CHICAGO — Food products containing upcycled ingredients have become a popular sustainability strategy.

The industry now needs to address how to scale up the practice and bring down product prices, making them more affordable for all, said Lara Ramdin, PhD, chief innovation and science officer at Upcycled Foods, Inc.

Ramdin was on a panel that discussed upcycling July 16 in Chicago at IFT FIRST, the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual meeting and food exposition. 

Upcycled foods use ingredients that otherwise would not have gone to human consumption, are procured and produced using verifiable supply chains, and have a positive impact on the environment, according to the Upcycled Food Association.

The industry may explore more cost-effective alternatives than biomass left over from corn harvests, said Franny Gilman, PhD, principal scientist at Kraft Heinz Co. Corn stover, soy straw, rice hulls, sugarcane trash and barley straw are some materials used in upcycling, and research continues on whey. 

Efforts also may focus on creating two or three compounds, instead of just one, from the fermentation process used to make upcycled ingredients, and upcycled ingredients might offer multi-functional benefits, including protein, gut health and fiber, she said. 

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are trying to create multiple upcycled ingredients from byproducts of Greek yogurt production. Challenges come in working with high temperatures and high-pressure processing, said Xiaolei Shi, PhD, a scientist at the university.

“We have to be open-minded about adopting other novel separation methods,” Shi said.

The researchers are creating glucose-galactose syrup (GGS), a sweetener that could act as a high-fructose corn syrup alternative. Further upcycling could produce a second, value-added sweetener that could act as an alternative for allulose, another sweetener. It may take three to five years to scale up, Shi said. The university researchers estimate such a project could produce an eventual profit of $10 million per year.

“We think this is super and doable,” Shi said.

Investors, however, want to see a financial return in a year to 18 months, Ramdin said, when it might take three years or more with upcycling.

“It’s still an emerging category,” she said of upcycling. “When you present something to a customer or a partner, it’s going to be a little more expensive. We are commercial, but we don’t have scale. I think there is a runway to get to scale, and there is a runway for costs to come down.”

Upcycled Foods produces upcycled flour from brewers’ spent grains. Ramdin said upcycling, as is the case with spent grains, often involves working with wet material that must be processed quickly to use in human food because of food safety concerns. After a certain time, the material instead goes to animal feed or a landfill. Upcycled Foods is working on extending the allowable time for processing human food.

Besides flour, Upcycled Food one day hopes to turn spent grain into fiber, protein or amino acids.

“The thing about spent grain is, the flour we sell I think is really the tip of the iceberg,” Ramdin said.