If food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after the U.S. and China: not only does it represent the use of resources and environmental impact without a clear benefit, but as it decomposes in landfills, it releases methane and carbon dioxide. What if some of this could be avoided, and in a way that improved access to safe, nutritious foods for those who need them?
This is the premise of repurposing food waste for use in food. Sometimes called ‘upcycling’, repurposing food waste into new food products is the focus of a recent GAIN’s working paper, done in collaboration with Agramondis. Through desk research and in-depth interviews, we did a rapid review of 21 potential food wastes that could be repurposed into nutritious foods, including fruit and vegetable peels and scraps; seeds, legumes, and their residues; other plant byproducts; and animal byproducts. Where possible, we considered availability, feasibility of repurposing, potential uses, consumer acceptability, food safety, and nutritional quality.
While data availability precluded a fully comprehensive assessment, the results indicate that several products have moderate or high potential across all criteria considered. For example, fruit peels (like orange and mango peels) tend to be high in vitamins and fibre and generally safe for consumption if pesticide residues can be managed. When formed into flours, they can be integrated into many different foods and tend to have high consumer acceptability. Press cakes are the residue left over from pressing seeds or legumes to make oils or plant-based milks; they tend to be high in protein, as well as fibre and some micronutrients. They can be used as meat replacements or processed into powders and added to foods. Whey is a major byproduct of cheese production, often disposed of in wastewater to environmental detriment – but also able to be processed into protein- and mineral-rich powders and drinks.
While opportunities abound, one key challenge identified with commercialising these food wastes is that they are often spread out at homes and food service locations where the food is processed. As such, some wastes (e.g., mango and banana peels, cashew apples, eggshells) are decent targets for promoting home processing but may not be commercialisable at scale. Commercialisation may be more feasible with foods that have high levels of industrial processing of the primary product, such as orange juice (yielding orange peels), legume- and seed-based oils and milks (yielding press cakes), and cheese (yielding whey). The achievable price for the final products (and how that would compare to consumer willingness to pay) is also largely an open question: while the waste products themselves tend to be available cheaply, the costs of collecting, cleaning, processing, packaging, and marketing them could be significant.
In bringing such products to market, particular attention would need to be paid to product design and marketing, to ensure they’re truly desirable to consumers, and to whether the necessary food safety processes could be put in place (including new standards, if needed). But with these requirements met, edible food waste has high potential for bringing new nutritional value and quality to our tables – while shrinking that which goes into our trash.
Read the paper here:
And the brief based on it here: