report back to us!

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech to let us know the best food tech news of the week!

Come Talk Food Waste Solutions at Our Next Meetup!

It’s time for the next event in our monthly food tech meetup series! We’ll be exploring a subject that affects every one of us on a daily basis: food waste. Join us on Wednesday, June 27th at sustainable design firm Artefact for drinks, snacks, and some rousing discussion. (Bonus: it’s free to attend, thanks to our sponsor ChefSteps!)

Food Waste Solutions

In the U.S. 40% of our food goes to waste, much of it produce — at the same time, roughly 6 million U.S. households are food-insecure. At this meetup we want to go beyond just discussing the worrisome statistics; we’ll talk with panelists who are helping design smart systems to mitigate food waste throughout the supply chain and explore how emerging tech can improve household, restaurant and workplace food efficiency. Finally, we’ll discuss actionable strategies that consumers (and industries) can implement to affect real change.

The panel will include:

Come ready to discuss creative ways to mitigate food waste with the Seattle food tech community — and bring a few business cards while you’re at it. Register here to reserve your spot!

Are We Entering a Frozen Food Renaissance?

Let’s be honest: frozen food does not have the best reputation. From French bread pizzas to bland microwaveable TV meals, the freezer section is usually full of meal options that are unhealthy, mass-produced, and overall subpar.

But lately a few companies are trying to reverse the frozen food stigma — and keep the convenience — with high-quality, healthy meal offerings.

It’s a good time to be in the frozen food market. According to RBC Capital markets, frozen food volume growth recently turned positive for the first time in 5 years. While the slump was blamed on millennials who tend to opt for whole, fresh foods, the rebound is most likely due to the exact same demographic.

“A lot of consumers, especially millennials and students, are looking for an easier [dining] option that they can stick in the microwave,” Zoe Lloyd, founder and CEO of Zoni Foods, told me over the phone. Her frozen meal kit company that offers three healthy, plant-based frozen meals.

Lloyd came up with the idea for Zoni Foods while a student herself at Yale business school. She wanted to find natural, easy to prepare food in the frozen aisle of the grocery store, and was struck by the whopping lack of innovation. So she developed a line of healthy, plant-based frozen meals with ingredients sourced from local farms.

This hits the sweet spot for busy millennials: the frozen meals are convenient, healthy, and offer nearly instant gratification. “People want to feel like they’re preparing a healthy dinner for themselves, but doing it in a way with no prep and very little cleanup,” explained Lloyd. They’re also capitalizing on rising demand for locally sourced ingredients. And at an average price of $6.99 for a single-serving meal, they’re cheaper than takeout or a shopping trip at most organic grocery stores.

Belgian Mealhero also makes frozen meal kits, but they’ve taken the operation a few steps further with a recipe app and connected countertop steamer. In our interview with their CEO Jeroen Spitaels for the Smart Kitchen Summit Europe blog (where they’ll be competing in the Startup Showcase), he emphasized the convenience of frozen food. “Because they’re starting with frozen food (with a long shelf life), our community is able to plug and play Mealhero food into their schedule whenever they need it the most,” he told me.

There are a few other companies edging into the high-end frozen meal market. Daily Harvest, a startup that delivers flash-frozen soups, smoothies, and meals, is putting a millennial-friendly face on frozen food. Eat Local stores provide gourmet, fresh-made frozen meals to Washingtonians. And just this week, Earth Fare announced that it will carry Seal the Seasons products, which sells frozen local produce from family farmers in North and South Carolina, all year round.

In addition to convenience and ease, frozen meals (or at least frozen produce) might be straight-up healthier for you. Studies have shown that it has the same amount or more nutrients than fresh food, especially if it’s flash-frozen. And while fresh food is often picked before it’s ripe to account for its shipping journey, frozen food can be harvested when it’s at its ripest.

As we start getting more and more of our groceries delivered, however, frozen foods can make things tricky. After all, you don’t want Amazon to leave your weekly shop in the car or on your kitchen table if it contains frozen meal kits or — god forbid — ice cream. This is where packaging insulation could come in handy, especially if it’s sustainable.

