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A chat with Tyler Malek, Salt & Straw’s chief ice cream maker.
For many people, ice cream is a fun summer treat. For Tyler Malek, co-founder and chief ice cream maker at Salt & Straw, it’s much more. He and his cousin Kim Malek started the artisan ice cream shop as a passion project in Portland, Oregon, in 2016. Now, 10 years later, Tyler sees a cone as an entryway into understanding our complicated food industry.
“Ice cream is so just inherently good and fun and adventurous,” he says. “We have this opportunity, and almost this responsibility, to talk to consumers and teach them how we can have a more sustainable food system.”
Salt & Straw has more than 50 locations in seven states and ships nationwide. The brand prides itself on working with local farmers. It supports social causes like the food business entrepreneurship program Hot Bread Kitchen in New York and The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ+ youth — and, of course, organizations working to minimize food waste.
A Partnership for Systemic Change
Addressing food waste isn’t just about eating your leftovers. It’s systemic. According to the USDA, 30 to 40% of the food supply ends up as waste. Tyler’s favorite example is manufacturers of Greek yogurt in upstate New York discarding whey, a good source of protein and probiotics. “They spend millions of dollars per year to denature it to pour it down the drain,” Tyler says. “We have children’s rhymes about eating curds and whey, but then forgot it’s a food. All of a sudden we start calling it a byproduct.”
Salt & Straw has long partnered with Urban Gleaners, a food rescue program that helps restaurants, catering companies, and grocery stores distribute food that’s about to spoil. Tyler has been on its board for eight years and talks about the program with great admiration. “They bring in and repurpose 1.1 million pounds of food per year, and they never fill up their dumpster,” he says.
Urban Gleaners’ downfall is bread, which can’t always be repurposed fast enough before it goes stale. So one of Tyler’s early upcycled ice cream flavors incorporated this excess bread. “We cooked it into ice cream, and it was gooey and delicious. We made this chocolate ganache that actually used a lot of the husk from the cacao. It’s technically upcycled, but even more than that, it’s giving those cacao farmers a whole new channel of revenue.”
The ice cream turned out well. But Tyler learned an important lesson: The right name is important. Titling the flavor “day-old bread pudding” put ice cream buyers off. “It was one of the most delicious ice creams, but it sold relatively poorly,” he says. “Lesson learned.”
Creativity That’s Tasty
In his 10 years of upcycling ingredients into ice cream, Tyler and the rest of his crew have experimented with how much to market based on environmental virtue, and how much on taste. The conclusion? “You have to start with the yummy first.”
To keep things interesting for ice cream makers and customers, Salt & Straw frequently rotates flavors and features monthly themes. Every January, also known as Veganuary, shops offer five different “vegandulgence” flavors. March flavors are inspired by cereal brands and October by Halloween treats. Every April, to celebrate Earth Day, Salt & Straw offers a series of upcycled ice creams for the month.
The upcycled series is especially dear to Tyler’s heart. This year offered five flavors, including cherry red velvet cheesecake. Salt & Straw partnered with Hello, I’m Ugly to rescue 958 pounds of overripe cherries. But Hello, I’m Ugly didn’t just redistribute the fruit; they had to desticker it. Fortunately, the rescue organization knew what it was doing. After an earlier incident when the whole staff came in to remove stickers by hand from 10 trucks full of plums, Hello, I’m Ugly engineered a destickering machine. “That’s the connect-the-dots that we are missing in the food community to save these ingredients and then convince the customers to buy it,” Tyler says.
While most of Salt & Straw’s flavors originate with a desired flavor profile, the upcycled series always starts with the ingredients. “Come May first, we start researching all the new, up-and-coming ingredients,” Tyler says. “We found this partner in the Midwest who is working with some of the biggest beer breweries in the country, like Busch, people like this, and they’re taking the spent grains and then creating a protein powder out of it.” It took a lot of trial and error to incorporate these spent grains into this year’s chocolate malted potato chip cupcake ice cream. “By the time we finished the recipe, it’s one of my favorite base ice creams,” Tyler says. “But spent barley milk by itself was a really challenging ingredient to use. Let’s just say the chocolate was very necessary.”
New Problems, Old Solutions
A lot of today’s food upcycling involves old technologies. Hello, I’m Ugly rescues fruit by drying it — a practice that dates back thousands of years and might have originated in Mesopotamia. “We had to have some sexy branding around it to remember it,” Tyler says. Spent soy flour, a high-protein byproduct of the modern soybean industry, has been used in Japanese cooking for thousands of years, yet Renewal Mill is one of few companies in the United States to find use for it.
A little extra work can pay off in the fight against food waste. Tyler urges consumers to look for products that are upcycled certified. “Understand how your buying power can impact this market,” he says. And food makers should “think outside the box and be one step more creative than we’re expected to be, or than we’re used to being.” After all, who would want more garbage when instead, we could be eating delicious ice cream?
