Joey Thurman:
Welcome back to Talking Plant Protein. I'm Joey Thurman.

Nicole Astra:
And I'm Nicole Astra. Today we're going to talk about waste within our food system. Food loss happens across the board between harvest and retail and food manufacturing, food service, and even in our own homes.

Joey Thurman:
A sustainable food system is resilient food system. More than ever, the plant-based industry is prioritizing the reduction of food loss and waste in production.

Nicole Astra:
So Caroline Cotto is the Board President of the Upcycled Food Association. When she came on the show, I asked her to educate me on food loss, the global statistics because it was something that I hadn't really paid attention to and the numbers are really concerning so. She was also just named to Forbes 30 Under 30. She's a real game changer. Let's see what she had to say.

Carline Cotto:
Yeah. So food waste is a massive problem. It's estimated that about 30 to 40% of food globally goes to waste of all the food that we produce. And if we were to kind of quantify the carbon impact of that, it's equivalent to one of the largest countries in the world. So, behind China and the US, food waste would be the largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. It's about 6% of greenhouse gas emissions totally. So, according to Project Drawdown, which is one of the leading climate change research organizations, reducing food waste is actually the number one thing we can do to stop at two degrees of climate warming currently.

Nicole Astra:
Wow. So how does up cycling, we'll say these byproducts, affect climate change and food loss?

Carline Cotto:
Yeah, so, we're wasting billions of pounds of byproducts or side streams that are full of nutrition that we're processing out of our food. Not because they're kind of unsafe, but just because it's been easier or more convenient to just truck them the way to landfill. So what we're doing with upcycling is making sure that we keep all of that valuable nutrition in the supply chain. So, at my company, Renewal Mill, we're primarily working with the byproducts of plant-based milk right now and taking those and dehydrating them and milling them in order to keep them shelf stable so that they don't go to waste.

Nicole Astra:
All of her products are pantry stable, going into baked goods, such yummy things and all from a side stream.

Joey Thurman:
That's amazing. I mean, I think that we taking the excess, byproduct of things and upcycling is really interesting even to the point where we're taking like ugly fruits and vegetables. It's okay if you're ugly fruit or vegetable, I'm still going to eat you. You are still delicious. Right.

Nicole Astra:
That's just it. It's nutritious, it's palatable. It goes into other areas of the food system. So, my first introduction to this was when Terra Bio was on the show and their Outreach and Marketing Director, Rebecca Bradley, introduced me to this idea. Let's take a look at their work with spent grain.

Rebecca Bradley:
Our plant-based protein comes from Brewer's spent grain, which is naturally broken down in our bio-fractionation process. By sourcing from local breweries and being able to produce in most food manufacturing plants, Terra Bio is shrinking the supply chain. Best of all, our protein product, Protina, retains the functional traits that are critical for the use in meat replacement products, especially that meat-like texture. And if you're in the business of fermentation, we're also working to create a spent grain derived sugar feed stock that offers the same zero waste story.

Joey Thurman:
Now, breweries have a lot of upcycling potential. At The Plant in Chicago, beer is where their internal ecosystem begins. When I toured the plant, I truly got an education on what closing the loop is.

Nicole Astra:
Yes.

Joey Thurman:
Let's take a look.

Speaker 5:
First off, we look at this as a living laboratory. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to take the output of one process and make it the input of another process. And so for small businesses and we have about 22 small businesses here at the plant, all food, that means taking some portion of their waste stream and using it as an input to another business and so that can be things like carbon dioxide. Actually, above us here, there's a... The gray line is a CO2 line that's harvesting waste CO2 from Whiner Beer Company down at this end and running about 300 feet up to the Back of the Yard Algae Sciences at the top end of the building.

Joey Thurman:
So you can go [inaudible 00:04:14] some algae, work on decreased inflammation, and go have a beer all in the same place.

Speaker 5:
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Joey Thurman:
That's brilliant.

