How Innovative Companies are Reducing Food Waste

The food industry may be late to the party on “revolutionary technology” compared to Telecom, Auto, Entertainment, Appliances, Aerospace or other sectors that better embrace the first-mover mentality.

But over the last few years, there’s been a buffet of stories about cellular agriculture, which creates animal proteins by replicating cells (although no products are yet available) and plant-based meats, which create alternatives to animal protein out of other things (although no products are doing all that well in the marketplace).

Shrinking the Footprint

The driver for this recent wave of innovation — and the flow of venture funding that is now drying up — has been clear: the need to reduce the food sector’s carbon footprint. Depending on who you listen to, the industry is responsible for between 14% and 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

The food industry — partly out of desire to divert attention from intensive water use, habitat destruction, and carbon emissions, and partly out of self-interest – has continued to focus attention on food waste as a significant environmental problem. The statistics are stark: more than 1/3 of all food is wasted. That means about 1/3 of the carbon emitted and water consumed is wasted as well.

Despite what may seem like obvious culprits, that amount of waste isn’t because we don’t clean our plates or throw away food that’s seen better days that we discover in the back of the refrigerator. Rather, most of that loss occurs in or near the fields where it’s grown.

The lack of ability to harvest crops when they’re ripe or problems storing them until they are needed are big sources of food waste. So is our preference for eating some, but not all, of what we grow. For instance, orange juice and lemonade remain popular beverages, but we don’t go around snacking on the peels, which contain most of the flavor and nutritional value.

Eating More and Having a Smaller Waste

Eating more of the harvest and wasting less is a simple and elegant solution.

Although not headline making, there’s another focus of innovation that is already reshaping the food sector and getting into the mouths of more consumers. It may solve the thorny problem of food waste by helping us eat more of what we grow.

Branchout Food Inc. (BOF) is applying new technologies to the ancient practice of drying food, while avoiding the issues of flavor, color and nutritional changes that arise from heating and freeze-drying. In turn, the company is producing new plant-based chips, chews and crisps made without heating, freezing or oxidizing.

Meanwhile companies like GTF technologies are pushing the envelope even further and creating equipment that food companies can use to produce dried ingredients out of the by-products of conventional processing.

These new approaches to creating higher quality food ingredients solve the age-old challenge of how to store food without sacrificing flavor. Substantial increases in production efficiency also may transform the challenge of low margins that have weighed on food ingredient suppliers.

Additionally, they address the main purpose of the food industry: getting food into kitchens and into the mouths of consumers. That’s largely a problem of preserving flavor and preventing spoilage. Fresh is tricky. Refrigerated and frozen have varying costs and can be equally complex. “Center of the store” foods have been written off as processed by consumers, and dried foods are a mixed bag. Some consumers love them, others aren’t fans.

Pasta seems quite popular. Coffee also seems to be catching on, along with tea, while others, like protein powders, find their way into smoothies. These, and many more dried ingredients, often require either more steps to rehydrate them in the home kitchen, or an awful lot of chewing. Chewy texture can be attractive and is the basis for Stryve’s (SNAX) first line of products, a South African-flavored clean label alternative to beef jerky.

Technology that Works

Technology that works is also more reliable than technology that doesn’t exist and may never work. And speaking of beef that’s hard to swallow, technological impossibility is a big part of what’s tripped up JBS S.A. (JBSAY), the international livestock company that had claimed it would someday produce carbon-neutral meat. The company did so in advance of a planned listing on the NYSE in hopes of ginning up its prospects.

Unfortunately, neither independent scientists nor the New York Attorney General thought that was possible and instead saw it as an effort to gain credit and drive-up sales for sustainability goals that won’t be achieved (a.k.a., "greenwashing" or false advertising). While JBS prepares to defend itself against a lawsuit from the New York AG, it also has delayed its IPO for apparently unrelated reasons.

While the food industry continues to seek ways to achieve necessary business and environmental improvements, advanced food drying may offer and immediate solution that offers a smaller footprint, smaller waste, and improved productivity, which all sounds delicious.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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