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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food waste

ReGrained Launches New Cookie Dough with Doughp and Partners with Future Food Funds in Japan

ReGrained, an ingredient company that upcycles spent brewery grain, and Doughp, an e-commerce site for gourmet cookie dough, partnered to create a new cookie dough flavor that incorporates Regrained SuperGrain flour. The new flavor launched April 1 on DoughP’s website.

The cookie dough collaboration is called “Beast Mode Brownie”. With the addition of ReGrained Supergrain +, the protein content is double the amount of Doughp’s regular doughs, and the fiber content is six times higher. Dan Kurzrock, the cofounder of ReGrained, said that the company envisions many collaborations like this in the future. “A lot of people perceive us as a consumer goods company because we’ve launched a few products and packaged goods, championing upcycled foods, but really we’re an ingredient company powered by food technology,” Kurzrock told me by phone this week.

Additionally, ReGrained announced its partnership with and investment from Future Foods Fund in Japan at the beginning of March. The investment was not disclosed, but it will be used to create collaborations with food companies in Japan to launch new products in this market.

ReGrained uses spent grain from craft breweries, with mixture of about 95% barley, with some wheat and rye (one six-pack of beer uses about one pound of grain, so there is plenty of spent grain to go around throughout the country). The company has a patent on the way it upcycles spent grain, and its final product is a flour called ReGrained SuperGrained+. The flour has the same protein as almond flour, is prebiotic, and contains three times more fiber than whole wheat flour.

Kurzrock is the officer on the board of the Upcycled Food Association, which includes around 150 companies that use upcycled food for food or beauty products. Within this association, a few other companies use spent grain from breweries to create new food products. Rise also makes high protein and high fiber flour, as well as baking mixes, granola, and brownies. The Upcycled Grain Project makes a variety of bars and crackers. Leashless Labs uses beer grains to make dog treats.

ReGrained’s current products include several different flavors of snack puffs, which can be purchased on its website for $3.99 a bag. The cookie dough collaboration will be available for at least the rest of this quarter, and a two-pack of 16oz containers costs $39.

Apeel Unites Avocado Suppliers Through an Expanded Network Fighting Food Waste

Apeel Sciences announced today that more than 20 leading suppliers from the global avocado industry have joined its network in an effort to keep more food out of landfills. New partners from the U.S., Latin America, and Europe will use Apeel’s plant-based coating technology that extends the life of fruits and vegetables, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Doing so will further reduce food waste at consumer-facing levels like retail and the home.

Apeel’s technology, which is a food-safe powder coating made from plant oils, acts as a barrier that keeps water and oxygen out of the produce items to which it is applied. While the company is working with a few different produce types, among them asparagus and citrus fruits — it’s best known for its avocado coating. Apeel-coated avocados can be found in major U.S. grocery stores. The company said today that in 2020, it kept roughly 5 million avocados out of the landfill, and promises “much greater impacts” in 2021.

Keeping food out of landfills isn’t just a matter of saving grocery retailers and consumers money (though that’s an important benefit). Food waste is a leading contributor to climate change, and produce is one of the most common types of foods to go to waste. Recently, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that 14 percent of the world’s food is lost between the harvest and retail stages of the supply chain.

Apeel’s technology builds time into that food supply chain by extending the shelf life of produce that’s in transit and, depending on the region it’s in, may not have the advantage of cold chain infrastructure to aid in the preservation process. And as CEO James Rogers told me last year, building this time into the supply chain allows produce to reach exporters before it goes bad. Meanwhile, joining Apeel’s network can mean greater access to retail markets for many suppliers. 

“[Food is] only valuable if the underlying infrastructure is there to make it valuable,” he said.

Among those suppliers joining the Apeel network are El Parque in Chile and Agricola Cerro Prieto in Peru. In the U.S., companies like Calavo, Del Monte, and West Pak have also joined the network.

Food Tech News: Electrolyte Beer and Food Waste Jet Fuel

Welcome to the weekend, and your weekly Food Tech News round-up. If you indulged in too many Irish stouts this past Wednesday for St. Patrick’s Day, you might want to try some electrolyte-infused beer over the weekend. In addition to health-conscious beer, we also have news on food waste being considered for jet fuel and a plant-based egg company in Singapore.

