Get Better For You Food Straight From Your Phone! with Xinyi Lim

Thanks, Justin for having me. My pleasure to be here.

I am really excited to chat with you to learn more about the association, learn more about what you're doing and talk all things Upcycling. We'd love for you to just intro yourself for our listeners. Tell us a little bit about you.

Well, I'm Turner, I'm the CEO of the Upcycled Food Association. I live here in Crested Butte, Colorado, a small ski town. So just seeing if we could get this going, I gotta go skiing after this.

You went skiing today?

Well, I actually already did. It was a powder day, so you gotta get as many hours in as you can.

Wow. Okay, I like that. So we're in Colorado are you from?

I'm from Denver originally, but I'm now in Crested Butte. It's a little mountain town right in the middle of the elk mountains right in the middle of the state. I live at about 9,000 feet.

Wow, that sounds like a big headache to me, frankly. But that's just because of the altitude.

It's cold. But the altitude doesn't bother me too much. It's beautiful. I wish I could show you the views of mountains over here at my window. It's gorgeous.

It sounds beautiful. It sounds beautiful. Wow. Okay, I would love to go skiing, I have been skiing in years.

Hey, I tell everyone who I talked to come visit. We'll have a retreat here in Crested Butte. There's no better place--

I went skiing was actually an Aspen, but that was a while ago.

Okay, cool. Yeah, Aspen's right on the other side of the mountain.

Awesome. Okay, well, let's just get into this for our listeners. I know they're curious about the Upcycled Association, the Upcycled Food Association. Let's connect the dots because we've been talking a lot about Upcycling on the podcast. And for those listeners that are familiar with the podcast and have listened, you will be familiar with the Upcycled Food Association because you may remember that we spoke with Dan from Regrained who actually is a friend of Turner, right Turner? You know Dan?

He's a friend. He's a board member. He's a colleague. Yeah.

Exactly. So let's connect the dots for them. How does somebody get involved with the association? What does the association mean for those in the industry? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Sure. I think taking Dan in Regrained is a great place to start because they were one of our first co-founding members. And just over a year ago, there was this group of businesses that came together to kind of realize, hey, we're doing something really special here. If we work together, we can magnify our impact and create something really, really special. It's going to change the world. So each of these businesses has their own creative ways of preventing food waste by identifying a source of waste, a byproduct from either manufacturing or agriculture and upcycling it, adding value into some other nutritious high quality product. For example, shout out to Regrained. This is the best part of my samples. So here we have the chocolate coffee, super green plus energy bar from Regrained. They have these products. The other businesses that are doing upcycling have their own products or ingredients. Some of them sell ingredients. And actually Regrained, and about a third of our membership has wholesale ingredients that they sell to other businesses. The other businesses use to make their consumer products or not just food, but cosmetics, all kinds of things. So all these businesses get together and they say, hey, we know that the main thing that's holding us back is consumer education. More consumers need to know that upcycled food is a way for them to enjoy delicious food and also prevent food waste at the same time. Because there's evidence that only a few percent of consumers actually know upcycle products are. But if there were more people who actually knew about upcycle products, then the demand is going to automatically go up. Because on average, more than half and this has been done in many studies all around the world, more than half of consumers are going to demand upcycle products once they know what they are. So it's all about education. It's all about consumer education and no one company like Dan and I have another example. Great company called AgRecycle, taking fruit that would otherwise go to waste and creating dried fruit products and ingredients for other businesses to use to make their products more delicious and sustainable. So all of these businesses are doing really great things. But no one business has the authority, or the scale, or the scope to command the kind of attention that we need to educate millions of consumers about this concept to really activate the solution. And if we put our megaphones together, then our message is all the more loud for consumers to hear and resonate with. So they created this organization to do exactly that, to get everyone to point their megaphones in the same direction and start using the same language, and talking about upcycling in the same way so that every time a consumer hears the word upcycle food, upcycling, they know exactly what it means. And what it means is it's a way for consumers to prevent food waste with the products they already buy.

And make more informed choices.

Exactly, yeah. If you take into consideration, preventing food waste is the single greatest solution to climate change. I don't know if Dan threw that stat out there. But according to Project Drawdown, it's true. More than any other solution, it has the ability to bring more carbon out of the atmosphere. When you take that into consideration, wouldn't you want to be a part of that solution and pay for a little bit of that solution? Every time you go into a grocery store, I think it's empowering for consumers to recognize the impact that they can have every time they are shopping online or shopping in the grocery store.

