Category: Food waste

Embracing ugly veg and the ugly side of poultry production to make more profitable and sustainable products

Read the full story at Food Navigator Europe.

A Danish food tech start-up is leveraging two very different food industry side streams – spent laying hens, and mushrooms rejected by supermarkets – to launch fermented organic flavour enhancers.

The 15 foods I most frequently freeze

Read the full story at Treehugger.

Since March is National Frozen Food Month, it’s as good a time as any to sing the praises of my freezer. Sure, I like my refrigerator, but I like-like my freezer. It is a magical box that stops time and keeps naturally decaying food in a state of delicious suspended animation. While some items don’t enjoy the process—say, salad greens and delicate sauces—most foods take pretty kindly to life at zero degrees. Here are the ones that I freeze the most.

How PepsiCo is turning waste into renewable energy: ‘A case study in best practice’

Read the full story at Bakery & Snacks.

PepsiCo has launched a project to turn waste into renewable energy at its snack plant in Carregado, Portugal. The move, a first for PepsiCo in Southern Europe, will reduce carbon emissions at the site.

This app is tackling food insecurity and reducing grocery store waste

Read the full story at Fast Company.

Flashfood has expanded into 1,600 stores across North America and allows SNAP recipients to buy food using electronic benefit cards.

There’s an environmental rebound problem in the food-sharing economy

Read the full story from Anthropocene Magazine.

In a new study, researchers made a surprising discovery: the environment benefits of online food sharing are often undone by how consumers spend their saved cash.

Fueling the future with food waste

Read the full story from the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

One cannot appreciate how food processing wastes become biofuels just by reading about it in a book.

Students in science teacher Melanie Bachart’s high school bioethics course at Chiawana High School, Pasco, Washington, got the full experience of producing carbon-neutral biogas from food waste that usually winds up in landfills. Biogas can be used in place of natural gas to power electrical generators or to provide heat for industrial processes. It can also be used to power cars and trucks that are equipped to run on compressed natural gas.

It was a tactile, memorable experience for the students. Their adjunct instructors for the project were Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers, representing PNNL’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) program.

How to power a plane with leftover Chinese hot pot

Read the full story from Bloomberg News.

There’s a ritual involved in creating the perfect Sichuan hot pot and it involves fat — lots of it. Diners first immerse slivers of meat in a spicy soup rich in molten animal tallow, then dip each morsel in a plate of vegetable oil, before finally devouring it. It’s a rich delicacy, one that produces about 12,000 tons of waste oil each month in the Chinese city of Chengdu alone.

So in 2016, a startup began exporting some of that leftover restaurant grease to Europe and Singapore, where it gets recycled into fuel pure enough to fly airplanes.

Upcycling food waste to grow ‘highly nutritious’ mycelium protein

Read the full story at Food Navigator Europe.

Israeli food tech start-up Mush Foods claims it is propelling the “meat-plus” movement to the mainstream of foodservice and food retail.

ISTC Farm to Food Bank project publishes case studies highlighting recent collaborations

The Farm to Food Bank project recently published six case studies of their work with farmers during the 2022 growing season. Each case study includes a summary of the project, as well as lessons learned.

The case studies highlight projects with:

During the 2022 growing season, these six partners donated over 975,000 pounds of surplus and off-grade fresh produce to food banks and pantries throughout Illinois.

Key takeaways

  • Getting an early, off-season start with farmers markets and growers is essential. It allows farmers markets to introduce the program when growers aren’t as busy. It also allows food banks, food pantries, and growers to have conversations about what crops to plant, especially in areas of the state where the communities are diverse and may have preferences for specific types of produce.
  • Using reusable plastic crates prevents both packaging and food waste.
  • Growers can champion the program and recruit other growers.
  • Farmers can be aggregators. Having one farmer handle communications on behalf of several growers makes it easier for food banks to coordinate delivery and receive a variety of products.
  • Pairing farmers new to growing specialty crops with more experienced growers may help overcome challenges to participation.
  • Matching up harvest schedules with food bank pick-up schedules is essential.
  • When partnering growers directly with food pantries, additional considerations include:
    • how close in proximity they are to each other.
    • ensuring that food delivery and distribution schedules are in synch.
    • relying on food pantries to pick up at the farm presents challenges. Pantries often do not have adequate staff, capacity, or access to large vehicles, which means that some food gets left at the farm.

Learn more about the Farm to Food Bank project on the TAP website and at Feeding Illinois and view the complete list of Farm to Food Bank project publications on IDEALS.

This story originally appeared on the ISTC Blog. Read the original story.

Ugly Co.’s $9m fundraise covers ‘gamble’ of expanding processing capacity to increase distribution of upcycled fruit

Read the full story at Food Navigator USA.

Fourth generation farmer and founder of the upcycled dried fruit snack producer The Ugly Company’s gamble to buy and retrofit an old dehydrating facility against early investors’ advice and despite limited cash and notable debt is now paying off after securing $9m in series A funding to scale production and meet surging demand.