Upcycling Wasted Food

Upcycling food is an age-old culinary tradition. Simply making stew from leftovers is a household example. On a more industrial scale, Ore-Ida developed Tater Tots in 1953 to use potato scraps that were byproducts of french fry manufacturing. Whey protein is a byproduct of cheesemaking.

There’s still plenty of surplus biomass in the food industry’s manufacturing ecosystem that could be put to better use. According to ReFED, a nonprofit striving to reduce food waste, more than 60 million tons of food go to waste in the U.S. annually, or about a third of the total. About 13 million tons of that waste stem from manufacturing. About 40% of that ends up as animal feed, 30% is spread out on the land, and 4%, or 500,000 tons, goes to the landfill. 

Reducing those numbers can have a big impact, as 6.1% of greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to food waste. It can also increase the nutrition in food products, along with the bottom line of their manufacturers.

It’s difficult to calculate the total amount of manufacturing waste that is being repurposed into human food “because most companies won’t disclose it,” says Alejandro Enamorado, senior manager of capital initiatives for ReFED. 

The biggest hurdle is often economics: If it’s less expensive to send wasted food to a landfill or compost it, then most businesses will have trouble rationalizing upcycling. Alejandro calls tater tots and whey protein “the low-hanging fruit,” noting, “Now we’re in this new area of ‘What else can we do?’”

Two Ways to Use Waste

Location is key. “If your facility is near other food manufacturers, then the argument could be made that upcycling is the right way to go,” says Alejandro. “If waste is distributed across many locations and is not centralized, transport and consolidating into a certain spot ends up being a challenge.”

Dozens of startups have tried to answer that question in the last decade, often with upcycled snacks and consumer packaged goods (CPG). “We’re looking at a series of science experiments that could be real businesses, but everyone’s still trying to figure it out,” says Alejandro, who explains a lot of CPG companies have shifted to ingredients. “It’s very hard to differentiate yourself in consumer packaged goods,” he says, “and they’ve all made the acknowledgement it might be easier to flow into someone else’s operation being an ingredient.”

Upcycled Foods is one example. CEO Daniel Kurzrock was inspired by the spent grain from his homebrewing hobby and co-founded the company to put it to better use in 2017. As about 80% of brewer’s grain goes to animal consumption, the company developed a process to turn commercial brewing waste into snack bars. It has since pivoted into the ingredient space with ReGrained SuperGrain+, a “fortifying inclusion,” says Daniel.

The supply chain is massive: About 20 billion pounds of brewer’s grain is generated by the commercial brewing industry annually, enough to fulfill thousands of large accounts. Daniel says, “A national grocer launching something like a bread on an annual basis is going to use something like the equivalent of 100,000 pounds of the ingredient.”

That’s why Upcycled Foods shifted its focus from CPG to ingredients. “It’s all about enabling other businesses to tap into the upcycling opportunity, both on the supply side and the demand side,” says Daniel. “This is emerging as a way for companies to make good on their commitments for a circular economy and for decarbonizing food products.”

A 2022 study from Capgemini Research Institute found that 77% of food companies reported internal efforts to reduce waste, and 72% of consumers were more conscious about their personal food wastage after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We know that there is an appetite for more products that are fortified with these ingredients,” says Daniel. “The data is showing increasing sensitivity to the environmental challenges and food waste specifically, and there’s an opportunity to reach those folks with that impact message. But most people buy food because it looks delicious or it has a nutritional value that they care about, and it’s got to be at the right price point.”

Scaling Up for Impact

In 2019, Daniel teamed with eight like-minded companies to launch the Upcycled Food Association (UFA). The organization has since grown to “200-plus members in over 14 countries, representing pretty much the entire supply chain,” says UFA CEO Amanda Oenbring.

While North America has emerged as a food upcycling leader, “we definitely have a lot to learn from other cultures who have much more culturally ingrained ways of dealing with waste,” Amanda says. “We’re rebuilding our muscle memory. This is not something new. This is something that past generations just needed and had to do. And I think we’ll be facing those times even more ahead.”

