Circular cakes, desserts, and other confections are now on the table thanks to the rise of upcycling startups.
Food manufacturers can now reach for cocoa from cacao pulp, flour from brewer’s spent grain, and sweeteners from fruit peel – all products made by waste ingredient specialists like Upcycled Food Inc, Agrain, and Fooditive Engine.
Ingredients like this could be the future of food, strengthening supply security, reducing environmental impacts, and offering decadence and nutrition in one.
Waste not, want not
Waste-based French chocolate maker Green Spot Technologies was in the news this week after raising €5M ($5.8M) for its range of fermented cooking ingredients.
The spotlight was firmly on its waste-based, chocolate-flavoured powders that replace cocoa in baking. With climate change driving volatility in cocoa harvests, many investors believe these circular swaps are the future of confectionery.
Brazil has its own version of waste-based chocolate thanks to Cellva Ingredients. In March, the company unveiled its CoffeeCoa “chocolate” ingredient made from coffee waste instead of cocoa beans.
It’s not just chocolate, however, getting the waste treatment. Slowly but surely, a circular supply chain for flour and sweetener is building as commercial customers demand sustainable treats, at scale.
Guilty treats
Waste-based desserts sound like an unlikely sell – after all, is there anything less decadent than thrift? Yet food from cast-offs could become one of the most important food trends in coming decades.
Today, our cakes and desserts are stuffed with resource-intensive ingredients that contribute to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Chocolate is among the most carbon-intensive foods in the world, while butter and milk come with the high greenhouse gas footprint associated with industrial livestock rearing.
Then, there’s the problem of food waste. Around a third of all food produced in the world ends up being discarded each year. This amounts to around 8-10 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions – nearly five times the total from aviation.
In a warming world where food security will dominate the economic agenda, the future of sweet treats is circular. This means confectionery, cakes, and desserts that require minimal land and resources – in other words, cooking with waste we already produce.
Consumers are already showing a growing appetite for upcycled food, with BCC research predicting the global market will grow at a CAGR of 5.6% to $74.8 billion by the end of 2029.
Beer to baked goods
The global economy produces around 1 billion tonnes of food waste annually and there is no shortage of ideas on how to transform these mountainous scraps into sweet indulgences.
Leading the way in building a waste-to-confectionary pipeline is Upcycled Foods Inc., whose products include upcycled flour (made from brewer’s spent grain) and cocoa powder (from the usually-discarded pulp of cacao fruit).
Like many big names in the confectionary ingredients sector, Upcycled Foods Inc focuses sharply on business-to-business sales. The startup offers a one-stop-shop for commercial customers wanting custom circular ingredients to incorporate into their own products.
Satisfying industry demand for sustainable sweets starts with flour, a near-universal ingredient when it comes to baked goods, snacks, and desserts. Accordingly, Upcycled Food’s flagship product is ReGrained SuperGrain, a flour made from spent grain – the main byproduct of the beer brewing industry.
Upcycled Foods Inc. often forges a link between health and circular sustainability: its “protein crisps” for example are sold as a healthier alternative to carbohydrate-heavy crunch mixes found in bars and cereals.
This emphasis on health and nutrients represents a wider tendency in the waste ingredients industry. By offering clients the ability to embed flavour and nutritional value into basic ingredients, upcyclers are trying to maximise markets: if demand for sustainable products lags, the health pitch remains.
In 2022, bakery ingredient specialist Puratos collaborated with the company to supply upcycled materials to commercial bakers. Another collaboration came in 2023, when Upcycled created a ‘super grains’ English muffin with Boston-based baked goods company Stone & Skillet.
Beer to flour, via AI
In Denmark, Agrain is another company offering circular flour from spent grain at commercial scale. After starting out in direct-to-consumer offerings, the company has now focused its strategy on business-to-business marketing instead, where wholesale orders and long-term contracts promise faster expansion.
Currently, the company produces three flour products for bread, cakes, pizza, pasta, and other starchy delights. Each offers a distinctive aroma and flavour profile, created by blending different types of spent grain.
Agrain, like other circular firms, must reckon with the unpredictability that comes with waste feedstock. Supply can be uneven, something Agrain solves by sourcing from multiple breweries so that there is a consistent flow of feedstock year-round.
The properties of the feedstock they source can vary too. The kinds of waste that upcycling companies have to work with can change dramatically over time and unevenness of stock is a given.
Spent grain is no exception. The material comes in different malt types with varying chemical properties: Agrain says its eight partner breweries supply more than 200 unique malt and grain types. This translates into different sensory properties, like aroma colour and taste, which is a problem if the consumer expects consistent food products.
Not being picky about feedstocks is a key competitive advantage in the circular baking ingredients sector: turning low-cost feedstock into high quality foods that meet strict quality and safety standards is the whole purpose of the industry.
Agrain is managing the problem of uneven feedstock using an AI-assisted “blending algorithm” and by selling three types of flour products rather than a single one.
AI is a key part of its business model and production process because it allows the company to deal efficiently with natural differences in its spent grain feedstock. The algorithm helps formulate “recipes” to make Agrain’s three flour products, given what spent grain is available at any time. It makes suggestions about which spent grain malt types to pair in which ratios to obtain the distinctive flavour profile of each of the three flour ‘flavours’ it sells.
Agrain has turned the unevenness of its waste feedstock into a branding opportunity: its three flavour-range offers customers choice while allowing the company to valorise a range of spent grain types. This shows how it is possible to find creative ways around the typical problems that come with working with food waste.
Molecular upcycling
Agrain shows how digital technology is central to managing costs in upcycling confectionary ingredients.
Biotechnologies like precision fermentation are also playing an important role in turning waste into new confectionary ingredients. Fooditive is perhaps the most biotech-heavy food upcycling company. The Dutch startup does not just sell a particular product line or work with a particular feedstock. Instead, what they offer is a service: the ability to custom-develop innovative sustainable ingredients.
Fooditive’s ability to develop custom ingredients, including from waste feedstock, rests with its “Fooditive Engine”, a platform that offers both precision fermentation and bioconversion to create new foodstuffs from unexpected sources.
The company’s precision-fermented casein, for example, offers a key food industry ingredient without the greenhouse gas footprint of animal casein.
Fooditive’s pitch is that their technology produces ingredients that are not just more sustainable but also healthier compared to conventional foodstuffs.
Its Fructosyl Oxidase enzyme modifies pear and apple waste in a way that turns them into a novel sweetener. Currently, the product is undergoing US FDA review. The company says its product is a healthier alternative to sugar in baking, chocolate, fruit fillings, and beverages.
Many products in the development pipeline at Fooditive are attempts to revamp problematic food industry staples. These include emulsifiers and preservatives, two broad families of food ingredients coming under increasing scrutiny for their health impacts.
The case for waste
Like many circular innovations, circular sweets solve several problems at once.
Upcycling discarded food prevents greenhouse gas emissions associated with food overproduction. It also strengthens supply chains, as valorising local waste can reduce the risks to food security posed by import disruptions and climate-driven harvest volatility.
There’s the health case too: upcyclers are forced to develop basic ingredients from scratch, allowing nutrition to be built into food products from the start.
The world of circular baked and sweet goods also shows how sustainability doesn’t have to be austere: with policy, logistics, innovation, experimentation, and marketing, decadent food with a smaller environmental footprint becomes possible. “Waste” is really a misnomer when it comes to upcycled sweets, given how so much of what we throw away can become mouth-watering confections.