Breweries are infusing beer with electrolytes and healthy ingredients

Do you like your beer with a twist of lime? Or how about with an infusion of electrolytes? A few breweries in the U.S are offering low-ABV beers infused with electrolytes and other nutritious ingredients. Zelus Beer Company (Massachusetts) was founded by a triathlete, and the brewery produces low-alcohol beer made with calcium, potassium, and different salts. Harpoon Brewery (Massachusetts) makes a beer with Mediterannean sea salt, chia seeds, and buckwheat. Mispillion River Brewing (Delaware) has a Berliner Weisse on tap that is infused with berries and a variety of undisclosed electrolytes. These beers are geared towards those who follow an active and healthy lifestyle but still want to enjoy a beer without feeling the negative side effects of alcohol. We’re not sure if they will actually rehydrate lost electrolytes, but an ice-cold beer after a hard workout is delicious regardless.

Photo from Unsplash

Commercial aviation industry considers using food waste for fuel

Taking a trip by plane adds a lot to your carbon footprint, especially if that trip is international. To combat the unsustainable nature of traveling by plane, the commercial aviation industry is looking into alternative options for jet fuel. One that has been presented in a study conducted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the use of volatile fatty acids derived from “wet waste.” Food waste, animal manure, and wastewater are the components of wet waste, and researchers extracted volatile fatty acids (VFAs) from this mix. This possible alternative can reduce food waste going to the landfill, carbon dioxide emissions, and soot released into the air by 34 percent.

Photo from Float Foods’ Instagram

Plant-based egg start-up Float Foods receives Temasek grant

Float Foods is a Singapore-based start-up that has developed a whole plant-based egg product, and this week the company received a grant from the Temasek Foundation. The amount of the grant was undisclosed, and it came from Temasek’s Ecosperity Innovations Grant, which aims to assist start-ups with an emphasis on sustainability in Singapore. The company’s proprietary product is made from legumes and called OnlyEg. Float Foods says it is the first to create a whole plant-based egg product in Asia; other plant-based eggs typically come in a powder or liquid form. Float Foods aims to bring its product on shelves in Singapore in 2022.

UNEP: 931M Tons of Food Sold to Consumers Gets Wasted

A total of 931 million tons, or 17 percent, of food sold at consumer-facing levels was thrown out in 2019, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and partner organization WRAP. This includes food sold to retail (e.g., the grocery store) and foodservice businesses, as well as consumer households.

The Food Waste Index 2021 report, released this week, examine’s the world’s progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 12.3, which aims to halve per capita global food waste at retail and consumer levels.

In its own words, the Index 2021 report “sheds new light on the magnitude of food waste, and on the prevalence of household food waste on all continents, irrespective of country income levels.”

It also notes that until now, the scale of the world’s food waste problem hasn’t been fully understood. A previous 2011 estimate from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) famously found that one-third of all the world’s food goes to waste. However, researchers acknowledged “a lack of household food waste data outside of Europe and North America at the time of their estimate. Now, the Index 2021 suggests that consumer-level food waste is “more than twice the previous FAO estimate” and that it is found “to be broadly similar across country income groups. This deviates from the oft-told narrative that consumer-level food waste mainly happens in developed nations, while food production and transportation losses are the territory of developing countries. 

Mapping 152 food waste data points across 54 countries, the report also found:

  • Of the 931 million tons of food wasted at consumer levels, 61 percent came from households, 26 percent from foodservice, and 13 percent from retail. 
  • Roughly 8–10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with food not consumed.
  • A total of 690 million people worldwide were hungry in 2019, and that number is expected to rise.
  • Worldwide, 3 billion people “cannot afford a healthy diet.”

The report does more than simply highlight these rather bleak statistics. In an effort to support SDG 12.3, it also includes a methodology by which countries can measure their food waste at consumer-facing levels. “Countries using this methodology will generate strong evidence to guide a national strategy on food waste prevention, that is sufficiently sensitive to pick up changes in food waste over two- or four-year intervals, and that enables meaningful comparisons between countries globally.”

