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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

upcycled

Where Food Comes From Acquires Upcycled Certification Program From Upcycled Food Association

Third-party verifier of food production practices Where Food Comes From, Inc. (WFCF) announced today it had acquired the Upcycled Certified Program from the Upcycled Food Association.

The Upcycled Food Association launched its certification program in early 2021, becoming, at the time, the first certification program for the nascent upcycled food industry. Since then, 93 companies have obtained Upcycled Certified status for over 480 products, according to the Upcycled Food Association. The group claims it has helped divert an average of 390,000 tons of food waste annually.

WFCF makes sense as a natural home for the Upcycled certification program given the company’s focus on with food industry verification. The company manages verification programs for organic foods, non-GMO foods, and the humane treatment of animals among others. And now with the acquisition of the UPFA’s verification program, they add a fairly fast-growing new category to their stable.

As for the Upcycled Food Association’s future, the non-profit group looks to continue to facilitate the growth of the industry even as it exits the verification business.

“The Upcycled Food Association is looking forward to ongoing collaboration to effectively serve the broader food waste reduction community and to ensuring that upcycled food companies have the resources they need to develop and bring to market new upcycled food products,” wrote the Upcycled Food Association CEO Angie Crone on her Linkedin.

Atomo Raises $40 Million To Scale Its Beanless, Upcycled Coffee

Today Seattle-based Atomo announced it had raised $40 million in Series A funding to scale production of its beanless coffee, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon.

When the company’s founders made the rounds in 2019, they pitched Atomo as the first ‘molecular’ coffee company. They had just emerged from the company’s chief scientist’s garage with a prototype of a ready-to-drink coffee made from upcycled ingredients, and eventually launched a Kickstarter with plans to make a ground coffee substitute that, when brewed, tasted and caffeinated like coffee.

The company eventually shifted its focus to developing pre-brewed products and started shipping small batches of its canned cold brew made from upcycled date seeds as well as grapes, chicory, and caffeine from tea. According to the company, they are still working on developing grounds product to allow customers to brew their own beanless coffee at home.

With today’s news, the company’s messaging is firmly centered around making “beanless” coffee crafted from upcycled ingredients. The shift away from ‘molecular’ as the primary consumer-facing descriptor makes sense given how consumers want cleaner ingredient lists, and terms like ‘beanless’ and ‘upcycled’ are less intimidating than more science-forward words like ‘molecular’ or ‘synthetic’ (which can connote non-natural ingredients).

No matter the messaging, the company’s focus has always been to create a coffee alternative that tasted like coffee but is made from more sustainable (and less challenged) plant-based ingredients. With Series A funding from S2G Ventures, AgFunder, and Horizons Ventures, the company has the resources to scale its manufacturing, invest in R&D and officially launch its consumer cold brew product.

Wine Bottles Can Now Be Reused Thanks to Good Goods’ Return Program

You have probably heard the popular waste management phrase, “Reduce, reuse, and recycle.” The order of these words represents the hierarchy of what option is best, and that certainly applies when it comes to glass bottles. While a glass bottle is easy enough to recycle, reuse is better since recycling requires energy, water, and other resources and can even release pollutants.

When it comes to wine bottles, a New York-based startup Good Goods hopes to keep the containers out of landfill and recycling bin through its wine bottle return and reuse program. The company launched its program in New York City in 2020. Two years prior, it had launched a grab-and-go food brand in reusable containers, which gave them the framework to create the model they use now.

Today, Good Goods takes a multi-pronged approach to bottle reuse. First, they work with about 60 wine producers and brands across the U.S. and sign them up for the bottle reuse program. Then, standardized bottles (branded with Good Goods’s label along the bottom edge of the bottle) are provided to the wineries. These bottles are filled with wine, and then eventually shipped to participating retailers.

Customers then purchase bottles of wine at the participating retailers. When the wine is finished, empty wine bottles can then be returned to the same store from which it was initially purchased or to another participating retailer. Good Goods operates a customer loyalty program to incentivize the bottle return, and customers receive $1 off their next purchase.

Good Goods gathers the used bottles and brings them to its facilities, and then a third-party company sanitizes the bottles. The bottles are redistributed to wineries, and the process starts again.

A visual explanation of how Good Goods operates

According to the Good Goods, customers have returned 20,000 wine bottles to date. Over 50 retailers located in New York and New Jersey have joined the program, and the company currently has a waitlist of 100 retailers wanting to sign up. By the end of 2022, Good Goods’ goal is to expand to New York, California, Texas, and Washington and onboard 600 retailers.

