Mushroom Concentrate Flavor Concept Nominated for Dutch Sustainability Award

The No Waste Award will be awarded to the company which has the most innovative way of working together on preventing food waste. This award is made possible by the No Waste Network.

Nov 4 2011 --- DMC Maaltijden with their pilot ‘Maaltijdservice á la carte’, Scelta Mushrooms with ‘From Waste2Taste’ and Sonneveld with their product ‘Sonextra Sustain’ have been nominated by the jury for the NoWasteAward. The NoWasteAward will be presented to one of the nominees on Monday 7th of November by the Ministry of EL&I during the ‘Beter Eten Congres’ in Den Bosch, The Netherlands.

The No Waste Award will be awarded to the company which has the most innovative way of working together on preventing food waste. This award is made possible by the No Waste Network. The No Waste Network is founded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation (EL&I) in order to create a platform in which the ministry and her partners work together to stimulate innovation in the field of food waste management.

The jury – consisting of Liesbeth Driven (Veneca), John van Kessel (Syntens, House of Food), Jonathan Karpathios (head chef restaurant Vork & Mes) and Toine Timmermans (Wageningen UR) – has carefully studied the entries. From the 14 submissions 3 ideas have been nominated. The winner will be chosen based on the following criteria: the level of innovation of the initiative, the amount of food waste which is potentially reduced and how special the collaboration with chain partners is.

DMC Maaltijden Prevents waste of food in social care centres and hospitals with the ‘Maaltijdservice á la Carte’ concept. This concept will prepare and distribute food in a different (central) way in which regeneration techniques (dish out) also have been taken into account. It is also of great importance that the cooking is based on what the customer expects and likes, and particularly give them the opportunity to choose last minute from the different meals and portion sizes. This will bring us to ‘eat well in a fun way’ because ‘eat well equals feel well’. Furthermore the logistic movements have been reduced to a minimum by using this system.

Scelta Mushrooms With the harvesting of mushrooms, a large part of the yield (about one quarter per farmer) is unusable, which is the stem of the mushroom. The stem is covered in the so called ’casing soil’ and therefore makes it visually unattractive for the consumer. Usually these stems are thrown away and the farmer has to pay for the removal of this waste product. In 2008 Scelta Blanchaud Concentrates (SBC) started to collect these mushroom stems to cook, press and then transform them into tasteful mushroom concentrates. These mushroom concentrates are used daily primarily by the soup and sauces industry, partly as concentrate and partly as spray-dried powder. For the production of this powder a joint venture has been formed with a company in France. Customers are companies like Campbell’s, Knorr, Unox (Cup-a-Soup).

Sonneveld is a supplier of raw bakery materials. Sonneveld has a wide knowledge of ingredients and their impact on colour, aroma, tenderness and crust of the bread. This knowledge has led to the development of a product (Sonextra Sustain) that combats the high amount of bread waste. On their website this product is described as “a special starter for reprocessing of bread. With Sonextra Sustain, wasted bread is changed in a sourdough to be used for the production of new fresh bread.” Bakeries have a lot of bread which they don’t sell, for instance because of the use by date. By adding this product to the dough, wasted bread can be upgraded to a new ingredient, much like sourdough, to create new fresh bread with more character and taste.

The No Waste Award will be presented during the No Waste Dinner which is part of the ‘Beter Eten Congres.’ Rob Geus, amongst others known from the TV show Smaakpolitie, will be hosting the presentation.