UPCYLED INGREDIENTS: Fighting Climate Change from Your Kitchen

by Jenna Movsowitz with Caroline Cotto, Co-Founder of Renewal Mill

When 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 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, and acts very similarly to a coconut flour, making it great for people with grain-free, gluten-free, low carb or keto diets. Their second ingredient came about with the rise of the next big dairy alternative: oat milk. Their oat milk flour, which is 50% protein, is made from the byproduct of oat milk production, giving new life to the remnants that don’t make it to your oat milk latte.

Renewal Mill sells these flours as ingredients, but also as the base of their line of gluten-free, plant-based baking mixes.These range from their best-selling, decadent, dark chocolate brownie mix to a classic sugar cookie mix, and all you have to add is oil and water. Their products aren’t just sustainable and high protein, but are also ridiculously scrumptious — created by a five-times James Beard award winning cookbook author and alternative flour expert.

Recently, Renewal Mill carbon offset their production — because having a 60% lower carbon footprint

than traditional wheat flours already wasn’t enough. Since founding, they’ve diverted over 100,000 pounds of food waste. “Reducing food waste is the number one thing we can do to prevent two degrees of global warming in the short term,” co-founder Caroline Cotto says. “We want to put that power back into the hands of the consumers. We want to empower them to help reduce food waste at scale, without having to sacrifice. Sustainable consumption can still be absolutely delicious.”