Blendhub and Essence Food upcycle food waste into 3D-printed nutrients

23 Feb 2022 --- Global foodservice platform Blendhub is partnering with Essence Food, a specialist in transforming surplus food into functional products to reduce waste and food loss. The companies will collaborate on developing affordable, nutritional food products from surpluses.

“We are wasting more than 30% of all fruit and vegetables – all highly nutritional food products which can be dried into valuable food ingredients in itself,” Henrik Kristensen, CEO at Blendhub, tells FoodIngredientsFirst.

“With this input of new ingredients into the food value chain, we will develop nutritious and transparent food recipes with a key focus on lower and no-income groups of people who have the right to quality food. We call it from #fresh2powder2fresh or upcycling food,” says Kristensen.

The companies will optimize raw materials and create new ingredients with a high nutritional value and long shelf life. The new formulations will be valid for 3D printing, starting with the digital recipe that combines different powdered ingredients. The technology optimizes the use of food and fosters personalized nutrition.

Retaining organoleptic properties 
Essence Food specializes in using exponential technologies to optimize production and consumption surpluses. 

The company uses a dehydration technique to generate powdered products that retain their organoleptic qualities for five years, even in adverse climate conditions. Consumers have tested the method.Blendhub’s portable powder blending unit in Colombia. 

Essence Food offers its technology and expertise in lyophilization, and Blendhub offers its Food-as-a-Service platform to help food companies design, produce and launch new food products anywhere in the world through a network of hubs on four continents. 

In addition, it offers Digitized Food Quality to validate fresh ingredients and formulations using Chemometric Brain software.

“Lyophilization or simply freeze-drying is a low-temperature dehydration process that involves freezing to remove water from a product. This is in contrast to dehydration by most conventional methods that evaporate water using heat,” explains Kristensen.

“Due to the low processing temperatures and the minimization of deterioration reactions, nutrients are retained, and the color is maintained. Freeze-dried fruit maintains its original shape and has a characteristic soft, crispy texture,” he says.

Blendhub is deploying a globally replicable service platform closer to ingredient suppliers (input) and closer to final consumers (outcome), offering Food-as-a-Service (FaaS). The company helps food producers from initial ingredient identification to the last food product launch through a global multi-localized FaaS hub.

“Our platform aims especially to empower SMEs and disruptive start-ups to detect new market opportunities, innovate incomplete product solutions and access new markets faster, safer and cheaper than before,” Kristensen says.

Powder-based supply chainBlendhub and Essence Food aim to transform surplus food into functional foods.
The project is still in its first phase, but multiple supply chain agreements are being formalized that define which kind of products will enter the novel powder-based supply chain. 

For example, kiwi-based ingredients develop affordable plant-based beverages, desserts, ice creams and nutritional breakfast-oriented product solutions. These are adapted to local consumer preferences in different parts of the world. 

“Taking the ingredients that Essence Food can generate through sophisticated drying processes applied to food surpluses, we at Blendhub and many freelance formulators active on our global platform are working on the development of new individualized formulations and recipes to create new, more durable and nutritious food products,” Kristensen outlines.

Essence Food transforms raw materials that come from surpluses that would otherwise have become methane. “The world can no longer afford any kind of food waste, and we will work together to optimize already available resources to make basic nutrition available to more people in more places,” he says.

Other strategic partners have recently joined Blendhub’s collaborative platform model, such as Nucaps, a company developing functional ingredients through nanotechnology, and Qina, a leading international platform for personalized nutrition solutions.

By Inga de Jong