WWW.RENEWALMILL.COM
by Jenna Movsowitz
UPCYCLED INGREDIENTS
FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE FROM YOUR KITCHEN With Caroline Cotto, Co-Founder of Renewal Mill
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hen you Google the word “upcycled,” you’ll be met with results ranging from trendy vintage furniture shops to reworked Levi’s. While upcycling has quickly become trendy in home and fashion, it’s still a relatively new concept to CPG — but Renewal Mill is one of many emerging brands who are trying to change that. Renewal Mill is a next-generation upcycled ingredients company, devoted to reducing food waste at the manufacturing level. Claire Schlemme originally learned about produce pulp waste when she co-founded Boston’s first organic juice company. Every day, they were left with copious amounts of pulp that ultimately were trashed. She knew there had to be a better solution, but it didn’t exist yet. This problem became her driving force, and it turned out to be a much larger problem than she ever could have imagined; it existed at every level of the supply chain. The co-founders of Renewal Mill learned the true scale of this issue when they met the third largest tofu producer
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in the US. In his manufacturing process, nutritious soy pulp was purely labeled as waste, then taken directly to landfill or to animal agriculture. In other words, a perfectly healthy byproduct was either being tossed, or used to fuel the meat/dairy industry — a truth largely unknown by many plant-based or vegan tofu-eaters. Upon seeing this, the founders knew that there had to be a better way to keep all this valuable nutrition in the supply chain and bring it back to people's plates. The answer? Turn it all into a nutritious ingredient. Through dehydration and a milling process, Renewal Mill created their flagship ingredient: Okara Flour. Okara is a byproduct of tofu production, high in fiber and protein, and completely gluten free. It looks very similar to a traditional all-purpose flour,