Reducing food waste can cut greenhouse gas emissions, lessen pollution, conserve land and other resources, and make food more available worldwide. The UNEP’s new analysis and methodology aims to do that by helping more countries around the world take actions driven by more and better data about food waste.

Bread to Booze: Misadventure Distillery Makes Vodka from Surplus Baked Goods

What if you could drink booze and help save the world by reducing food waste? That may be slightly hyperbolic, but Vista, California-based Misadventure Distillery aims to reduce the amount of food waste that enters the landfill by producing vodka made from surplus baked goods.

Misadventure Vodka is distilled twelve times and contains 40 percent ABV, and the main difference between it and other vodka is that instead of using grains or potatoes as the main ingredient, it uses unsold baked goods.

I spoke with Whit Rigali, one of the co-founders of Misadventure Distillery, to learn more about the company’s food waste-based vodka and mission. Rigali, a former bartender, and Sam Chereskin, an agricultural economist, wanted to start a distillery, but do so with sustainability in mind. When the two read the National Resources Defense Council’s report that revealed that 40 percent of food in the US goes to waste, they knew food waste was the sustainability issue they wanted to tackle and launched the company in 2017.

The co-founders began working with food banks in San Diego to gather surplus bread, pastries, and other baked goods that had been sent in. Food banks typically do not distribute these types of food because they are considered empty calories, but these sugar and starch-laden foods are perfect for creating alcohol. Misadventure Vodka can essentially use any type of baked good, like bread, bagels, donuts, croissants, cake, and cookies, but the company tries to separate out items like buttery garlic bread for example.

During the distillation process, gluten and most of the baked good flavors are removed. However, Rigali said that Misadventure’s vodka still retains a subtle vanilla flavor and has a silky mouthfeel. The leftover waste from the vodka-making process is donated to a compost facility local to the area. Rigali said, “If everybody in the U.S. switched to drinking Misadventure, we would divert the same amount of carbon dioxide as a forest the size of Yosemite National Park.”

It is estimated that 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year globally, so there is a huge opportunity for companies to make edible food and drinks from this waste. A company in Sweden, Gotland Spirits, recently launched a new vodka made from pasta, bread, crackers, and milk powder that would otherwise be wasted. Toast Ale, a brewery based in the UK, uses bread that would end up in the landfill to make it beer.

Misadventure Vodka can be purchased on the company’s website with shipping available to 40 states in the U.S., and one 750ml bottle costs $24.99. Additionally, the product can be purchased at local retailers and restaurants in San Diego county. The company has raised an undisclosed amount of funding.

Kroger’s Zero Hunger/Zero Waste Foundation Is Taking Applications for Its Innovation Accelerator

Startups, take note. The Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation (aka, the “Foundation”) is now taking applications for the second cohort of its Innovation Fund. The program, done in partnership with Village Capital, looks for companies developing new technologies, processes, and other solutions that combat food waste.

The Foundation says this could include rescuing and upcycling “imperfect” food. “Upcycled food is the next frontier in recovering and repurposing food that may otherwise go to landfills,” the Foundation said in a statement this week. In this context, upcycling could mean either using discarded food to create new foods (e.g., upcycled cookies), ingredients, or even meal kits. The program also lumps food rescue — selling surplus food to consumers — as part of the upcycling process, too.

Both areas are becoming more popular in the U.S., with companies like Imperfect Foods, Misfits Market, Renewal Mill, and Goodfish leading the way. Imperfect was actually a part of the first cohort for the Innovation Fund, along with Food Forest, mobius, Replate, and others. About 400 startups applied for the first cohort, so we can expect as many if not more vying for a spot in this next installment of the program.

The six-month-long Kroger program includes one week of virtual programming followed by monthly cohort sessions. The entire program runs from late May through November 2021.

A total of 10 startups will be selected from the applicant pool. Selected companies each receive $100,000 in upfront seed grant funding, with the chance for an additional $100,000 grant based on “achievement of identified program milestones.” Virtual workshops that cover investment readiness and technical skill development, and also provides networking opportunities with mentors and potential investors.

