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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

upcycling

HomeBiogas’ Backyard System Turns Home Food Waste into Green Cooking Fuel

I started composting when I moved to Seattle last year. I felt very virtuous depositing my banana peels and coffee grounds into a special organic waste bin at the back of my house, but I didn’t get to reap any benefits. Besides, you know, helping the planet.

Those who want to get more bang for their food scraps could consider investing in a HomeBiogas (Ed note: Roommates, I promise I’ll ask you before I buy one.) HomeBiogas LTD just launched a new version of its eponymous closed-loop system which turns kitchen leftovers into cooking fuel and fertilizer. The company started a Kickstarter yesterday, which reached its $50,000 goal in less than two hours. At the time of this writing, the project has raised roughly $170,000.

The HomeBiogas is about the size of a large doghouse and resembles a black bouncy castle. Only instead of letting kids crawl in to play, you fill up the system’s chute with waste materials like food scraps, animal manure, and even, um, human waste, if you’re feeling especially hardcore. Bacteria digest the organic matter to create biogas, which can be used to cook on the countertop biogas stove which comes with each purchase. Two kilograms (or 1.5 gallons) of food waste makes enough fuel for two hours of cooking, with the added byproduct of liquid fertilizer.

According to the Kickstarter page, the new HomeBiogas is easier to put together, fully recyclable, and 30 percent taller than the previous version.

Interested backers can nab a HomeBiogas for the Super Early Bird price of $399. Normally with crowdfunded physical products, we have to issue a warning that hardware is hard, and not all projects make it through the manufacturing process in the estimated time, or at all. However, since HomeBiogas has already shipped over 5,000 of its last-gen systems, it seems pretty safe to assume they’ll be able to deliver on this upgrade.

The question is whether or not you’d actually want to have a sizeable inflatable bacteria factory in your backyard. Admittedly, the HomeBiogas is a pretty extreme solution for the average environmentally-conscious Joe. It’s big, expensive and requires you to be willing to adapt our cooking to a small countertop stove. If you’re looking for a way to turn your food scraps into compost, there are a number of easier, cheaper options out there. HomeBiogas is pretty self-aware, however; its promo video notes that it’s suitable homesteaders and off-the-gridders.

Nonetheless, the HomeBiogas is an inventive way to upcycle home food waste into something of added value. Plenty of companies are upcycling discarded food ingredients into new products, edible or otherwise, but very few are targeting the home. Though it might not be for everybody, especially space-strapped urban consumers, HomeBiogas shows that when it comes from cutting down on food waste, sometimes it pays to think outside the (compost) box.

Chip[s] Board Makes Sustainable Plastic for Eyeglasses and More from Discarded Potato Peels

Odds are, when you’re eating a handful sour cream & onion chips or french fries, you aren’t thinking about the mountain of potato peels that went to waste to produce those snacks. However, the landfill doesn’t have to be the final destination for these ‘tater peels, thanks to companies like Chip[s] Board. The London, UK-based startup is giving discarded potato peels a second life by turning them into a sustainable plastic material which can be used in a variety of fashion applications, from buttons to eyeglasses.

Chip[s] Board was born in 2017 when co-founders Rowan Minkley and Robert Nicoll became frustrated by the amount of material waste they saw in their work doing design and fabrication projects. Speaking on the phone earlier this week, Nicoll told me that oftentimes when it comes to materials design, the longevity of the materials themselves doesn’t usually come into consideration.

Inspired by the plastic made in the Toaster Project, in which a man decided to make a toaster from scratch (which took him one year), the co-founders developed a material made from potato starch. Their first product was an alternative to chipboard, which they ended up shelving because it wasn’t cost competitive enough.

Chip[s] Board’s Parblex

Their next product, called Parblex, is a plastic made from upcycled potato peelings mixed with other upcycled agricultural waste products, like olive wood flour. Chip[s] Board (the name is a nod to both their original product and chips, aka what the Brits call french fries) plans to sell the Parblex to a variety of partners, most of whom are in the fashion industry. They’re planning a soft launch of the Parblex next month. Initial partners include Cubitt’s eyewear, which uses the Parblex to make glasses frames.

Chip[s] Board is working with McCain Foods, a British frozen food company, to source its potato waste. Unlike the chipboard, Nicoll said that the Parblex is competitively priced with typical plastic.

Next up, Nicolls said Chip[s] Board’s team of five will look into the waste stream to find new materials to upcycle and diversify their product lineup. He also told me that the London startup raised a seed round last year, but wouldn’t disclose exact numbers.