Speaker 5:
There's a lot of other loops that can be closed too. Things like oxygen from grow rooms. Heat is a really easy one because all of this food manufacturing is very energy intensive and so we create large amounts of heat. We also have large amounts of refrigeration in the building. And so balancing all of these energy loads is one of the things that makes all of this work. Because what we're trying to do is provide economies of scale for small businesses that they wouldn't have if they were operating on their own.

Nicole Astra:
See, that's incredible. That's a perfect example of implementing technology to improve our practices.

Joey Thurman:
It was really interesting. And from that piece, you can't tell, so go on our website and see how big this facility is. I mean, they... From brewery to microgreens to lab-based meat and they even have this huge composter in the backyard... And they're actually in back of the yards look a double meaning there... It's really cool to see so make sure you guys go to our website and check that out.

Nicole Astra:
Yeah. So many companies under one roof and all benefiting from that closed cycle.

Joey Thurman:
Yeah. It was wild. And the thing is, it's mainly vegan and it used to be a slaughter house. So, it is pretty interesting, right?

Nicole Astra:
And, honestly, algae, I think we need to pay attention to algae. I'm not afraid of it.

Joey Thurman:
Let's talk about algae.

Nicole Astra:
Yeah.

Joey Thurman:
Susewi is an algae producer and their CEO and Co-Founder, Keith Coleman, calls it the healthiest food on the planet. Here it is. So when

Keith Coleman:
So when you think about it, humans are very used to eating vascular plants, land plants. And land plants... There is about... We grow about 3 billion tons of land plants every year to feed ourselves. And if you take the totality of land plants, vascular plants, it supports roughly 160 million tons of animals on Earth every year. In the sea, Phytoplankton, or algae, supports 900 million tons of life. So it's five times... got five times more carrying capacity in the sea than all of the land plants combined. So we talking about the source of the greatest food source on the planet, in effect, which supports the most life on the planet. And that's what algae is.

Keith Coleman:
Algae is this three and a half billion year old organism that figured out 1.) how to absorb carbon and use it, 2.) how to absorb nitrate, silicate and phosphate and turn it into the world's healthiest food, 3.) algae is the fastest growing organism on the planet. So, when we grow algae, we start off with a test tube on day one. And by day 30, we have 10,000 tons. It's an incredibly abundant, unbelievably healthy food source. It's got all of the proteins, all of the amino acids, it's got EPA and DHA, which you don't get from anything else, all of the Omega threes, it's got [inaudible 00:07:25], beta carotene. It's this most amazing organism that I would dare to say, if there was only one thing on Earth that you could eat, it would be algae. And so it's this incredibly healthy thing that we don't know.

Keith Coleman:
As I said earlier, that we grow about three billion tons of vascular plants a year. The total global output of algae macro algae per year is about 30,000 tons. And so it is barely... We've barely figured out how to unlock, how to use this most abundant food source on Earth.

Nicole Astra:
What you think about seeing algae on our plates?

Joey Thurman:
It used to kind of weird me out because I'm a texture guy, but what I've started doing recently is getting dried seaweed for a little bit of crunch.

Nicole Astra:
Sheets?

Joey Thurman:
Yeah. And the sheets. And it's literally... You can take the whole thing and crunch it and put it in your mouth. But it has iodine and so many benefits that people aren't getting in their regular diet and we always try to pop a multivitamin, so having some algae in your life. Even in The Plant, we talk about Chlorella and Spirulina and they're talking about algae and all these amazing benefits.

Nicole Astra:
Yeah. And again, it's not using soil. Fermentation is ever more popular. And I think that's where we're headed.

Joey Thurman:
I think we're headed there.

Nicole Astra:
That's it for now on Talking Plant Protein. I'm Nicole Astra.

Joey Thurman:
And I'm Joey Thurman. See you next time on Talking Plant Protein. Algae, crunchy, good, delicious?

Nicole Astra:
Delicious.

Joey Thurman:
Nutritious.

Nicole Astra:
Have you seen the pickled algae?

Joey Thurman:
I'm not a pickler.