Food tech innovations have the potential to change American diets, but consumer education remains a challenge, said Jonathan Deutsch, director of the Drexel Food Lab, a culinary innovation and food product research and development lab focused on solving real world food system problems, during a Fancy Food 24/7 session on Thursday.
“Most struggle to understand what’s in their conventional food and have trouble navigating a nutrition label, and it’s only going to get worse with the decline in home economics, nutrition education in K-12 schools, and fewer people cooking and more ordering delivery,” he said. “If they’re already struggling to describe the ingredients in their chocolate bar, when you add novel ingredients that are cultured and synthetically derived, it’s a long road to get consumers educated.”
That’s not to say that they won’t try such foods, he added.
“To get them to accept them is relatively easy, so it doesn’t always make sense,” he said. “There are certain preservatives found in foods like vinegar but if you put acidic acid on the ingredient list, they’ll say ‘I don’t eat acid in my food.’ So the acceptance is a marketing problem, more than a scientific one.”
Deutsch, along with Sarah Masoni, director of product and process development at Oregon State University’s Food Innovation Center, and Larissa Zimberoff, author of “Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley’s Mission to Change What We Eat,” took part in the "Will #Foodtech Change What We Know About Making Food?" session.
Zimberoff spoke about her fascination with upcycled products, which are produced when one company has a waste stream and another sees it as a viable ingredient option. She cited as example Pulp Pantry’s chips, which are made from the fiber-rich pulp that’s left over from juicing.
“The founder teamed up with Suja, a large juice maker, who provides the pulp, usually kale and celery, and incorporates it in her chips,” Zimberoff said. “She also uses okara flour, a waste stream from tofu making, and cassava.”
Deutsch is president of the Upcycled Food Foundation, which was established in 2019 with nine startup members and now has over 170 including many SFA members and large companies like Dole and Mondelez. He said he is particularly proud of a student startup from the Drexel Food Lab that makes the upcycled product Reveal Avocado Brew.
“This was started a couple years ago during the height of the avocado toast boom. The founders saw the seeds and said ‘this is where the antioxidants and polyphenols are so why are we getting rid of this stuff?’” he said. “They created a prebiotic, antioxidant-rich beverage.”
In addition to recovering waste pits, the company solves another problem. “As any home composter knows, avocado pits are horrible in compost since they don’t break down very easily, so by steeping the pits and making brew from them, they break down afterwards,” he said.
Masoni noted that OSU’s Food Innovation Center has tested a number of upcycled ingredients.
“We do a lot of work where we’re putting pulp or dried byproducts from manufacturing in foods,” she said. “You can pretty easily add 20 percent to something you’re making. So, for instance, if you’re making a loaf of bread, you can add 20 percent dried milled tomato pulp, and people will still find it acceptable.”
She said that one of the challenges with these ingredients is that there is more waste stream than can be used, and creating a product that is 100 percent from a waste stream is difficult.
Deutsch noted that it also tends to be small startups rather than large CPG companies that are innovating in the space, but the giants are keeping an eye on these products and their makers.
“A Nestle or a Unilever isn’t going to say ‘we have all this byproduct, let’s stabilize it and make an upcycled chip,’ but they’re watching and will likely acquire some of these startups or invest in them,” he said.
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