Definitely. I couldn't agree more. So in particular, what was the inspiration for you to be part of this?

For me, Justine, I just kind of wound up here in Crested Butte on top of the mountain, and then next thing you know, we're starting the Upcycled Food Association. It's awesome. But I actually came from the Food Rescue space.

Okay.

It's really important to understand what kind of impact our food system has on health equity, on food security. And when you look at the fact that so much of food, so much of our food, 30%, or about a trillion dollars worth of food goes to waste every year. And meanwhile, one in seven Americans is food insecure, totally unnecessary, totally unjust, and exploitative, and racist situation that our food system has propagated. So what we have to do is redesign our food system. And upcycle food gives us an opportunity to do that because we're tapping into previously untapped value. Something that was going to waste before. And when that opportunity comes, the responsibility to decide where is that value going to go. And I think answering that question is a really important one to me. And one that kind of drew me to this industry from previously doing Food Rescue and other food security work in Denver, my hometown.

Oh, in Denver. Only in Denver, your impact only in Denver? I can't imagine that. That's right.

Well, I was executive director of Denver Food Rescue for a number of years, and also helped to start a great organization called Fresh Food Connect, which is a nonprofit technology company that is creating a market for homegrown food. So has this great system that nonprofit Food Rescue organizations like the one that I worked for a while can use to tap into extra food that gardeners have for their own backyards, backyard gardeners.

That being said, even though those roles were both in Denver, Upcycled Food Association is clearly not a local organization and a local Association. It's now allowed you really to spread your wings a little bit and have a bit of a broader reach.

Well, okay, for the listeners, I will clarify, Fresh Food Connect is being used by nonprofits all over the country now.

Okay, your reach is bigger than Denver.

Yeah. Well, there's like 20 organizations around the country using it now, so that's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool.

If there's any food rescuers or hunger relief for food security, anyone in that line of work, Fresh Food Connect is a really cool way to improve your impact. But to answer your question more directly, yes, Upcycled Food Association is super global. We have about 140 members now across more than 20 countries. And that just goes to show that this is a totally global movement, and we have a global food system. There's food waste everywhere so there's opportunity everywhere to take that wasted food and upcycle it into something that has higher value. And therefore, it's a really great way to talk about where is all that this new value going to go? Let's make sure that more of it goes to the populations that have been historically marginalized by our conventional food system, farm workers and farmers in the global south. Let's use the fact that you can take, now, this is a great product from one of our members Blue Stripes, a cool diagram to show that right now, we only use the seeds from the cacao pod, the second most harvested crop in the world.

For our listeners that are not watching the YouTube video, but they are listening, can you tell them verbally what it is you're showing us?

I'm holding up a box of cacao shell flour cookies.

And the name of it?

From Blue Stripes. That's the name of the member. I encourage you to check them out.

And what's the website, or how would they check it out?

Check out? That's a great question, at Blue Stripes Cacao, or bluestripes.com. And by the way, for the other two members that I shared earlier, Jali Fruit Co, AgRecycle, jalifruit.co for them, and then at Regrained on social media.

This is unpaid advertising, just for our listeners.

If you send me snacks for me to eat one at work, then you're gonna, we tell that to our members all the time.

I'm gonna let your members know, for any members of the Upcycled Food Association, that if you want to send me snacks, I'm happy to eat them on my podcast as well and let everyone know.

Totally. And there's probably been a couple people like this, I'm going to be totally honest with you, this box is empty. This box and this bag are kind of famous because even though they're empty, because they've been sitting on my desk for a while. So again, UFA members, send me samples on my lunch breaks and then get to give you shoutouts here. Okay, back to what we're talking, I'm holding up the box of Blue Stripes cookies here. There's a diagram of what we don't eat. Basically, where's this cacao pod. We eat the seeds, but we don't eat the fruit. So we eat the seeds to make chocolate. We use a ton of them to make chocolate, but then there's this beautiful white, nutritious super, super sweet. Have you ever tried it Justine?

I don't think I have.