Guided by that same ethos, brothers Adam and Jeremy Kaye launched The Spare Food Co. in 2018, then launched the first product, Spare Tonic, in 2021. The company used byproducts from yogurt manufacturing to make the sparkling probiotic beverage.

After growing distribution to 400 retailers, the brothers pressed pause on Spare Tonic to focus on Spare Starter and Spare Burger, which debuted in the food service channel on college campuses in fall 2024. “It’s exactly the same product in two different formats, either pre-formed patties or bulk blend,” says Jeremy. “And what we’ve done is literally reduced the amount of animal proteins by 30%, which is not insignificant, and replaced it with a cooked blend of six different surplus vegetables, all purchased from farms and farmers and that generally would not have been sold.”

Sales for the two products increased by more than 300% in the first three months. The food service focus allows Spare Food “to work with customers who can commit to pallets at a time, not cases or single cans at a time,” he adds. “We do think that CPG is very important, we just need to have a much more effective supply chain. … We will get back there in the next year and a half to two years.”

Spare Burger and Spare Starter also “have a much greater impact in terms of reducing the environmental footprint and feeding more people healthy, real food,” says Jeremy, noting that 30 to 50 billion burgers are consumed annually in the U.S. “Reducing just 30% of that amount of beef is not insignificant.”

Case in point: A 2018 report from the World Resources Institute found that a 30% reduction in beef in 10 billion burgers would lead to annual decreases of 10.5 million tons of CO2 (the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road), 83 billion gallons of irrigation water, and 14,000 square miles of agricultural land.

Expanding Upcycling

In order to further boost food upcycling, Jeremy says that consumer awareness is critical, as is verbiage. “I don’t use the words food waste,” he explains. “We use wasted food if we’re going to talk about it, because it changes that emphasis so importantly onto food, not waste, because nobody wants to eat waste. … For us, it is not waste. For us, it is ingredients that have been overlooked or underused.”

Likewise, Renewal Mill takes such ingredients as oat milk pulp and pineapple fiber and creates flours and baking mixes. Its CPG products are now available across the country at Whole Foods and other retailers as it supplies ingredients to a number of food brands.

Beyond the environmental benefits, upcycling leads to better food, says Lydia Oxley, Renewal Mill’s president. “We don’t make anything that doesn’t taste good, and we also don’t make anything that doesn’t have some nutrient density to it,” she explains. “A lot of our more processed foods, like flour, are so heavily processed that a lot of the fiber and protein don’t make it in. By pulling these concentrated waste streams of protein and fiber, we’re able to dry and mill it into, typically, a naturally gluten-free flour.”

Renewal Mill supplies its ingredients to manufacturers of tortillas, cereal, and other products. “We’ve been really rapidly expanding our scale for ingredients to be able to meet the demand of the ingredient market,” Lydia says. “We see a lot of promise on both sides.”

With upcycling emerging as a selling point for many consumers, the UFA developed Upcycled Certified in 2021 and sold it to Colorado-based Where Food Comes From in 2023. Since the certification’s launch, more than 800 Upcycled Certified products have been released, with healthy year-over-year sales growth. In 2024, certified products diverted more than 1.2 million tons of waste; the cumulative total is 3.4 million tons. “There’s still a lot of room to grow,” says Amanda of UFA. 

One big challenge is that the upcycling movement is being pushed primarily by startups, she adds. “Especially in this economic climate, it’s challenging for any small business, let alone a business that’s really pioneering on a specific topic.”

Government policy can be a catalyst. Massachusetts has banned the disposal of organic material from facilities that generate more than a half-ton each week. In California, SB 1383 mandates that 20% of organic waste be upcycled into human nutrition. 

Amanda says large food manufacturers making sound business decisions could ultimately drive a potential paradigm shift. “Think of how many businesses are paying to have their waste, poof, go away,” she says. “So the chance to transform that cost center into a value add and a value stream is really when people just unlock that aha moment.”