🌱 Upcycled Food Month: 3 'High-Trashion' brands turning side streams into consumer dreams
🌱 Upcycled Food Month: 3 'High-Trashion' brands turning side streams into consumer dreams
Featuring Matriark Foods, Trashy, Renewal Mill, NewMoo and more...
Happy Monday!
Have you ever heard of Upcycled Food Month? Scratch that… have you ever heard of upcycled food? This week we look into the concept and try to prove to you that one company’s trash is another company’s treasure (with the help of some innovative consumer goods brands of course!).
As usual, we will follow-up with The Good(s) News from last week, which includes a look at how the UK is hoping to speed up the approval of new foods, and what the FTF team has been up to!
Let’s dive in…
> In Focus
Side-stream, on-brand: How companies are making the most of food production waste
by Jenny Nova
If you’re like me, when you hear the word ‘upcycled,’ you think of patchwork jackets and jeans being cutting your jeans into shorts, not anything in the culinary space. Recently, though, we’ve seen many pantry brands promoting upcycled snacks and staples.
Let’s dig into what this means - and how we can keep finding value in leftover materials.
A Vocabulary Lesson
To get official with it, the dictionary definition of upcycling is “to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item / to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value).”
The Upcycled Food Association encourages brands to create new products from waste-bound ingredients like damaged produce, manufacturing by-products or leftovers from primary product manufacturing. The same organisation also verifies upcycled food products that meet their definition: ones that are made with 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.
Now is the perfect time to explore this concept because June is Upcycled Food Month, and there’s a ton of great virtual programming to deepen your understanding. We’re excited to see so many brands innovating by upcycling since 20-40% of all food grown never leaves the farm gate. It’s an area ripe with opportunity (pun intended), so let’s get cooking to see how different companies are making side-stream materials so on-brand!
High-Trashion Brands
Trashy is using fibrous vegetable remains from juicing and carrot peels (discarded during baby carrot production) to produce veggie chips; they’ve made their entire identity garbagé. They’ve partnered with some of the US’ biggest juice brands, as well as Bolthouse Farms, to secure their raw materials. Their chips also offer more nutritional benefits than a traditional bag, because juicing remains are packed with fibre and low in sugar.
Renewal Mill has six offerings across the protein, flour, and fibre categories, like an upcycled soybean pulp flour (from soy-milk production) and upcycled oat milk flour. To make these ingredients more accessible to consumers, they launched a line of baking mixes that, similar to Trashy’s chips, have a higher nutritional composition (example - 7g of protein per ½ cup) than standard all-purpose flour. They’re also excellent gluten-free options!
Matriark Foods has taken a different upcycling approach focused on rescuing surplus fruits or vegetables, as well as veggie scraps, from farms where they don’t meet cosmetic standards. They’ve developed tomato sauces and a vegetable concentrate, perfect for conscious home cooks.
B2B Solutions
It’s promising that so many companies, including some of the above with their own direct-to-consumer (DTC) arms, offer upcycled ingredients for crafting more nutritious and less environmentally harmful end products. Options like the Spare Starter are ideal for food service, while the Supplant Company has a lower-calorie sugar product made from corn cob fibre!
For all of you reading along, we hope that you find your own way to make more with less. For those currently on a CPG team, we urge you to consider finding a side-stream partner for a product innovation - or re-evaluating if your own production waste can be given new life.
> Follow up with…
Article: Upcycled Ingredients: Challenges and opportunities in securing side-stream supply, Food Navigator
Case Study: The Pathway to Building and Sourcing Upcycled Products for Food Service with Matriark Foods
> Last week in consumer goods x climate…
The Good(s) News
Up and coming brands…
🎯 Heura opened their completely vegan butcher shop across various locations in France. Along with stocking their favourite products - mince, chicken, burgers, and now ham slices - Heura’s head of plant-based cuisine will also be offering cooking sessions, speaking to customers about how to incorporate meat substitutes into French cuisine.
🎯 NewMoo announced the development of their latest innovation: plant-based cheese produced with plant-produced casein proteins. These proteins, typically responsible for the sensory properties of cheeses, make up ~80% of the proteins in dairy products. Their technology means that the proteins are produced by plants using traditional agricultural methods, while keeping the same sensory and texture properties as dairy cheese.
🎯 My Emissions in partnership with Just Eat have carbon labelled the food at the UEFA Champions Festival to raise awareness around the carbon footprint of food. The takeaway items are also being packed in Notpla’s seaweed-based containers.
🎯 Absolute Collagen announced they are B Corp certified.
Bigger organisations…
⭐️The LEGO Group have employed a compensation package linked to a new KPI across their entire workforce, focused on lowering emissions. The KPI specifically looks at reducing their Scope 1 and 2 operational and Scope 3 business travel emissions. This change is part of their goal to be net zero by 2050.
⭐️Vestiaire Collective released their 2023 Impact Report, highlighting key changes they’ve made to reduce their environmental footprint. For one, they’ve reduced air freight and replaced it with road transport. They’ve also increased the number of orders which are transported directly to buyers, replaced their propylene pouches for recycled cotton, and reduced their number of clothing labels.
⭐️Mondi Group, in partnership with Meurer, have developed a paper packaging solution for bundling food and drinks, in place of plastic shrink film. The Advantage StretchWrap is made of 100% paper and is fully recyclable.
⭐️Lidl Netherlands saw a 7% increase in plant-based meat alternative sales when placing the products in the conventional meat section in their stores. These results were part of a study with Wageningen University & Research and the World Resources Institute to investigate whether placement of plant-based meat alternatives in retail stores has an impact on sales.
⭐️PepsiCo Beverages North America announced the expansion of its electric vehicle fleet in California with 50 Tesla Semi trucks and 75 Ford E-Transit electric vans to support its Fresno facility and other locations across the state. This initiative is part of their strategy to be net zero by 2040.
Industry wins…
⚡The UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA) plans to introduce a "sliding scale" mechanism for the regulatory approval of novel foods. This means that the FSA could approve products if they’ve already been approved in other countries. This move aims to speed up the approval process for products like cultivated meats, insect protein, and precision-fermented foods, addressing the current two-and-a-half-year backlog.
Want good news sooner? We post our top 5 stories every Friday on LinkedIn! If your CPG brand has good news to share, let us know.👇
> In case you missed it
Want more? Here’s what’s happening across FTF at the moment…
In last week’s The Check Out, we threw a spotlight on Algae Cooking Club’s algae cooking oil and found out how its environmental footprint compares to our oily staples.
Our Manchester-based team went on a little outing to the ‘Food’ edition of PechaKucha Manchester. The fast-paced talks included 6ish minutes on Doughnut Economics Manchester, food as medicine, and even included some music made by mushrooms!
Reminded of how much we love waste-busting food, we dug back into our archives to refresh our memories on Renewal Mill in newsletter #129.
Finally, if you are passionate about consumer goods x sustainability and have a few hours per month to spare… then we might have just the ticket for you! We are on the lookout for a new writer and researcher. Learn more about the team here or drop us a line by clicking the button below 👇🏻
That’s it for today!
Want more? Check out ‘The Check-Out’ this Thursday for the latest brands in our basket. In the meantime, if you have any topics that you would like us to dig into, ping us an email on info@followingthefootprints.com to say hi!
Much love,
Team FTF