🛒 The Check-Out: Lydia Oxley Johnson, Renewal Mill

+ 5 cool climate events + what's in our basket - TrueStart, garum & ginger shampoo...

Happy Thursday! Welcome to The Check-Out - your weekly dose of climate x consumer goods inspiration, and your discovery box of products and events the Following the Footprints team are loving this week. It’s great to have you here. 

One thing we LOVE about publishing newsletters is that we just never know what conversations they’ll start. Early June saw Jenny write about ‘high-trashion’ brands for Upcycled Food Month. One of these brands was Renewal Mill. One LinkedIn DM from Lydia, President at Renewal Mill, later… today Jenny and Lydia are chatting all things supply chains, DTC vs B2B, and 3 wishes for consumer goods. Pretty wild, right?

After we chat to Lydia, we’ll share what the Following the Footprints team has loved and consumed this week and 5 Climate x Consumer Goods events coming up. Let’s dig in…

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> Brand Spotlight

🎙️ Behind the Brand: 6 questions with Lydia Oxley Johnson, President of Renewal Mill

​​👉 Hello! We’d love the non-LinkedIn lowdown on you and Renewal Mill.

Well, hi! My background is a pretty even combo of marketing and operations. My first full-time role was in brand marketing at Red Bull throughout the midwest. There, I grew a deep appreciation for agriculture and the behind-the-scenes of our food system. 

Seeking a deeper mission, I came across Imperfect Foods when ‘ugly’ produce delivery was just beginning. Over the next 4 years, I grew with the company and took on cross functional and operational projects, from growth marketing and customer care to merchandising and localization. That work gave me such a strong understanding of what it takes to grow a startup, but more importantly, it offered the opportunity to shape a consumer-centric movement.

While supporting private label product launches, I fell in love with an upcycled cookie product using Renewal Mill ingredients. I followed the brand closely and then joined to scale the business. Renewal Mill sources and develops delicious and nutrient dense ingredients from manufacturing processes in our food system, founded by Claire Schlemme and Caroline Cotto in Oakland, CA. We sell B2B ingredients and CPG products nationally in Whole Foods and other leading retailers. 

Our key ingredients are made from the protein and fiber processed out of oats and soy when making plant based milks, called Oat Milk Flour and Okara Flour! They are both super high in protein and fiber and naturally gluten free. Renewal Mill is well loved as an upcycled brand and food-system-focused company, named a “World Changing Idea” by FastCompany.

​​👉 What was the most complicated part of establishing your supply chain, given that you’re making ‘upcycled’ products requiring the pulp and fiber from other manufacturing processes?

Making upcycled products is the challenge! We’re at the mercy of other industries’ performance; our creation limits are tied to how much of our source material (ie - the pulp left behind from oat milk production) is produced - a rare position. If the oat milk industry declined in production, we would be in a bad place as well, because we would struggle to produce our high-protein oat flour. That’s why our focus is on choosing the right supply chains with higher ceilings, so that we can grow without limitations. 

We’re currently focused on innovation within our supply chains. Recently, for example, we processed our first tanker truckload of GFCO (Gluten-Free Certificate Organization) oats. This was a big triumph for us because the oat supply chain is quite diverse, with oats coming from many smaller farms, which leads to frequent cross-contamination. We’re energized by new challenges like this one! 

​​👉 Since you offer B2C via Amazon & Whole Foods and are otherwise B2B, how have you had to adjust your messaging and education for those two different groups?

We see upcycling as exciting - food is the only area of life where we get to vote three times a day, and at Renewal Mill we’ve done our jobs right if a potential customer is intrigued enough by one of our products to grab it off the shelf and purchase it for the very first time. 

In our DTC business (via Whole Foods and Amazon), we’ve maintained our ‘bake a better future’ messaging. We want our mixes to be reminiscent of a grandmother figure: someone who makes the most of what they have to produce a delicious end result. Our solution to consumer pain points is front and center on our mix packaging: gluten-free, easy to prepare, chef-developed and high in protein (thanks to our upcycled origins). Renewal Mill’s DTC messaging initially focused on how our products fought climate change, but the environmental-forward approach unfortunately wasn’t making our other functional benefits apparent enough. We haven’t stopped highlighting our reduced environmental impact, but it’s now on the back of our packaging for when someone is already considering a purchase. 