Two startups of the chosen 10 will be picked at the end of six months to receive an additional $250,000 in funding.

Applications are open until April 1, 2021.

Just Salad’s Reusable Bowls Are Going Off-Premises, Too

New York-based restaurant chain Just Salad plans to pilot its popular reusable bowl program for digital orders in the near future. The announcement comes as part of the fast-casual chain’s annual sustainability report, which was just released, and tracks company progress on making its business more eco-friendly.

If you’ve ever set foot inside a Just Salad, you’ll know the company’s line of colorful bowls made from heavy plastic resin that can be washed and reused on a regular basis. Just Salad started its reusable bowl program back in 2006 with the aim to cut down on single-use packaging for to-go orders. Customers could purchase a reusable bowl (mine cost $1 when I bought it in 2012), take it home, wash it, and bring it back for a refill each time they bought a meal from the restaurant.

In its most recent sustainability report, Just Salad said that sales of its reusable bowls grew more than 100 percent year-over-year in 2019 — then were abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In New York City and elsewhere, reusable containers were banned from restaurants in an effort to lessen the spread of the coronavirus. Simultaneously, homebound customers switched to digital ordering and delivery formats, neither of which lend themselves to reusable packaging.

Now, in 2021, Just Salad said it plans to expand its reusable bowl program to serve off-premises channels like delivery. Under the new phase of the program, customers can order digitally for delivery and pickup. Food arrives in a Just Salad reusable bowl, which can be returned to any Just Salad location for cleaning and sanitizing afterwards. The phase is currently in beta and only available at one location, at the chain’s 3rd Avenue spot in Manhattan.

Just Salad told Nation’s Restaurant News this week that without any extra marketing done, roughly 30 percent of customers have already used the program since it launched earlier this year. 

The expanded reusable program is one item on a growing list of initiatives Just Salad has around sustainability — an area the company was championing long before the pandemic. Another notable item this week’s report mentions is Zero Waste delivery pilot. In partnership with NYC-based company DeliverZero, the Just Salad location in Park Slope, Brooklyn offers delivery items in reusable containers. Customers have six weeks to return the containers to either a delivery person or at a Just Salad location. Multiple other NYC restaurants work with DeliverZero, many of them local businesses. 

Hopefully that number grows, and quickly. If delivery and off-premises restaurant formats aren’t going away, nor is the mounting packaging waste problem, not if we don’t do anything to stop it. Restaurants account for 78 percent of all disposable packaging, much of it plastic. And plastic production has increased 200-fold since 1950, growing at a rate of 4 percent per year since 2000, with most plastic winding up in the landfill or ocean. Needless to say, our appetites for off-premises aren’t helping this problem.

In response, circular-economy-style delivery is slowly but surely making its way into the restaurant industry. Reusables are by no means the norm yet. However, major chains like Burger King and McDonald’s have various tests underway, which is encouraging for the industry as a whole.

Just Salad, meanwhile, has a number of other sustainability initiatives on the table, including its meal kit program aimed at combating both packaging food waste and a partnership with food “rescue” company Too Good to Go.

Meijer and Flashfood Expand Food Waste Program Across Grocery Stores

Grocery chain Meijer announced this week it is on track to complete its food waste reduction program with Flashfood this year, with plans to expand the initiative across all Meijer stores in the Midwest.

The program, which involves customers buying surplus Meijer food via the Flashfood app, originally launched in 2019 and was slated for a wider expansion in 2020. That expansion was delayed when COVID-19 hit, but Meijer is now expanding the program from its original Detroit, Michigan location to Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, and the rest of Michigan. 

Flashfood, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario in Canada, also has “Flashfood zones” available in multiple provinces across Canada as well as in New York and Pennsylvania. The company works with grocery retailers to rescue surplus or cosmetically imperfect foods that would ordinarily go to the landfill.

From the consumer side, users first select their grocery store on the Flashfood app and set it as their location. They can then browse the foods available for purchase via the Flashfood program. Since these items are either surplus or unsellable (for cosmetic reasons) on the stores regular shelves, they are usually priced at a discount, sometimes 50 percent lower.

