Focus on food upcycling

Modern, industrial production systems within the food industry are already ensuring that waste is minimised even in the case of large production volumes and that production can be timed flexibly to meet customer demand. Work is continuously being undertaken to ensure that resources are used efficiently. Ideally, food waste does not occur in the first place and, if it does, materials that can still be used are returned to the production cycle.

To further reduce resource consumption, manufacturers employ what is called the cascading or multiple use of a raw material over several stages. This is carried out by using secondary products or residual materials to produce animal feeds or by means of energy conversion in biogas plants. According to the Federation of German Food and Drink Industries, for example, around 50 percent of the fruit are used as animal feed when squeezing oranges to obtain juice. Potato peels that are incurred when producing French fries are also transformed into animal feed.

Existing resources such as production residues and secondary streams can be used internally within a company or sold. Their potential is extensive: they occur in large quantities, are regularly available and have numerous nutritionally highly-valuable properties. According to analyses conducted by Future Market Insights market researchers, the market for upcycled foods was already worth 46.7 billion US dollars (38.6 billion euros) in 2019. And this trend is set to increase.

The sustainable approach of using residual materials from food production and obtaining new ingredients from them is becoming increasingly popular. Numerous start-ups are shaking up the market with new ideas and have made upcycling the core of their brand.

This is shifting the focus onto secondary products that have so far not or hardly been used to feed human beings, including oil press cakes from oil seeds. These occur in large quantities at oil mills that produce in Germany and have so far been used mainly for animal feeds. Their wide range of different proteins, their high content of unsaturated fatty acids, essential amino acids, roughage and secondary plant substances as well as their good availability as a secondary product from cooking oil production make them an interesting raw material for protein-rich meat alternatives. These so-called textured vegetable proteins (TVP), which can be used as mincemeat or goulash substitute, have a meat-like texture that develops as a result of protein interactions during extrusion cooking. Cereals and legumes such as soya or peas are used almost exclusively as TVP raw materials – apart from soya, oil seeds have so far played a negligible role as a source of protein.

Changing this is the goal of a current Industrial Collective Research (Industrielle Gemeinschaftsforschung, IGF) project being conducted by a team of researchers at Berlin’s Technical University (AiF 21340 N). The potential is enormous: the market is growing continuously, because demand for sustainably produced foods with nutritionally valuable ingredients is high. It also enables oil mills to use a secondary product from cooking oil production while adding value – upcycling to perfection.

LEROMA is a B2B platform for food raw materials and bridges the gap between suppliers and customers. This young Düsseldorf-based start-up is focused on a circular economy in the sense of residual material to valuable material and offers all value chain players around the globe the opportunity to integrate their residual streams and secondary products into new processes. This enables valuable resources to be transformed into new products. The exchange is open to all industries that need valuable raw materials. For instance, the cosmetics industry can use fruit cell water and fibres from apple juice production.

In the USA, the Upcycled Food Association (UFA) presented a new certification standard and tested it with 16 companies during the first half of 2021. The ‘Upcycled Certified’ label can be applied for for raw materials or products that are manufactured using residues from food production. The definition of upcycled food according to the UFA is: ‘upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment’. A distinction is made between three labels depending on the percentage of rescued ingredients: 1. Product containing upcycled ingredients (minimum content: 10 percent by weight of the end consumer product); 2. Upcycled ingredient (at least 95 percent ‘upcycled input content’; wholesale goods); 3. Products containing less than 10 percent upcycled ingredients may bear the label ‘Upcycled Certified Minimal Content’ (minimal content of upcycled raw materials).