What is ‘upcycled’ food? Leftovers can now be turned into ingredients

Washed food is a big problem. More than one billion tons were rejected in 2022 by homes, retailers and food service companies, according to the figures published by the UN Environment Program in 2024. It is also expensive: the World Bank estimated that it was lost. Lost.

It is a problem that food businesswoman Chloe Stewart realized for the first time as a young adult traveling to different parts of the world. Seeing scheduled dishes in places like Beijing and Boston and having the feeling that “there is no way that someone ends” made her angry, he said.

“This is a real criminal, the fact that we do not have the mandate to find a better use for food that ends in the landfill,” he said in a video call with CNBC.

The Stewart food business, the tips, etc., begged a blog where “misunderstood”, such as cocoa tips, small pieces of fermented cocoa beans that are used to make chocolate and vegetables, such as the seeds scraped with a pumpkin, was wrong. Stewart calls these “recycled”, instead of waste products, due to their potential as ingredients in their own right.

In 2018, Stewart began making Granola, salty cookies and banana breads in their kitchen, selling them in the exclusive Borough Market in London. A newly squeezed juice was close, and was forced to make excess pulp recipes: the seeds and skin that would otherwise be discarded.

“The juice pulp is only ‘waste’ because the wrong end of a squeezer comes, but in reality it is where all good things are, and it is full of fiber,” Stewart said. As his business grew, he experienced with differential fruit, placing the apple pulp that he obtained from a cider manufacturer in Kent’s English county. It became the key ingredient for the Nibs farola, etc. And it constitutes 25% of its cookies, and Stewart now sells Nibs, etc. Products in high -end retailers in the United Kingdom, including Selfridges and Waitrose.

Stewart said that other types of the so -called food waste can be recycled in this way, and the tips, etc., is developing a chips style snack made of potatoes, as well as grains spent grains of the beer production process, an ingredient that could beer beer brewery with beer with beer with brewery brewery in the direction of beer. He is also working on a digestive cookie, a sweet refreshment based on popular flour in the colla food used by the United Kingdom, the byproduct of oil production by Colza. Both new products have the potential to have 40% to 50% of recycled ingredients, Stewart said.

The food industry can become “positive nature”, Chordination to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a beneficial organization focused on the circular economy. It can regenerate instead of exhausting natural resources, for example, through the use of crops that would be seen otherwise they would have wasted, said the beneficial organization.

Some of the NIBS products, etc. They were among the winners of a recent “redesign” challenge of food organized by the Foundation. Other winners included Hodmedod paste made of “wrinkled” peas, a crop that could otherwise return to the ground if their harvest time is lost and tostan, breeds with surplus bread.

Beth Mander, who supervised the “Big Food Insign Food Challenge of the organization”, which announced the winners in February, said that the broader objective of the initiative is to influence colleagues to produce food in a more regenerative way. “Our great hope is that every time … you enter a supermarket and choose products on the shelf, you can be sure that nature is turned off as a result of your choices,” Mander to CNBC told CNBC through the video call.

That could mean less intensive agriculture, cultivate a variety of crops or add ingredients to products that reduce their environmental impact, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. One of those ingredients is Cossing, a mixture of algae that can be added to hamburgers to provide a salty flavor, while reducing the proportion of meat in the hamburger by 25%.

Algae do not provide an “ocean flavor”, according to Hannah Weise, commercial marketing manager and communication of the sea seaweed company, which makes the combination of face be mixed. Instead, said Weise, “adds juiciness and … [a] Good texture, because it contains or can absorb a lot of water, and also adds this umami flavor. “Algae contain proteins, up to 32% of their dry weight, and grows rapidly without fertilizers, but it is not in use and is used for it and is used for him and that is what he is, it is he is him, it is as he is.

“Our goal is really to make food supply chains more sustainable and green through algae,” he said.

While sewing is currently under development, the approach of the algae company is in Nomet, a Belgian croquette made with algae instead of the most traditional shrimp. Nomet is sold in Bioplanet stores in Belgium, and the objective is to expand to other chains and more European countries this year.

Several of the products in the Big Foodsign Challenge are for sale in Waitrose stores in the United Kingdom, part of the tenders’ efforts to address the environmental exhaustion that is based on food production, according to the company’s senior environment manager, Ben Thomas.

“The food system is not in an excellent way. It is a great taxpayer to environmental decrease, climate change and loss of biodiversity … Essentially, we are part of the problem, therefore, we have to be part of the solution,” Thomas told CNBC by video. (The “Agriculture for Nature” initiative of Waitrose aims to help 2,000 farmers change to regenerative practices, for example)

A problem is to communicate the meaning or “regenerative” to buyers. While consumers in the United Kingdom recognize organically produced foods, terms such as “recycled” understand themselves less well. The products in the Redesign challenge of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation are marketed using the phrase “Nature in mind”, which appears in the stores of the stores and online, but Thomas said that there is some way of flying to the complete people, understands what is media.

Small production executions can mean that recycled products have a higher price, with a 360 g package of NIBS, etc., the Centeno, Hazelnut and cocoa granola that appears on the company’s website for £ 6.99 ($ ​​9.08). But the food entrepreneur Stewart expects recycled ingredients to go in the main current. “It is fine in the first days for the … concept and recycled products to sit a little more premium. But the goal is to obviously compete with the products of the mass market for mass adoption. And to do so, we need to be ABC. To take advantage.