By capitalizing on the millennial-driven trend for convenient, home-cooked meals and adding new, local, and healthier options, frozen foods could be on the cusp of a Renaissance. No matter what, though, I’ll always have a soft spot for DiGiorno pizza.

Aeropowder Turns Feather Waste into Biodegradable Food Insulation

Meal kits may help you make good use of fresh ingredients, but there has been a lot of buzz about the waste they generate. While most of their insulation, containers, and wrapping are technically recyclable, many have to be broken down or driven to particular recycling facilities — which means that most of the packaging ends up in a landfill.

London-based startup Aeropowder is trying to reduce packaging waste by making use of a different waste stream: feathers.

Their first product, called ‘Pluumo,’ is 95% waste feathers and 5% biobinder wrapped in a compostable sheet. This biodegradable product is meant to insulate perishable food and replace polystyrene (a non-recyclable material used for packaging) in food delivery and grocery ecommerce.

According to CEO and cofounder Dr. Ryan Robinson, the U.K. wastes one thousand tons of feathers every week, and the E.U. wastes 3.1 million tons a year. (He didn’t have stats for U.S. wastage.) He and his co-founder Elena Dieckmann decided to take this massive waste stream and turn it into something valuable. “Basically, we’re up-cycling byproducts,” he told me — which is a fancy way of saying that they’re recycling a waste product into something better. 

After their launch in 2016, Robinson and Dieckmann initially focused on turning waste feathers into building insulation. However, they were soon approached by companies looking to use Pluumo as a packaging insulator, so they pivoted to develop a product for food transport. 

Two years later, they had a product that would insulate food as effectively as polystyrene and biodegrade much more quickly. Aeropowder just sold their first set of units (around 350 feather-packed “sheets”) to a craft butcher in Oxford this month. Robinson told me that their feather-packed sheets cost 10-20% more than conventional polystyrene at the moment, but he expects it to be competitive soon.

As of now, Aeropowder gets their feathers as surplus from the down industry. They pay a small fee to use feathers that are too big or too bulky for pillowcases and comforters. The end game, however, is to source their feathers from the poultry industry. “At the moment, poultry producers actually have to pay to get rid of feathers,” said Robinson. Since regulations prevent feathers from being burned or tossed into a landfill, the poultry industry has to turn them into extremely low-grade animal feed, which has high labor costs and low return.

Aeropowder currently works with manufacturing partners to produce their insulation but plan on opening their own production facility. Actually, they have even bigger dreams for production. “This is just a concept, but we want to make a special kit that gets plugged in locally to a poultry processing plant and creates Pluumos to use in that area,” Robinson told me. The kit would wash and process the feathers on-site — which has to happen within 24 hours lest they start to smell. That way they can capture mass waste streams throughout the world, especially in places that struggle with infrastructure and access to materials, without having to ship feathers or finished Pluumos insulation back and forth and adding to the carbon footprint. 

Yes, there’s a lot of “hoping” going on here — but the market for Aeropowder’s product is certainly there. As anyone who’s read the internet lately knows, grocery ecommerce and food delivery are on the rise. At the same time, the global sustainable packaging market is expected to reach $440.3 billion by 2025; an almost 8% increase from 2015. Combined, this means there’s a big opportunity for food insulation that’s both effective and sustainable. 

Two sheets of Pluumo will fully insulate a meal kit or food delivery box.

So far, Aeropowder’s four-person team (the two co-founders plus two interns) has raised two hundred thousand pounds through grants and awards. They’ve also racked up an impressive pedigree of awards; the founders were in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Social Entrepreneur 2017 and the company was recently was named a finalist in the 2018 Thought for Food (TFF) Challenge. 

Robinson told me that they’ve also had interest in Pluumos from pet food producers and confectionary organizations, as well as food delivery giants looking to keep their meals warm en route to customers’ doorstep. Robinson said they’re even exploring ways to use Pluumos as insulation for pharmaceutical and biotech transport.

It’s still too early to tell if Pluumos will indeed be a sustainable, affordable, and scalable alternative to packaging like polystyrene. But as the poultry industry continues to grow and we move towards a more delivery-heavy food system, both the market and demand are certainly there.

