Upcycling on the Up and Up

Interview with Caroline Cotto, co-founder and COO of Renewal Mill, Pbc.

When it comes to crafting or reformulating products for greater sustainability, developers and manufacturers are faced with considerations that go beyond whether or not the agriculture and manufacturing processes involved are ecologically sound and resource-controlled. Sustainability is a consideration across the entire chain of an ingredient, from the agriculture to the processing to the use in manufacturing. And upcycling is a key link in that chain.

Upcycling involves more than just making use of some previously unusable parts of certain ingredients, such as produce or grains, etc. Questions to consider are, is the unused portion (or “ugly portion”) better suited and more economically advantageous as animal feed? Or is the planned usage for it the best usage? Consider an apple that is too small or too misshapen for retail display. Is it better upcycled for juice and the pulp for animal feed? Or should it be but up into fruit bits? Or dried as a powder for flavoring or in some beverage or bakery mix?

Upcycling is a delicate balance of coordinating the value of each part of the ingredient in consideration, the costs of putting them to use, and the energy and resources involved throughout the lifecycle of those ingredients. Renewal Mill, Pbc., a California company at the forefront of the new circular economy of food upcycling, has done the front-end work to ensure that it is rescuing valuable resources that would otherwise go to waste or be used in ways that are less sustainable.

For example, it makes a retail soybean flour from the pulp left over from the manufacture of soy milk. The pulp can’t be used for animal feed, as it goes bad within hours. So Renewal, using state-of-the-art technology on site where the soy milk is made, immediately processes the soybean pulp into a high-protein, vitamin and mineral-rich flour that can be used at up to 25% replacement for wheat flour in baking.

The company’s success comes from a deep understanding of the confluence of all those aspects as individual building blocks of a working upcycling paradigm. Renewal Mill co-founder and COO Caroline Cotto describes how Renewal Mill converts the byproducts of grain, seed, and legume food and ingredient processing into a retail line of clean label, organic specialty flours and baking mixes.

Catch the full interview by watching the video above or listen to the audio version below.

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David Feder, RDN, has been a food, nutrition and health journalist for 26 years. In spite of an academic background that began with psychology and biblical archaeology, David cut his teeth as a celebrated chef in Texas during the 1970s and 1980s, helping pioneer haute-health & fusion cuisines in high-end restaurants and hotels. In the 1990s he became a registered dietitian while completing research and coursework toward a Ph.D. in nutrition biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. Along the way he taught food science and nutrition while practicing as a nutrition counselor.

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