On the B2B side, it’s actually a lot more simple; we lead with nutrition, scalability, and impact metrics and are meeting the needs of R&D reps, manufacturers, and brands themselves. R&D wants to see innovation, something new and functional that solves a specific problem. We fulfill their desire for high-protein (our oat flour is almost 50% protein), gluten-free, and plant-based ingredients. The unconventionality of our ingredients is what gets R&D excited to experiment. Manufacturers want materials to run smoothly on their lines and easily deliver, via pallet or truckload. Brands are now needing to find ways to meet scope 3 emission goals, and the reductions we offer via upcycling are quite compelling, especially for big brands under pressure to update outdated supply chains. 

​​👉 How do you think about and measure your impact at Renewal Mill? What does sustainability mean to you? 

We look at our impact in three ways - poundage of food saved, water savings, and emissions avoided by creating our products from the waste streams of other industries. Claire is laser-focused on providing accurate emission reduction statistics to our clients and we’ve seen poundage of food saved really resonate, since it’s such a tangible metric.

What I love about this work is that our impact grows as we do; by being a circular company, product purchases mean we can save more and more resources. 

​​👉 Ok, magic wand time: if we could grant you three wishes for the consumer goods industry, what would they be?

1. My first wish would be compostable, affordable packaging with a long shelf life. There’s so much opportunity for packaging innovation; better, low-cost CPG packaging would be a game changer. 

2. My second is for greater awareness around the innovation required to establish a supply chain from scratch. Trendspotters are hungry for new flavors and collabs, but the beautiful thing about a food system is creating a new ingredient or enhancing an existing one’s performance. Large-scale risks, like building a supply chain, require a lot of industry partnership, trust, and belief in the end result. Investing time and effort to solve the scariest system-wide problems is worth it, though, because consumers really do care. 

3. Lastly, I’d love to see a woman-owned distribution system! Having transparency in distribution would fix a lot of the issues we see within CPG. Restaurant and foodservice distribution is a lot more transparent than retail, where the accounting can get quite thorny and brands don’t receive much support. 

​​👉 Finally - we’d love some recommendations: one climate-related resource, one person to follow online and one consumer brand that’s killing it! 

• A resource: Danielle Schwab’s Iluminate Food Substack

• To follow online: Following the Footprints (of course), but also Leah Thomas (aka Green Girl Leah). She often discusses climate intersectionality, and how conversations about climate are also ultimately about race and equity.

• A brand I love and respect: Matriark! They’re similarly a small, scrappy team and have found a great upcycled use case.They create premium products with their available resources. 

A huge thanks to Lydia for jumping into the hot seat today!

Renewal Mill's products, and the team out sampling! Source: Brands Own.

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> In Our Basket

🔎 What we loved and consumed this week:

1. From Rosalin in Manchester: I'm not entirely sure why, but the smell of coffee always reminds me of camping. I've been camping a few weekends this summer and I always pack my TrueStart Instant Coffee, which is B Corp certified and tastes great even in a field (even when you forget to pack milk in your cool box) ☕

2. From Jenny in New York: To say that I was hyped when the Noma Projects team did a ‘New York City Tour’ this past spring would be putting it lightly. I waited in a rainy line to try a specially-concocted Aebleskiver and to buy their mushroom garum (free of the high shipping cost). Months later, it’s a key ingredient in many a tofu marinade & dressing! 

3. From Laura in Manchester: A bit of a cult classic...this week I'm replenishing my stock of The Body Shop ginger shampoo. Not only does it smell amazing, but I love what they have done with the Plastics for Change programme.

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> Monthly Events Roundup!

📆 5 Consumer Goods x Climate Events:

Browse 20+ upcoming consumer x climate events, and submit yours.

15th August - Small99 CRAB - fast, fun Sustainability workshop!

• Organisers: Aspire Sustainability Consulting

• Location: WRAP, Brighton, UK

20th August - Find your ‘Unique Positive Contribution’ and unlock your impact strategy

• Organisers: Given, Anthesis

• Location: Virtual

10th September - Deloitte’s Digital Consumer Trends - Introducing the “Era of Enough”

• Organisers: Deloitte

• Location: Deloitte, Cambridge, UK

11th September - Tech for Sustainability: Uncover The Truth On Sustainability Claims

• Organisers: Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership

• Location: CISL, Cambridge, UK

25th September - Sustainable Bites: Seven Plausible Scenarios for the Food Industry

• Organisers: Kerry

• Location: New York, USA

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That’s it for today! 

• Know a brand we should spotlight next? Let Leone know! 

• Have links that can make the team learn or laugh? Share them with us, we might just share them in The Check-Out next week. 

• Hungry for more? You’ll see us on Monday! That’s when we suit up and get serious, digging into a topic that is guaranteed to make you look smart at standup. 

Much love, 

Team FTF