BioBean Uses Coffee Grounds to Fuel Your Fire — Literally

Strong coffee is sometimes referred to as “rocket fuel,” but London-based startup Biobean uses spent coffee grounds to make a much more literal type of fuel: the kind that powers stoves, fires, and even industrial furnaces.

Biobean was started in 2013 by Arthur Kay, an architecture student who realized that even when a coffee shop is sustainably designed, it still generates huge volumes of waste in the form of coffee grounds. But because they’re usually still hot when they hit the trash and add weight quickly, baristas typically empty coffee grounds into a separate container. That, as Kay noticed, makes it easy to collect out of the waste stream for reuse. 

Biobean works with waste management companies throughout the UK to collect used coffee grounds from over 1,500 small coffee shops, chains, and office blocks. After collection, drivers deliver the coffee grounds to Cambridgeshire, where Biobean has established the world’s first coffee-recycling factory. After cleaning and drying the coffee grounds (which are about 60 percent moisture when they come in, Henderson said), workers mix them with sawdust, compact them, and coat them with wax to create 100 percent carbon-neutral biofuel.

The fuel comes in two formats: the first are logs (or briquettes), about the size of a soda can, are a consumer product meant for fireplaces, stoves, or furnaces (kind of like Duraflame logs but with coffee grounds). They’re available for purchase pretty widely throughout the UK: via Amazon, through grocery e-commerce retailer Ocado, and also available in various garden centers. They cost roughly £6.99 ($9.50) for a bag of 16.

The other product is a biomass pellet, which is intended for B2B sales. These pellets are used on an industrial level to heat buildings.

Biobean’s pellets and coffee logs.

According to their website, Biobean’s coffee fuel burns 20 percent hotter longer than wood (at least according to tests they’ve run themselves) because of coffee’s natural oils. And no, it doesn’t smell like coffee when you burn it — which is actually kind of a bummer, in my coffee-loving opinion.

Biobean is exploring other ways they can make use of coffee grounds beyond biofuel. They have a team of research scientists working to transform oils from the grounds into a commercial-grade product that could be used in cosmetics or foodservice. (It’s still in the R&D stages.) Last November Biobean also partnered with Shell to develop a diesel fuel made in part with coffee grounds.

In 2016 the company first began producing their briquettes, and today their roughly 30-person team is working to expand production of their coffee ground fuel and figure out new ways to use those ground-up beans. 

Biobean isn’t the only company trying to reduce coffee-related waste. In fact, Biobean isn’t even the only company repurposing spent coffee grounds — I’ve seen companies repurpose grounds as body scrubs or turn them into compost — but they’re doing on a much larger scale. In 2017, they converted the waste from 28 million cups of coffee into biofuel. Which puts the amount of coffee grounds destined for a landfill in perspective. 

By taking such a huge waste product and turning it into something that displaces — at least a little bit — environmentally unfriendly fuel sources like coal, Biobean’s concept is a slam dunk. I for one hope they make it to the U.S. so that my future lattés can find a second life as a biofuel heating someone’s home.

Can #RecipeForDisaster Help Us Stop Wasting So Much Food?

By this point, you’ve probably heard the (admittedly sobering) stats a few times over: according to the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one third of the food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted — almost half of all the fruits and vegetables we grow. At the same time, almost a billion people around the world go hungry. There are quite a few apps trying to reduce the amount of food waste, or redistribute excess food to those in need.

A new social media campaign from the World Food Programme (WFP) wants you to turn food waste from a recipe for disaster into a, well, #RecipeForDisaster. WFP hopes that this hashtag will spark a social media movement that will draw attention to food waste and highlight simple ways that people can reduce their wasted food at home. Here’s how it works:

#RecipeForDisaster: Join the Fight Against Food Waste

The campaign asks you to make a meal out of ingredients that will soon expire, then share photos (or videos) of the dish with the hashtag #RecipeForDisaster. (Be forewarned: A search for that hashtag on Instagram will turn up some odd images that are very much not food-related.) The video also suggests you make a donation to the WFP to help them reach their goal of eradicating world hunger by 2030.

