Kazoo snacks founder talks mega water savings with eco-friendly upcycled tortilla chips

08 Apr 2022 --- Upcycled food start-up Kazoo Snacks’ corn tortilla chips are made using upcycled corn germ and less virgin corn than its conventional counterpart. The industry-first snacks reduce food waste and save up to 76 liters of water per bag.

In addition, the company has saved 264,979 liters of water in the last nine months.

Josh Death, founder, Kazoo Snacks tells FoodIngredientsFirst: “We chose to tackle water savings because it’s the most understandable and actionable in addressing today’s drought conditions.” 

“Our hope is that consumers, in being presented a choice between a conventional tortilla chip brand and one that is sustainable and upcycled with a positive and measurable environmental impact, consumers will choose the eco-friendlier choice.”

Upcycling is “the new recycling,” presenting an attractive opportunity for businesses to curb food waste and loss, while scaling a host of new value-added F&B products from these side streams. 

Emergent concepts within this space now include alcoholic spirits from upcycled whey, chewy snacks from fruit surplus and prebiotic sugars to fiber-rich agricultural waste. 

Eco-friendly bottom line
Kazoo’s water savings occur at the ingredient sourcing level not exclusively during production. Water footprint engineers who specialize in using reclaimed or upcycled corn germ byproduct from the corn starch industry helped design the company’s economic model. 

The tortilla snacks took four years to develop to include better-for-you properties such as extra fiber, healthy fats and less carbohydrates, but was also sustainable with the potential to change the entire chip and snack category.

“Since we’re able to incorporate 40% upcycled corn germ by-product into our chip, we only need 60% virgin growth corn. Only a small percentage of water used to grow the corn for starch is attributable to the germ by-product. As such, we’re able to get a corn tortilla chip where 60% of the corn uses its full water footprint of 110 gallons (500 liters) per pound of corn,” Death explains.

The water-savings are also calculated using an ISO 14044 lifecycle model which arrives at a similar result.Kazoo lime zest.

Death is a board member of the Upcycled Standards Association which aims to reduce food waste by growing the upcycled economy. A Standard provides rules and guidelines to unite the industry and centralize messaging around upcycled food. The long-term goal of a standard is to guide the food system towards increased economic and environmental sustainability.

“This also gives grocery shoppers the chance to vote with their dollars while showing conventional brands and grocery stores that making environmentally friendly manufacturing and purchasing decisions can actually help, and not hinder, as their bottom line,” says Death.

Water saving claims 
The company is reviewing sustainable packaging and carbon neutral transport options which they plan to incorporate once Kazoo is more established.

“Our claims are validated and verified by the top two food practice law firms, led by former US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lawyers, to validate and support our on-package water savings claims. We believe sustainability claims should be validated and if they’re validated, they should be marketed to make customers aware of real sustainable choices – not greenwashing,” says Death. 

“The first step was to secure sourcing and find a mill willing to go outside their routine operations. Getting corn scientists to formulate so much germ into chips was the second step. This exercise took 18 months and numerous failures,” he continues.

“Kazoo’s corn scientists typically work with Fortune 500 food companies, but they were willing to take on my project because they claimed no one had done this before nor had they been able to get more than 25% substitution into a tortilla chip and still have it machinable in production.”

The third step was getting a co packer willing to experiment and take on a novel challenge. Each step forward was built on numerous failures. 

“The challenges seemed never-ending. Each step forward was built on numerous failures,” Death concedes.

“The main R&D challenge was creating a workable masa after we removed so much starch (the whole corn kernel) and effectively replaced it with oil (upcycled corn germ). This required deviations from the typical tortilla chip production process and is the basis of our patent applications. There were also scale up challenges in production.”

Meanwhile, Arla Foods Ingredients highlights how upcycling ingredients aids in developing a circular bio-economy.

By Inga de Jong