After selecting and paying for food, the user heads to their designated grocery store and confirms their order with a customer service or staff person. From there, they can retrieve their items from a Flashfood fridge, which is usually kept at the front of the store. As of right now, the process is somewhat manual, since users have to confirm their order with a human being at the store, rather than simply unlocking the fridge with a QR or text code via their smartphone.

The concept of rescuing then reselling cosmetically imperfect produce from the grocery store was, until recently, a fairly niche market in the U.S. The last year has seen the category expand, however. Too Good to Go launched in certain U.S. markets, while Imperfect Foods expanded its grocery e-commerce platform to include pantry staples, meat, and dairy items, in addition to rescued produce. Likewise, Misfits Market runs a robust e-commerce platform in the U.S. for reselling surplus food from grocery stores.

Flashfood’s partnership with Meijer, and this current expansion, will give Flashfood substantially more visibility in parts of the U.S. While the company has not confirmed as much, this could lead to partnerships with other major American grocery retailers in the future.

Skål! Gotland Spirits Launches Vodka Made From Food Waste

Gotland, Sweden-based Gotland Spirits this week launched a new liquor product called SPILL, which the company says is a “premium alcoholic beverage made from food waste.” The product, a vodka, became available to folks in Sweden on Feb. 16, according to materials sent to The Spoon.

To get this “truly sustainable” spirit, the company teamed up with Coop, one of Sweden’s largest grocery retailers. Gotland “rescues” surplus food from the retailer. Among the food types mentioned are pasta, crackers, fruit, and milk powder. 

“We thought, what if instead of producing new carbs, can we recycle what’s already out there,” Johan Johansson, founder of Gotland Spirits, said in a statement sent to The Spoon. By his account, the resulting vodka is on par with Russian luxury vodkas in terms of quality and smoothness.

The company did not provide extensive details on the technical process of creating booze from food waste, but the concept is similar to what other beer, wine, and spirits companies have done in the past: rescue food that would otherwise go to the landfill and use it in the distillation or brewing process to create the beverage. Misadventure Vodka, based in Southern California, makes vodka from rescued baked goods. On the beer side of things, a company called Toast makes craft beer from surplus bread.

Both the U.S. and the EU are similar in terms of where the most food gets wasted along the supply chain: at consumer-facing levels, including grocery stores. Food waste per capita in these regions totals to about 95-115 kg/year, compared to 6-11 kg/year in Subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The EU specifically wastes around 88 million tons of food annually, or upwards of €143 billion, according to the European Commission.

Gotland Spirits is a relatively small distillery, so for now, at least, SPIL is only available in Sweden.

A Designer From Spain Has Turned Food Waste Into a Skincare Line

Redistributing cosmetically imperfect produce via grocery and restaurant services is one way to keep food out of landfills. Turning those cosmetically imperfect fruits and veggies into actual cosmetics is another method, and one Spanish designer Júlia Roca Vera is taking with her Lleig skincare line.

Dezeen, a website covering all things design, profiled the process Vera used to make four different skincare products from a single piece of fruit, in this case an orange that was discarded because it was cosmetically unacceptable by supermarket standards. From that orange, Vera, who is currently a design and engineering student, created moisturizer, a soap, a potpourri, and a juice for drinking.

Lleig (Catalan for “ugly”) is as much a conceptual design project as it is a skincare line, with products coming in reusable clay containers and the suggestion to complete certain rituals during the skincare process. Vera worked with Espigoladors, a social enterprise that “rescues” cosmetically imperfect produce, to source the food used for the project. While she focused on an orange, she told Dezeen that her process would also work will apples, bananas, carrots, and other fruits and vegetables.

There’s no way to purchase Lleig right now, as it’s more design statement than scalable product at the moment. The larger point of the project is to raise awareness about why we throw certain foods away as well as what can be done with those items instead of tossing them in the landfill. Vera told Dezeen that she “hopes to encourage a holistic approach to beauty that prioritises health and wellbeing over external appearance.” That goes for humans and produce items alike. 