An article in The Guardian argued that millennials’ obsession with Instagraming their food has heightened our expectations about what food should look like, prompting us to buy more than we need and reject perfectly edible food, just because it doesn’t look as nice as it used to. By promoting photos of dishes made with less-than-perfect-looking ingredients, the #RecipeForDisaster campaign hopes that they can fight this trend.

#RecipeforDisaster isn’t the first social campaign to draw awareness to food waste. Perhaps most prominent is Ugly Food & Veg, an Instagram account with over 40K followers that reposts photos of oddly-shaped produce. Imperfect Produce‘s Instagram account, which has with over 68K followers, also highlights nonconventional (“ugly”) fruits and vegetables, as well as ways to use up the entirety of your produce.

Photos from Imperfect Produce’s Instagram.

#RecipeforDisaster could go further than some of these other accounts by asking the consumer to contribute content. If they can gain enough traction (and in the unpredictable realm of social media, that’s a big “if”), they could go far in promoting awareness about a critical issue in our food system. They’re not off to a bad start: the hashtag currently features in 6,300 posts using the hashtag on Instagram and many more on Twitter, including posts from celebrity chef like José Andres. But in our age of constant stimulation, it’s hard to keep anyone’s attention for too long — even on issues as pressing as food waste.

So next time you have an extra brown banana in your fruit bowl, don’t throw it away — turn it into banana bread and post it to the gram with #RecipeforDisaster.

Food Tech News Roundup: Plastic-Free Grocery Stores, Food Waste Accelerators, & Crowd Cow Tackles Pork

This week certainly kept us busy. Bear Robotics, which we were the first to cover, got a $2M investment, and Amazon opened the door to in-car grocery delivery. We also explored meat alternatives, from a tour of JUST’s cultured meat lab to Omnipork’s plant-based pork. Most excitingly of all, we had our first food tech meetup in which we explored the future of recipes.

If you don’t feel news-ed out, we’ve rounded a few food tech stories that caught our eye around the web this week. Great to peruse on a Sunday morning, post-snooze.

Photo: Crowd Cow

Crowd Cow moves to pork
Beginning May 2nd, Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based startup that lets carnivores buy cuts of meat directly from farmers, will expand into pork. Customers will be able to buy various snout to tail porcine products like bacon, pork chops, and sausages from four pig farmers; two on the East Coast, two on the West Coast. This expansion speaks to consumers’ growing interest in food transparency, especially in meat, as well as their demand for convenience — Crowd Cow cuts out the visit to the grocery store and delivers flash-frozen meat directly their customers’ doors.

 

Photo: Somadetect

Documentary on minority women in Agtech
Journalist and filmmaker Amy Wu has created a documentary called “From Farms to Incubators,” which tells the stories of minority women entrepreneurs in agtech in the California area. The film will premiere on May 3rd in the 2018 Steinbeck Festival in Salinas Valley. The documentary profiles minority women who are creating innovation in the agricultural sector through mobile apps, robotics, data systems, and beyond. Agtech, like many tech fields, is male-dominated. (Despite notable exceptions like women-run companies SomaDetect and AgShift.) The screening is free and open to the community.

 

Photo: Hooch

Hooch debuts next-level exclusive subscription
Hooch, the company that lets you claim a free drink every day from one of their participating bars and restaurants, just launched a new subscription level: Hooch Black. It’ll cost you quite a bit more — $295 per year, instead of $9.99 per month — but it has a lot more perks, too. On top of the drink-a-day service, subscribers also get hotel discounts, preferred restaurant reservations, and even tickets to performances like Hamilton or Coachella. Wannabe users also have to fill out an application before they even have the option to pay for the subscription.

CEO Lin Dai told Techcrunch that Hooch Black will continue Hooch’s mission to be the “an antidote to apps that ‘facilitate a couch economy’,” such as food delivery services. Instead of bringing the booze to you, they’re encouraging you to get out and drink it in a bar — and Hooch Black takes that even further by pushing users to go on trips, eat at restaurants, and attend live shows.

 

Photo: Ekoplaza

100% plastic-free grocery store opens in Amsterdam
This Wednesday a grocery store opened in Amsterdam that claimed to be the world’s first plastic-free pop-up store. The shop, dubbed Ekoplaza, has over 700 grocery items according to The Washington Post — and no plastic. Instead, food is packaged in plant-based compostable biofilm or just displayed, packaging-free, in glass, metal, and cardboard containers.

