Several years ago, Claire Schlemme cofounded an organic juice company in Boston, only to be disappointed by what her recipes left behind: plenty of pulp, a nutritious byproduct going to waste.
So she started another company to change that. In mid-2016, Schlemme became the CEO of Renewal Mill, a public benefit corporation that reduces food waste by transforming fiber-rich scraps from food processing operations into flour that can be sold wholesale. It’s now joined forces with Hodo Foods–the organic soy brand that sells tofu to Whole Foods, Target, Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and many Michelin-starred chefs–to make something nutritious made from okara, the main leftover from making tofu.
Tofu represents a particularly good test case because it yields such a huge amount of byproduct. The initial recipe requires soy milk, which must be extracted from dry soybeans, which are boiled and blended to produce the liquid that eventually results in tofu. Every pound of soy milk yields at least its own weight in wet pulp. For major manufacturers, this presents a pretty big storage and logistics hurdle.
Hodo used to unload it as animal feed for local dairies or livestock programs. But Renewal takes the pulp and dries it. The resulting flakes can be milled into flour with 46 grams of fiber. (There’s barely any in traditional white flour.) For Hodo, the partnership will ensure that the company turns 100% of their raw material into something edible. The tofu maker currently diverts between 5% and 10% of its processing leftovers to Renewal. It expects to ramp up quickly because there’s an additional financial incentive: Renewal pays about two and a half times more for the unrefined material than Hodo was previously selling the pulp for.
“Renewal is looking at industrial scale production and the impact [of that] is what excites me,” says Minh Tsai, the founder and CEO of Hodo, who is also an adviser for Renewal. Tsai emphasizes that okara will hopefully be just the first of many byproducts in the company’s portfolio. Renewal isn’t just selling one ingredient but a whole new way of sourcing them.
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