Upcycling Tackles Food Waste in Manufacturing

Concern about food waste continues to grow in importance globally. With so much of the waste happening before the food reaches the consumer, producers are finding new ways to make use of what previously went to landfills.

Seven Sundays recently developed its oat protein cereal using OatGold, a nutrient-rich oat protein powder upcycled from SunOpta’s oat milk production.
Seven Sundays recently developed its oat protein cereal using OatGold, a nutrient-rich oat protein powder upcycled from SunOpta’s oat milk production.
Seven Sundays

Sure, “upcycling” is one of the latest buzzwords in the food and beverage industry. But it’s also a growing movement that is finding itself increasingly popular as the world—not least of all the manufacturing world—figures out how to curb the copious amounts of food waste that ends up in landfills.

Worldwide, about $1 trillion of food is wasted each year, and more than a third of that food waste happens before the food reaches the consumer—whether on the farm or during the manufacturing process. “Food waste is also the No. 1 contributor to landfills in the U.S., and the disposal of food waste and organic material to landfills is one of the leading causes of global methane emissions, which is the second highest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide,” says Magenna Brink, membership manager for the Upcycled Food Association (UFA).

There is much that can be done by the manufacturing community to address food waste at the source, optimizing systems and processes so that less is lost along the way. But the upcycling movement has grown largely out of natural byproducts of food and beverage processes—finding ways to take what had previously been considered byproduct waste and make use of it as an ingredient in other foods.

There are strong environmental arguments to be made, of course, for upcycling. Project Drawdown maintains that preventing food waste is the single most effective solution to reducing global warming. You’re not only saving the food itself from the landfill but reducing CO2 emissions—food waste accounts for about 8% of global emission. “When food is wasted, all the energy, resources, and money that went into producing, processing, packaging, and transporting it are wasted, too,” Project Drawdown notes. “Producing uneaten food squanders a whole host of resources—seeds, water, energy, land, fertilizer, hours of labor, financial capital—and generates greenhouse gases at every stage.”

But there’s also a considerable economic argument to be made. Through upcycling, food and beverage companies are turning what used to be waste into revenue streams. Instead of paying somebody to haul away whey, spent grains, subpar produce, and other waste, you could be getting paid for those ingredients to be in somebody else’s products.

A matter of perspective

Your perspective on upcycling might differ considerably depending on what sector of the industry you’re coming from. If you make apple juice, for example, you might be asking, “What’s this ‘upcycling’ you’re talking about? We’ve always used as much of the apple as possible.”


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From the point of view of Jon Kingston, food and beverage industry manager for Flottweg, upcycling is nothing more than the product reclamation that the juice industry has always practiced. The first time the fruit goes through the system, they get non-concentrated juice. The second process adds water back to the remaining pomace, which still has quite a bit of sugar in it, and that goes to juice concentrate. Only dry cake pomace, stripped of its sugar, is then sent off for animal feed, he says.

For some products, upcycling might not make sense as the primary goal. At Bob’s Red Mill, for example, where a lot of their products are closer to their original ingredients—grains, oats, beans, etc.—the end game is focused much more on reduced food waste, though upcycling still plays its part.

“For the big picture, of course, we want to be as close to zero waste as possible. So prevention is a big focus of that,” says Julia Person, sustainability manager for Bob’s Red Mill. “If it can’t be prevented, then we want it to go to its highest and best use. So that’s where upcycling comes in.”

Down on the farm

Inevitably, though, not everything makes it into a packaged, saleable product at Bob’s Red Mill—whether there are packaging issues, or even just milling byproduct that goes into a large dust collection system, notes Kyle Geber, QA material handler for Bob’s Red Mill, where he also focuses on outgoing large format recycling. “Everything that gets sucked up out of the machines ends up going to our feed,” he says. “If there’s damage, anything that would otherwise go to the trash, when it comes to food product that doesn’t end up in a package, we send it off to a farm.”

EnviroFeeds is a national company that works with food manufacturers to keep food waste out of the landfill and turn it into high-quality cattle feed for local farms. In the case of Bob’s Red Mill, based in Milwaukie, Ore., workers from an Oregon dairy farm come pick up a full trailer of byproduct two or three times a week, Geber says, saving 50 to 60 tons of waste a week from the landfill.

“For them, it’s highly nutritious feed,” Person notes. Geber adds, “They’re really satisfied with us because we deal with so many different products, so they get a really complex nutrition profile for their cows.”

Upcycling is not particularly new to brewers and distillers, who have been passing their spent grains—full of proteins and nutrients—along to local farmers as animal feed. Decanter technology has been important here to dewater the grain as much as possible to decrease the volume and lower the cost of transport.

Fit for human consumption

But several food companies are moving that spent grain beyond the animal feed level and into what UFA considers its higher purpose, ingredients for human consumption.

EverGrain, for example, focuses on transforming barley used in the brewing process into high-quality, nutritious, and sustainable protein ingredients for use in other food and beverage products. “We started our journey in 2013, long before upcycling was a trend, with the goal of unlocking every grain of potential in our barley to have a positive impact on people and the planet,” said Gregory Belt, EverGrain CEO, in a press release related to the company’s new large-scale plant-based protein facility in St. Louis.

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