Plastic waste from food packaging is a huge problem — that’s why companies like NASA, the U.S. Army, and Unilever are working on ways to find alternatives. Ekoplaza, and other stores focusing on bulk shopping like Bulk Market, are tackling plastic food packing waste from the consumer shopping side.

 

Edible grasshopper company reportedly has $5M in order requests
This week Israeli edible insect company Hargol FoodTech told CTech that they had already received $5 million in requests for orders from companies in the U.S. and Europe. According to the aforementioned article, Ikea, Whole Foods, and Pepsico have already expressed interest in purchasing the startup’s grasshopper-based protein powder.

If these numbers are accurate, it would indicate a shift towards acceptance of edible insects — especially after recent growth news from Entomo Farms and Aspire/Exo. And if companies like Pepsico and Ikea are really getting on board, bugs could become a mainstream ingredient relatively soon.

 

A new accelerator for startups fighting food waste
Copenhagen-based transport and logistics company A.P. Moller-Marsk is partnering with startup accelerator Rockstart to create a program targeting food waste, reported FoodNavigator. Dubbed FoodTrack, the one-month program will start on June 6th and will offer workshops and guidance from mentors to the 10 startups selected to participate. They hope to help give the startups tools to tackle food waste, specifically in the early stages of the value chain (growth, harvest, and distribution.)

Flashfood and Tyson Partner to Fight Food Waste and Help Food Deserts

If you’re even vaguely interested in the issue of food waste, you’ve probably got the vital stats memorized by now: Forty percent of U.S. food goes to waste. Food waste costs the world $1 trillion annually. And my personal (least) favorite: in the U.S., we waste enough food to fill a college football stadium. Meanwhile, there are 793 million people on earth (PDF) who are starving, and 42.2 Americans living in food deserts (areas without easy access to fresh and healthy food). Not to get all didactic, but something’s definitely rotten in the state of modern food.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. In fact, we’re now in an era where people and organizations aren’t just talking (or writing) about these issues; they’re actually working to fix them.

One such project is the recently announced partnership between Flashfood and Tyson (hat-tip to Fooddive). Together, the two are offering U.S. customers boxes of surplus foods through a direct-to-consumer e-commerce program called flashfoodbox. The 90-day pilot program just kicked off in Detroit, on Earth Day (April 22).

Flashfood successfully runs a similar program (Tyson is not involved) in its native Canada. Tyson, meanwhile, has been donating surplus food to various organizations for years.

Flashfood works directly with the farmers to select produce for the boxes, while Tyson’s role is to donate surplus meats that are perfectly safe to eat but can’t be sold in U.S. grocery stores (e.g., improperly cut chicken breasts). Produce comes from greenhouse growers and farmers across the U.S. “This is all Farm Fresh product, equally as fresh as what you’d see in the store, just rejected from retailers for aesthetic reasons,” says Flashfood CEO and founder, Josh Domingues. After selecting and receiving the food, Flashfood packages and ships the boxes.

To get a box, interested folks can head to the Flashfood website or app, where they have the option to make either a one-time purchase for $44.99 or buy a subscription for 10 percent less. Each box is temperature controlled and contains 15 pounds of surplus food: a combination of produce and protein. Customers can also purchase a box as a donation to Detroit-based food rescue program Forgotten Harvest. The site offers recipes to use when cooking the surplus food.

The catalyst for Flashfood was a phone call Domingues had with his sister, a chef, who had just wrapped a catering event by throwing out $4,000 worth of unused food. After much more reading and research on the topic, Domingues, who worked in finance at the time, found himself pondering the idea of an app specifically designed to help people find unwanted food from restaurants, grocers, and farmers, then sell that food at heavily discounted prices. “I thought about how many other people could benefit,” he says. Young families, students, recent grads with $50,000 worth of debt . . . the list goes on. And, of course, at the top of that list are those living in food deserts — that is, areas where access to fresh, quality food is uncertain and inconsistent.

