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

Wasted food is a big problem. More than 1 billion tonnes was thrown away in 2022 by households, retailers and food service companies, according to figures published by the U.N.’s Environment Program in 2024. It’s expensive too: The World Bank estimated that lost or wasted food cost $1.2 trillion in 2020.

It’s an issue that food entrepreneur Chloe Stewart first became aware of as a young adult traveling to different parts of the world. Seeing plates piled high in places like Beijing and Boston and having a sense that “there’s no way someone’s going to finish all that” made her angry, she said.

“This is actually criminal, the fact that we’re not mandated to find better use for the food that’s ending up in landfill,” she said in a video call with CNBC.

Stewart’s food business, Nibs etc., began as a blog where she wrote about “misunderstood” ingredients such as cacao nibs — the small pieces of fermented cacao beans that are used to make chocolate — as well as explored how to cook with the parts of fruit and vegetables that are typically discarded, like the scraped out seeds of a pumpkin. Stewart calls these “upcycled,” rather than waste products, because of their potential as ingredients in their own right.

In 2018, Stewart started making granola, savory crackers and banana loaves in her kitchen, selling them at London’s upscale Borough Market. A freshly squeezed juice stand was close by, and she began to make recipes from the leftover pulp — the seeds and skin that would otherwise be discarded.

“Juice pulp is only ‘waste’ because it comes out the wrong end of a juicer, but actually it’s where all the good stuff is, and it’s full of fiber,” Stewart said. As her business grew, she experimented with different fruits, settling on apple pulp that she sourced from a cider-maker in the English county of Kent. It became the key ingredient for Nibs etc.’s granola and makes up 25% of its crackers, and Stewart now sells Nibs etc. products at high-end U.K. retailers including Selfridges and Waitrose.  

Other types of so-called food waste can be upcycled in this way, Stewart said, and Nibs etc. is developing a chip-style snack made from potatoes as well as spent grain from the brewing process, an ingredient that might otherwise become animal feed. She’s also working on a digestive biscuit — a flour-based sweet snack popular in the U.K. — using rapeseed meal, the byproduct of rapeseed oil production. Both of these new products have the potential to be made from 40% to 50% upcycled ingredients, Stewart said.

The food industry can become “nature positive,” according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity focused on the circular economy. It can regenerate rather than deplete natural resources, for example by using crops that would otherwise have gone to waste, the charity said.

Some of Nibs etc.’s products were among the winners of a recent food “redesign” challenge organized by the foundation. Other winners included Hodmedod’s pasta made from “wrinkled” peas, a crop that might otherwise be ploughed back into the soil if its harvesting time is missed, and Toast, a beer brewed with surplus bread.

Beth Mander, who oversaw the charity’s “Big Food Redesign Challenge,” which announced winners in February, said the wider aim of the initiative is to influence companies to produce food in a more regenerative way. “Our big hope is that every time … you go into a supermarket and you pick products off the shelf, you can be sure that nature is better off as a result of your choices,” Mander told CNBC via video call.

That might mean less intensive farming, growing a diverse range of crops or adding ingredients to products that reduce their environmental impact, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s website. One such ingredient is SeaMeat, a blend of seaweed that can be added to burgers to provide a savory taste, while reducing the proportion of meat in the burger by 25%.

The seaweed doesn’t provide an “ocean flavor,” according to Hannah Weise, trade marketing and communication manager at The Seaweed Company, which makes the SeaMeat blend. Instead, Weise said, it “adds juiciness and … [a] nice texture, because it contains or it can absorb a lot of water, and it also adds this umami flavor.” Seaweed contains protein — up to 32% of its dry weight — and it grows fast without fertilizers, but is not yet being used to its full potential as a food product in the U.S. and Europe, Weise said in a video call with CNBC.

“Our aim is really to make food supply chains more sustainable and greener through seaweed,” she said.

While SeaMeat is currently in development, The Seaweed Company’s focus is on Nomet, a Belgian croquette made with seaweed instead of the more traditional shrimp. Nomet is sold at BioPlanet stores in Belgium, and the aim is to expand to other chains and more European countries this year.

Several of the products in the Big Food Redesign Challenge are on sale in Waitrose stores in the U.K., part of the grocer’s efforts to tackle the environmental depletion caused by food production, according to the company’s senior environment manager, Ben Thomas.

“The food system is not in a great way. It’s a major contributor to environmental degradation, climate change and biodiversity loss … Essentially, we’re part of the issue, therefore we have to be part of the solution,” Thomas told CNBC by video call. (Waitrose’s “Farming for Nature” initiative aims to help 2,000 farmers shift to regenerative practices, for example.)

One issue is communicating the meaning of “regenerative” to shoppers. While organically produced food is recognized by consumers in the U.K., terms like “upcycled” are less well understood. The products in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s redesign challenge are being marketed using the phrase “Nature in Mind,” which appears on store stands and online, but Thomas said there is some way to go before people fully understand what that means.

Small production runs can mean upcycled products are priced at the upper end, with a 360g pack of Nibs etc.’s Rye, Hazelnut & Cacao Granola listed on the company’s website for £6.99 ($9.08). But food entrepreneur Stewart hopes upcycled ingredients can go mainstream. “It’s okay at the early days for for the … upcycled concept and products to sit slightly more premium. But the goal is obviously to then compete with the mass market products for mass adoption. And to do that, we need to be able to tap into economies of scale,” she told CNBC.