In the U.S., rescuing cosmetically “unfit” produce is still a fairly new area of the food industry, with its main players companies like Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods that sell this rescued food as discounted groceries. Whether skincare made from food waste every becomes a scalable notion remains to be seen. However, the idea does give us one more reason to keep food out of the landfill.

Sustainable E-Grocer Imperfect Foods Increases Series D Round to $110M

Imperfect Foods has increased its recently announced series D round to $110 million, up from $95 million. The increased round now includes two additional investors, Hamilton Lane and Blisce, and brings Imperfect’s total funding to $229.1 million.

The company says it will increase the production capacity of its online grocery store and improve the shopping experience for customers. 

Imperfect Foods’ evolution from food redistribution service to full-stack online grocer started in 2019 when the company began offering “rescued” foods beyond produce items: meats, pantry staples, and dairy, for example. The idea was to extend Imperfect’s original modus operandi — rescuing surplus food and selling it to consumers for a discount — to any type of food, whether an avocado or an unused cheese plate rescued from an airline.

Rescuing food is one tactic in the fight against food waste. Surplus and so-called “ugly” groceries, inventory at restaurants, and, yes, cheese plates and other food items from airplanes, would typically go to the landfill, contributing to the world’s multibillion-dollar food waste problem. Redirecting that cosmetically imperfect but perfectly edible food to consumers also informs the business models of Misfits Markets, Flashfood, Too Good to Go, and several others.

More investment dollars for Imperfect and these other companies suggests U.S. consumers are receiving the concept of ugly-food redistribution more in 2021 than they have in the past. Historically, the category has been more popular in Europe. However, with online grocery projected to be 21.5 percent of total grocery sales by 2025 and awareness of our food waste problem increasing, more folks are willing to pay less for their food items, even if they come with imperfections.

Imperfect said in a press release sent to The Spoon that the Series D round, including the add-on investments, will help the company build “the most sustainable online grocery service.” Currently, users in parts of the U.S. can sign up at the company’s e-commerce storefront to receive deals on grocery delivery. Imperfect currently serves the West South Central, Midwest, and Northeast regions and the West Coast. 

ReFED: Food Waste has ‘Leveled Off’ Since 2016, But More Must Be Done

The total amount of food wasted in the U.S. has leveled off since 2016, while food waste per capita has decreased 2 percent over the last three years, according to ReFED’s newly launched data hub, the Insights Engine. But more must be done to meet the country’s goal of cutting food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

First announced last year, the Insights Engine is an online hub for data and analysis related to the global food waste problem. Among the other findings ReFED released today:

  • In 2019, 35 percent of food went uneaten or unsold. That’s the equivalent of throwing away $408 billion or 1.9 percent of U.S. GDP.
  • More than 50 percent of waste at the farm level is from food that does not get harvested but is perfectly edible.
  • Seventy percent of food waste at restaurants and foodservice businesses comes from customers not finishing their meals.
  • At-home food waste remains the largest generator of food waste in the U.S.

ReFED estimates that an annual investment of $14 billion will be needed to implement the kinds of solutions that will reduce food waste by 45 million tons annually. The Insights Engine reviews over 40 of these solutions, analyzing them based on things like net economic benefit, greenhouse gas emissions reduced, jobs created, and meals recovered. The Engine also provides a directory of organizations helping fight food waste, a tool that tracks current and upcoming food waste policies, and an “impact calculator” that puts into numbers the impact of food waste on the climate, economy, and population.

Roughly 1.3 billion tons of edible food worldwide goes to waste each year, and experts predict this number will jump to 2.1 billion by 2030. Solutions to this problem span everything from food rescue companies to technologies for preservation, cold storage, harvest and post harvest, and many other ideas, tools, and processes.

As a companion to the Insights Engine, ReFED also released its “Roadmap to 2030” framework today, which will help the organization implement the solutions found in the Insights Engine. It outlines seven “key action areas” for fighting food waste over the next 10 years, and also includes a financial analysis of where investments (public, private, philanthropic, and capital) should be directed.