Industry’s first upcycling food label targets over 255 product certifications in 2021

04 May 2021 --- Upcycled Food Association (UFA) is rolling out the “world’s first mark certifying upcycled food,” advertised as a crucial tool to address urgent climate and environmental crises through purchasing power. The new label will be featured on upcycled products across the US in August, with over 255 products and ingredients targeted for certification. 

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst ahead of the official rollout, UFA’s marketing director Leah Graham details the commercial potential of the new labeling scheme.

Among successful upcycled product launches, Graham highlights examples of used grain being transformed into snack bars, coffee cherries turned into flour for cookies and surplus bread brewed into beer.

During this era of pivotal climate consciousness, the label’s founders aim to help consumers identify which products have been made with transformative ingredients sourced from waste side streams to maximize the full potential of food-grade raw material.

“UFA is helping improve the rest of the upcycled product supply chain, so that it may meet the capacity of the impending boom in demand. These efforts include educating venture capitalists to increase investment in upcycled companies,” she details.

“UFA is also working to connect more upcycled ingredient suppliers with product developers, and other institutional buyers. To do this, UFA holds networking events and curates connections between relevant potential partners.”

More than 43 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year by supermarkets, flags UFA.

From beta testing to national rollout
This program has been in development since 2019, and was launched in beta version last February in the US.

Open enrollment will begin in mid-June and the company anticipates the label being on packaging and on shelf by late summer. 

“We had a surplus of applicants for the beta round and are optimistic that the right products will get to market,” says Graham. “Our long-term goal is for certification to expand worldwide.”

“Once certified, a product is brought into the consumer marketing efforts orchestrated by UFA to increase access to, and demand for, upcycled products among consumers,” she notes.

UFA is creating a vast library of upcycled products and ingredients, for which it can then assist in increasing sales through partnerships with retailers, and consumer education strategies.

Targeting over 255 products and ingredients
More than 43 billion pounds of food are thrown away each year by supermarkets, flags UFA. That is the equivalent of 10 percent of all US food waste and is due to administrative mistakes, breakage, spoilage, theft and other losses.

Overall, excessive food waste spells bad news for business, costing the grocery industry more than US$50 billion in lost profits annually.

Graham highlights examples of used grain being transformed into snack bars, coffee cherries turned into flour for cookies and surplus bread brewed into beer.Meanwhile, the environmental cost of retail food waste that goes unaddressed equates to 30 million acres of cropland and 4.2 trillion gallons of water, according to a recent study by the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service.

With pressure mounting, other long-term targets of UFA include increasing the number of grocery stores that sell upcycled products; raising the number of grocery stores that actively feature upcycled products; growing consumer awareness of upcycled products; and raising overall sales for upcycled products.

“UFA is helping improve the rest of the upcycled product supply chain, so that it may meet the capacity of the impending boom in demand,” says Graham. 

“These efforts include educating venture capitalists to increase investment in upcycled companies,” she explains. “UFA is also working to connect more upcycled ingredient suppliers with product developers, and other institutional buyers. 

“To do this, UFA holds networking events and curates connections between relevant potential partners.”

Upcycling revolution
Whole Foods Market Forecasted upcycled foods among its top ten food trends for 2021. Upcycling was also pegged as “the new recycling” under last year’s Innova Market Insights Top Trend, “The Sustain Domain.”

Tapping into this green trend, Canadian food-tech company Chinova Bioworks is currently focusing its efforts to rapidly scale up manufacturing for its clean-label upcycled mushroom extract Chiber that functions as a natural preservative.

Among Earth Day highlights this year recently featured on FoodIngredientsFirst, upcycled basil was transformed into aromatic vodka in a new Rethink Food partnership with “Manhattan’s first distillery since Prohibition.”

In other moves, CP Kelco’s Nutrava Citrus Fiber is sourced from intact citrus peels from the juicing industry and is marketed as a replacement for eggs, starch and xanthan gum.

Also in this space, Renewal Mill specializes in “oat okara” – a nutritious flour made from the pulp leftover when plant milk is made. The company primarily works with pulps such as oat pulp, soybean pulp and almond pulp.

And last November, Barry Callebaut began a new eco-initiative to upcycle its cocoa shells into biochar, which looks similar to charcoal, supplies green energy and reduces carbon emissions at the chocolate and cocoa giant’s operations.

By Benjamin Ferrer