While many companies are upcycling food waste products to make brand new foods — like beer made from stale bread or flour made from defatted sunflower seeds — there are also several notables startups turning food products into non-edible finished products. Agraloop transforms crop waste, like pineapple leaves and sugar cane bark, into sustainable fabrics. Aeropowder upcycles poultry feathers into eco-friendly insulated packaging, and Biobean turns used coffee grounds into fuel for fireplaces and industrial heating.

Like Chip[s] Board, these last two startups are based in London. Maybe the U.S. should take a page from their book and ramp up its efforts to find innovative ways to upcycle food waste to make both edible and inedible final products.

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

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

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

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

The various products Planetarians has developed with Blu1877.

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

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

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

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

Leftover Sushi Rice Gets Upcycled into Danish Beer

Brewing beer generates a lot of leftover organic waste via spent grains. But now researchers in Denmark have turned the tables and found a way to turn sushi rice that would go to waste into beer, reports Beverage Daily.

While rice has been used to make beer in Asia before, it’s a challenging ingredient because it’s starchy and blocks the filters used in the brewing process. Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark, along with a company called ScienceBrew, partnered up with the Copenhagen restaurant Sticks ‘n’ Sushi to upcycle as much excess cooked rice as possible.

The trio was able to brew up 10 liter batches of beer made almost entirely out of surplus cooked rice, water and little bit of malt. The result is dubbed Gohan Biiru, and it’s available at the Sticks ‘n’ Sushi in the Lyngby district in Copenhagen (road trip!).

While creating beer from rice in one restaurant is just a drop in the bucket in the fight against food waste, it is part of a larger upcycling trend that is going global. ReGrained actually uses the spent grains from beer brewing to create flour that is both sold and turned into snack bars, Pulp Pantry turns the leftover bits from juicing into flavorful snacks, and Render is making new drinks out of leftover whey and pickle juice. And, of course, there’s Toast Ale, which makes beer out of bread that would otherwise be thrown out.

As my colleague Catherine Lamb wrote, to truly make an impact in reducing food waste, we need more behavioral changes at the consumer level. But an easy way to start (if you’re in Copenhagen) is to consume a pint of sushi rice beer.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These Companies Upcycle Food Waste Into New (Not Necessarily Food) Products

Earlier this week, I read a fascinating piece by Fast Company predicting that the fashion of the future would be made from food waste. They were referencing Agraloop, a technology from Circular Systems which turns food crop waste, such as sugar cane bark, pineapple leaves, and hemp stalks, into low-cost natural fibers.

By diverting food waste from five widespread cash crops into a new production channel, Agraloop would be able to create 250M tons of natural fiber annually while reducing crop burn pollution and methane emissions. This April, Circular Systems won a $350,000 Global Change Award grant from the H&M Foundation to scale up its operations and is in the midst of developing partnerships with global brands like H&M and Levis.

I for one am very intrigued by the idea of wearing banana tree trunks and pineapple leaves. But reading up on this sustainable textile company — which turns a massive waste issue into a high-value product — got me thinking about other companies using creative methods to repurpose food waste into both edible and non-edible products.

Aeropowder turns surplus feathers, a byproduct of the poultry industry, into packaging insulators for things like meal kits. They’re a double waste-fighting whammy, since they not only upcycle poultry waste, but also reduce the amount of non-biodegradable packaging needed for cold food transport. Biobean repurposes spent coffee grains from millions of cups of joe into logs and biomass pellets to fuel fireplaces.

There are also quite a few companies turning one type of food waste into edible products. Toast Ale transforms bread waste from local bakeries — the stuff that’s left after they’ve donated all the loaves that they can to shelters and food pantries — into IPA’s and Pale Ales. Not only do they divert bread, one of the most wasted food items, from landfills, they also reduce the amount of grains needed to brew beer.

Moving the other way in the brewing supply chain, Regrained takes spent grain from the beer brewing process and turns it into protein bars. Snact turns surplus produce into fruit snacks like chewy jerky and banana bars. Misfit and Rubies in the Rubble both make use of produce that doesn’t meet supermarket’s aesthetic standards — the former in bottled juices, the latter in jams and chutneys.

Tyson Foods recently developed a protein crisp snack made out of food waste, such as chicken breast trim and post-juicing vegetable purée. The “¡Yappah!” snacks launched on IndieGoGo in May and are projected to ship in July of this year.

As we’re all (hopefully) aware by now, food waste from all points on the supply chain — post-harvest, grocery store, in the restaurant and in the home — is massive. If we’re ever going to reduce the roughly 1.3 billion tons of food we waste globally, we’ve got to tackle it from all angles: from reselling leftover food from cafés to better managing Sell-By labels to spinning hemp stalks into fabric.

P.S. If you’re interested in out-of-the-box ways to fight food waste, come talk Food Waste Solutions at our free food tech meetup later this month in Seattle.