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.

Eat the Change Launches Jerky Made From Upcycled Mushrooms

Mushrooms naturally have a meaty texture and savory flavor, which makes them perfect as an ingredient for plant-based meat alternatives, so it’s no surprise that companies in the alt-protein space are using them to create everything from bacon to steak. One company, Eat the Change, recently joined the list of players with the launch its plant-based jerky made from mushrooms.

Eat the Change was founded by Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea and chair of the board at Beyond Meat, and Spike Mendelson, a celebrity chef and restauranteur. To celebrate the launch of the company’s mushroom jerky, I was invited to a virtual tasting, where I got to sample the five flavors of jerky: hickory smokehouse, habanero bbq, maple mustard, sea salt + cracked black pepper, and teriyaki ginger. (Maple mustard is my favorite!) Besides being eaten straight out of the bag, the jerky can also be used in sandwiches, noodle dishes, and other recipes.

Organic crimini and portobello mushrooms are the base of the jerky, and the company uses imperfect mushrooms cosmetically unfit for retail that would otherwise get thrown away. The mushrooms are marinated, and then instead of using liquid smoke flavoring, the company actually smokes the mushrooms over hickory branches. The jerky naturally has high amounts of several B vitamins, and one bag contains 4 grams of protein.

Although plant-based burgers get a lot of attention, there is room for expansion in the plant-based jerky space. Several other companies are also using mushrooms as the key ingredient for their plant-based jerky. Moku Foods uses king oyster mushrooms, while Pan’s Mushroom Jerky uses shiitake. Akua uses both seaweed and mushrooms to create its plant-based jerky.

Eat the Change mushroom jerky is currently available in 300 stores nationwide, including Whole Foods, Erewhon, MOM’s Organic Market, Fresh Market, and Stop & Shop. It is also available for purchase on the company’s website, and the retail price is around $5.99 for a 2 oz bag.

Tyson Discontinues ¡Yappah!, Its Crispy Snack Bites Made with Upcycled Ingredients

Tyson’s brand of snacks made from rescued food ingredients, ¡Yappah!, is shutting down less than a year after it was announced.

¡Yappah!’s first product was a line of crispy snack bites made from spent barley from Molson Coors beer brewing, vegetable purées from juicing, and its own upcycled chicken breast trim. The snacks were packaged in recyclable aluminum canisters and had 8 to 10 grams of protein per serving.

“We’re sorry, but ¡Yappah! Chicken Crisps are no longer available,” the Yappah website reads. “The team decided that the product did not offer the viability that would enable continued investment.”

Tyson first announced the brand in May of 2018. After both a Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaign, which raised the relatively small amounts of $11,674 and $13,542, respectively, it launched the crisps during a short trial at a Chicago supermarket in July 2018 and then began selling them online. On Amazon a 6-pack of the crisps, which came in 1.25-ounce cans, sold for $21.94. That shakes out to $3.65 a can, which is pricier than the majority of snack options out there, even high-end ones.

According to reviews, the ¡Yappah! crisps weren’t exactly a slam dunk. The space in the aluminum cans meant that the crisps sometimes arrived at consumers’ doorsteps crushed into crumbs, and the can’s sharp edges made them tricky for on-the-go snacking. Some customers also balked at paying such a high price for ingredients that would typically be thrown away or used as animal feed. As one reviewer put it: They Sacrificed Function for the Message.

The crisps were the first product of the ¡Yappah! brand, which would feature products made from sustainable and upcycled ingredients. They were the first product from the Tyson Innovation Lab, a team within Tyson meant to bring consumer products to market in just six months.

In the end, ¡Yappah! crisps were too expensive, too difficult to eat, and maybe too niche to attract enough consumers to keep the product viable. Nonetheless, it’s encouraging to see a major food corporation like Tyson investing so heavily in creative ways to feature oft-forgotten ingredients, even if it didn’t work out in the end.

Despite a big company like Tyson’s setback, several smaller companies are still in the upcycling game. Regrained makes snack bars out of spent grain from beer brewing. Toast Ale upcycles stale bread into beer. Misfit Foods turns pulp from juicing into blended sausages, and Pulp Pantry repurposes the same pulp into fruity snacks.

This might not be the last upcycling endeavor we see from Tyson. “Food waste is still a focus from us,” said a statement we received from a company spokesperson. Hopefully the ¡Yappah! flop doesn’t discourage them, or other Big Food companies, from continuing the fight.