“Food deserts are a result of city builds based on wealth distribution,” says Domingues. “And when people live outside certain boundaries, they don’t have access to fresh food.”

Why Detroit? “[We want] a city that we think could really benefit people and provide them with fresh produce and protein,” Domingues explains. “Detroit is going through a really fascinating resurgence and we want to be there for it. It’s a city that’s right across the border from Canada. It’s a city that not a lot of tech companies would target.”

The fact that Flashfood is targeting cities that aren’t, in Domingues’ words, “sexy” for tech companies to set up shop is an important part of their overall mission. While the company isn’t actively avoiding the San Franciscos and Austins of the world, getting in on the action, so to speak, in the startup world is not a priority. For Flashfood, the action lies elsewhere: “Sure there’s technology involved in what we’re building, but this is much more technology,” he says. “We’re building a marketplace to fix the failure of modern day food.”

 

Apeel Sciences Wants to Save Your Produce, One Edible Peel at a Time

Apeel Sciences founder and CEO James Rogers was more concerned with paint than produce when he first came up with the idea for the company.

At the time, Rogers was getting his PhD in Materials Sciences, developing a solar paint that could harvest energy. But after hearing a story on the radio about global hunger, he found himself wondering why such a thing existed if an abundance of food was grown every year.

The culprit, as Rogers would discover, wasn’t a lack of food; it was food spoilage. Thus Apeel Sciences was born, and Rogers and his team set to work developing a plant-based peel for produce that, once applied, extends the shelf life of fruits and vegetables. The product, called Apeel, acts as a barrier that retains water inside the produce longer and regulates how fast oxygen gets in.

Stepping away from paint for a moment, Rogers used his background in materials sciences to address the problem, applying the same concepts metallurgists used when creating a coating to protect steel from the elements. Since produce, like iron, degrades when exposed to environmental conditions for a long period of time, couldn’t we use the same solution—a barrier—to slow down the decay?

In trying to answer that question, Rogers discovered that everything needed to create such a barrier already exists—in the food itself. Out of that revelation, (and a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation), Apeel was born.

To create that barrier for produce, Apeel basically takes parts of plants left behind on farms (e.g., tomato rinds, seeds and pulps) and extracts particular lipids from them. Those lipids are then combined in specific ratios, which vary depending on the produce, to create the ideal protective barrier for each fruit and vegetable.

From there, the company sends its specialized Apeel to farmers and suppliers in the form a lightweight powder, which they combine with water and apply to the produce. “Once applied, [Apeel] leaves behind an imperceptible amount of edible plant material on the surface of the fruit that naturally slows down water loss and oxidation—the factors that cause fresh food to spoil,” says Michelle Masek, Head of Marketing for Apeel.

Of course, the product’s main appeal (please kill me for that) is that consumers will have food that stays fresher longer, and isn’t coated in wax for protection against the elements. For example, Masek says Apeel can, “at minimum,” double the shelf life of avocados. Considering that (at least up north) most avocados are already shriveling by the time they hit the major chain grocery stores, that’s welcome news.

But it’s not just consumers who win with the longer shelf life. “It benefits every member of the fresh food supply chain by minimizing waste and extending the transportability of the produce [for] farmers, shippers and retailers,” says Masek. In other words, less waste and longer transport time windows are a win for everyone involved in getting food from the farm to the store.

Right now, Apeel Sciences works with everyone from smallholder farmers and local organic growers to large food brands. It’s currently only focused on fresh produce. Masek also assures me the company is scaling as we speak: “We’re ramped up in a new 105k square-foot facility in Goleta, California where, as an example of scale, we can make enough product to service the global avocado supply.”

Whether the company does end up serving the global supply of avocados isn’t clear. By some accounts, the produce industry didn’t exactly welcome Apeel with open arms. That said, few industries have a uniformly positive reaction when a new player comes in with a “disruptive” idea. And with $40 million in funding so far, plus support from the Gates foundation, Apeel may very well have a real shot at replacing that wax that covers the produce at your local grocer.

3 Low-Tech Solutions That Could Impact a High-Tech Food Industry

Innovative food-related gadgets and practices don’t always have to rely on things like sensors, apps, and machine learning to have a positive impact. In fact, in some parts of the world, these “low-tech” (that is, technologically simple) solutions are often all that’s needed to prevent waste, improve farming practices, and even boost the local economy.

