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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

ReGrained

Upcycled Food Association Launches Open Enrollment as Upcycling Momentum Grows

This week, the Upcycled Food Association announced that it had opened the doors for anyone who wants to apply for certification.

This news marks the culmination of a year of steady progress for the organization, which is made up of a number of startups and larger companies creating products out of food waste that would have otherwise gone to the landfill.

Last May, the organization put out its official definition for the term “upcycled food:” “Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment.”

At the beginning of 2021, the group launched its certification program for upcycled foods, and this past April it showed off its new certification mark. And during the first half of this year, the group ran a pilot program with 15 members to work out the kinks for its certification process, resulting in companies like Regrained getting certification for its ingredient product.

Now, every company who wants to apply for UFA certification can do so.

For an industry that some market sizers have as big as $46.7 billion, why did it take so long to get serious about certification? While making something valuable out of discarded food outputs is a centuries-old practice, the rapidly growing interest by consumers and new companies positioning their product in recent years was a signal for the industry to get serious about creating an organization that could create a standard.

Retailers also see a bright future in upcycled food. Whole Foods named upcycling as one of the big trends for 2021, while Kroger, a supporter of the UFA, has been investing in young upcycled food brands. And, in the end, it’s this interest by the food retailers that may matter most as they will likely make compliance with UFA certification as one of the key requirements before getting into the store for any upcycled product.

The interest in upcycled food is also a part of a broader interest in companies up and down the food system in tackling the problem of food waste. The pandemic helped accelerate this interest as everyone saw entire crops go to waste, but the reality is rising costs of food products has made reducing food waste not only appealing to sustainability-oriented organizations, but also to the bottom-line focused types in big corporates at CPG, retail and restaurants.

Food Tech Show Live: Dark Kitchens, Dark Grocery

The Spoon team got together on Clubhouse on Friday to talk about the biggest stories of the week. Our special guest was Veronica Fil, the CEO of Grounded Foods.

The stories we discussed include:

If you’d like to join us for the live recording, make sure to follow The Spoon’s Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse, where you’ll find us recording our weekly news review every Friday.

As always, you can listen the most recent episode and past episodes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. To listen to last week’s episode, just click play below.

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.

ReGrained Grapples with the Least Worst Option While Fighting Waste

Upcycling company Regrained is learning that doing the right thing is seldom the same as doing the easy thing, especially when it comes to tackling food waste. The company’s mission is to “align the food we eat with the planet we love,” and that includes not just the product they create, but the packaging it comes in. But when that eco-friendly packaging started to break down, the company had to choose a lesser of two wasting evils.

ReGrained works to reduce food waste by taking spent grain from beermaking that would typically be thrown out and turns it into flour. That flour is then sold to other food producers (Griffith Foods is an investor) and added into the company’s own Regrained snack bars. This leave-no-waste-behind ethos also extended to the wrapper those bars came in.

“We’ve used compostable packaging from the beginning,” Dan Kurzrock, Co-Founder and “Chief Grain Officer” at ReGrained told me by phone, “and drew a really hard line about that being a non-negotiable value for us.”

But as Kurzrock wrote in a corporate blog post last week, that compostable packaging has started failing. When the company was small, it did just-in-time production and delivered its product to retailers close by, so the compostable wrapping worked just fine. But as the company grew and started shipping product on trucks to travel long distance, they noticed the shelf life of their product degrading. Something about the heat and humidty on the trucks during transit was breaking down the moisture barrier in the compostable packaging.

“The problem that’s happened is that we’ve got products out there that are actually only 3 – 4 months into their [nine month] shelf life and are tasting stale,” said Kurzrock.

This left ReGrained in a tough spot. Switching to plastic meant creating more immediate waste, but leaving the situation as is meant their product wouldn’t last as long and would thereby be creating a different type of waste. As Kurzrock wrote in his post, it was a decision he and the company wrestled with:

We have lost a lot of sleep over the irony of the situation: in our effort to prove that waste can be designed out of the food system, we began to create waste through staling product. We were at risk in a number of areas, including the erosion of trust with our trade partners and consumers, the cost of damage control, and the maintenance of a failing status-quo. Without change course, we would have compromised our solvency and thwarted our primary mission: fighting food waste.

In the end, ReGrained decided to go with plastic packaging in order to make sure customers get the freshest product. Kurzrock hopes that they can switch back to certified compostable packaging within a year.

But as Kurzrock explained both in his blog post and to me over the phone, the issue of compostable packaging is actually quite complicated, and if we want to reduce waste in our food, there are a number of different issues that need to be addressed:

  • There are obviously technical issues with compostable materials that need to be improved.
  • Plastic costs about a third as much as compostable packaging so there is less incentive for companies to switch over.
  • Consumers need more access to composting and to voice their preference for waste-free packaging.
  • Composters don’t even like compostable wrapping because they aren’t sure which wrappers are compostable, and whether they actually add nutrients to the compost.

Thankfully, there is an increasingly loud chorus encouraging the reduction in waste throughout our food system. Whether it’s upcyclers turning food that would otherwise be tossed into new products, or marketplaces selling food near its expiration date, or even the big players like Nestlé and Pepsi experimenting with reusable containers, companies of all sizes are learning that by working together they can make doing the right thing the easy thing.