That is to say that low tech, while maybe not as alluring as, say, using sensors to save the bees, plays a bigger role in advancing food than one might initially think. Their simplicity is effective, and often just as interesting, or at least thought provoking, as a high-tech alternative.

Consider fermentation, specifically as a way to curb food waste. Instead of just chucking food that’s about to decay (or selling it at a discount on a digital marketplace), some countries turn to a kind of “controlled decay” through fermentation. This isn’t new. The idea of preservation through decay has been around for thousands of years. And around the world, it’s still a food preservation practice.

This post gives a pretty good rundown of some of the delicacies you can find in Vietnam that exist due to preserving food through fermentation, including rượu nếp, which many Vietnamese believe kills parasites. There’s also fish sauce — the kind you’ll find on restaurant menus anywhere in the world — as well as kimchi, Sauerkraut, and Filmjölk, to name a few. True fermentation connoisseurs, I dare you to try this.

Fermentation honestly seems like kind of a no-brainer in terms of a way for, say, restaurants to preserve food and reduce waste. It’s already a trend amongst foodies, which makes me wonder if, as more and more people make efforts to curb waste, fermentation has a chance to go from delicacy to staple.

Speaking of food spoilage: typically, the closer one gets to the Equator, the faster food decays. So it makes unfortunate sense that in Kenya, fruit and vegetable vendors are constantly losing money because their produce goes bad after only a couple days. The same is true for many places of similar latitude where refrigeration isn’t always readily available.

A company called FreshBox (not to be confused with hydroponic produce company FreshBox Farms) came up with a pretty simple solution: a solar-powered cooling unit — the “box” — that looks a bit like a walk-in fridge, but reportedly costs way less to operate. Each unit can hold 70 crates of produce. Vendors pay 70 Kenyan shillings ($.068) per crate per day.

Food waste is one of the main contributors to millions of people in Africa facing starvation. According to the Rockefeller Foundation, 50 percent of all produce is lost in the post-harvest stage of production. FreshBox may not be able to solve such a massive problem overnight, but it’s proof that serious problems don’t always require a high-tech answer. Sometimes a cold box powered with cheap solar energy will do.

Another pervasive problem the food industry faces is scarcity of arable land. An oft-quoted figure is that by 2050 we’ll have to feed 2 billion more people worldwide. But it’s also generally agreed on that farmers will have to produce more food on less land. Indoor farms that raise plants without soil are one solution, but there’s no proof yet that these “modern” farming systems will be enough.

And some haven’t given up on traditional agriculture land yet. Regenerative agriculture is a land-management strategy that restores soil fertility and resilience and, in the process, sequesters CO2 emissions to mitigate climate change. Like fermentation, practices in regenerative agriculture have been around almost since the dawn of agriculture itself. They include everything from crop rotation, low tillage, installing cover crops, planting borders for bee habitats, and composting, to name a few.

One especially interesting aspect of regenerative agriculture is the role livestock can play — a definite counterpoint to the idea that livestock production is only harming the planet. Some farmers have taken to a practice called “rotational grazing,” where livestock is strategically moved around to graze, so no one part of the land is entirely depleted.

Some farmers and ranchers are already exploring the possibilities of how this seemingly low-tech action could integrate with various high-tech components in order to mitigate the burden of livestock production while also helping the actual soil. And more software is becoming readily available when it comes to overall land management, so it will be interesting to see if it can work in tandem with these age-old farming methods.

A lot of these “low-tech” innovations are currently happening in the developing world, more as a necessity than for some “oh cool” factor. At the risk of over-simplifying the matter, it would be worthwhile for food companies in more developed nations to explore these practices in more detail. Would, for example, something like FreshBox be of use to those at farmer’s markets, or the fruit and vegetable vendors who set up on the streets here in NYC? Could restaurants make more use of fermentation instead of throwing out huge percentages of their inventory?

Doing so would obviously require a lot more effort than just casual interest or enthusiasm. Still, it would behoove us to step away from the burger-flipping robots for a sec and explore such possibilities.

 

Wasting Enough Food to Fill a Stadium? One of These Apps Could Help

Earlier this year, I wrote that the U.S. wastes enough food each year to fill a college football stadium. Meanwhile, on a global level, about one third of the food produced for human consumption gets thrown away. And sometimes it’s for seemingly pointless reasons, like grocery stores throwing out pineapples with crooked tops.

Grocery stores aren’t alone; restaurants, catering companies, and schools, not to mention consumers, all contribute to this stadium-sized food waste problem.

Which is where mobile apps could help. While they’re not the only food waste technology out there, apps have a relatively simple — but effective — mission: cut food waste by connecting the ones with too much food (restaurants, grocers) with those who either need food or want to pay less for it. And a number of these apps now play specific roles, from supplying food-insecure areas with produce to connecting buyers with local food or simply giving city dwellers a cheaper option for dinner.

Below are just a few of the companies and apps worth noting and, should they serve your area, using to source your dinner. Note this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’ve doubtless left off some big ones. Feel free to share ‘em in the comments below.

BuffetGo

As its name suggests, BuffetGo works with lots of markets and buffet-style restaurants, offering consumers insanely discounted prices on leftover breakfast, lunch, and dinner items.

To get food just search within your area on the app, choose a restaurant, and purchase a voucher. (The average price is $5.) The app then designates specific time windows for you to pick food up (usually after the lunch rush or at closing time in the evening/night). You don’t have to purchase a specific meal. Instead, you show up, grab a to-go container, and fill it up as much or as little as you like.

Flashfood

This Canadian company keeps edibles out of landfills by offering them for pickup or delivery.

Participating grocery stores can sell items nearing their expiration date (which would normally be thrown out) through the Flashfood app at discounted prices. Consumers choose the food they want from selections posted to the app, where they also pay for it. They pick the food up directly from the store. At the moment, it looks like the service is only available in Canadian stores.

Flashfood’s other food waste reduction method is compiling boxes of “not-good-enough” food (ahem, pineapples) and shipping them direct to consumers. The contents of the box vary depending on what’s available/not wanted in any given week. Flashfood delivers in Canada as well as Detroit at the moment, and plans to expand to other U.S. cities soon. (In the meantime, U.S. consumers have Imperfect Produce to supply their needs.)

Food For All

If you’re in Boston or NYC, Food For All will sell you discounted meals from local joints. You just have to pick the food up at a designated time.

The company started in collaboration with the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health in 2016. It partners with a pretty wide range of places, from tapas, Indian and Latin American restaurants to bakeries to a marshmallow shop. I’ve tried the app and found that it’s especially handy in finding things I wouldn’t normally pay full price for, like a bottle of cold-pressed juice.

Participating restaurants can also use the app to donate a set number of meals to homeless shelters and other charity organizations.

Food Rescue US

Food Rescue has a proprietary mobile system it uses to match food donors (grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) with receiving agencies in food-insecure areas. So, for example, the algorithm might match a participating deli with a nearby homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Food Rescue delivers the items directly to the receiving agency via volunteer drivers. These drivers — called “food rescuers” — operate much like Lyft drivers, using a map to see available pickups and selecting the ones that are closest or make the most sense for them to pick up. Anyone can become a volunteer driver, regardless of what sort of vehicle they drive or how often they’re available.

Food Rescue operates in multiple states right now, including Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina.

goMkt

This company is basically a food marketplace in app form: cafes, bakeries, restaurants, and delis can use it as a platform on which to post unsold inventory. Users browse what’s on offer or get notified when food becomes available in their area. As with other apps, users pay within the app and can then pick the food up for a heavily discounted price.

According to a recent interview, goMkt will soon launch a B2B version of its app geared towards wholesalers, manufacturers, and large supermarket groups.

A bigger waste problem

One thing that will definitely need to be addressed in the future: packaging. While that’s a post for another day, it’s worth noting that a lot of these restaurants still use to-go cartons made from Styrofoam or other harmful materials. Yes, we need to tackle the actual food part of food waste first. At some point, though, we’ll need to broaden the definition of “waste” in order to address the market as a whole.