I mean, it's unusual that you probably would have had to go somewhere in the tropics--

I was just thinking, the Virgin Islands or something?

I don't know if it is grown there. But yes, it's a tropical tree.

I'm thinking, maybe I tried it when I was in St. Thomas, or St. Maarten, or one of the Virgin Islands. It seems like something I would have had there.

It's totally delicious.

Where did you get it?

Well, okay, I actually got a gift box from these guys.

I'm thinking these guys need to send me a gift box because now, I want to try them.

And in the gift box is a real cacao fruit that you cut open and like, and it really is. It's like this hard shell that has a bunch of fiber and nutrients in there. So they use that to make the flour for these cookies. Okay, so the point is that the seeds, and we use it to make chocolate, but then there's all this other good stuff left and the farmer has put in the energy to create those parts of the pod too.

Okay. So bottom line, what are they doing with the fruit?

They're throwing it away.

But are these people doing something with it?

They use it as the sweetener for these cookies and they make a juice. They have another product that's like a cacao juice product, and they have some flour and baking mixes. They have a bunch of products and--

Where are they out of?

There in New York. Actually, a really interesting company, the guys who started this company had previously started a really big and successful chocolate company in Israel that they sold. And now, this is kind of like their second round at starting a food company.

Okay, so are they Blue Stripes? Is that them?

That's Blue Stripes, yeah. And there's a few of our members that were actually started by previously successful food entrepreneurs like Candid. Candid makes a chocolate called Noons. And the guys who started that, started Runa Tea. If you remember Runa Tea, who else? Well, Seth Goldman who started Beyond Meat at a company called, everyone knows that one called Eat the Change and they make mushroom jerky.

Oh, I want to try that.

It's super delicious. Let's see who else? There's a few more of people who have started companies before, and then they're realizing, and I think that just goes to show the people who are in this industry know that this is the future.

And that's what we're here to talk about is the future of food. That's what we're talking about. So with that in mind, we've talked about all these brands that you so graciously, literally promoted for them. I hope that they're all very appreciative. But I am super interested because I love to learn about these new Upcycled brands, but I equally, I believe you're the founder of a food brand as well. Is that accurate?

I've started a couple food projects.

Okay. So talk to me about these food projects. And for our listeners, the word projects was an air quote.

Yes, okay. Yes, they are businesses, but they are not conventional businesses and they're not operating right now. I should say that I can focus on what I think is more impactful, and that's advocating for this whole industry.

Before we get that, before we get into your businesses, let's just tie up what we were talking about before. If you could just share with us the impact that the association has had to date, or so far, just so we can wrap that up in a little pretty bow. For everyone, I think it's important to just recognize the impact you've had to date and share that with our listeners.

Right. So the impact that we've had so far is we built this big global community of 140 businesses all around the world who are working together to prevent food waste. So that's really great. And if we are successful, the Upcycled Food Association continuing to grow demand for upcycled products where in the next 10 years, we're going to have prevented more than 10 billion pounds of co2 emissions.

Wow.

So it's a huge number, and it goes to show the scalability. And really the impact that this industry can have is that it's reducing carbon emissions in it's very core. Every time you buy an upcycled product, you're preventing a little bit of carbon emissions. And that's really exciting. That's one of the things that we're working towards is growing the sales and growing the businesses of upcycled products, and we're doing that by educating consumers. We're educating consumers with a program that we've been working on for over a year now to certify products and ingredients, it's called the Certified Upcycled Program. What we're doing is certifying ingredients and products so that on this product, you would see a logo that would communicate to the consumer. Look, this product helps to prevent food waste, this product gives you the opportunity to be a part of the single greatest solution to climate change. And certified products are also going to be wrapped up into some other work that we're doing to increase their sales by partnering with retailers and just getting these products in front of more consumers all around the world. So that certification process was a doozy and a half, we've been working on it for about a year and a half now and we're finally ready to launch it--

Congratulations.

--this April 2020.

We're not in 2020 anymore, Turner.

Oh no. 2021, thank God. I'm the guy who's still saying Happy New Year.

It's February. It's always valentines day.

And it's like, if I haven't seen you since the end of December, I'm saying Happy New Year and people are starting to look at me like a little late for that.

Except that it is a Happy New Year. Thank God, the right things are looking up.

Things are looking at. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of momentum growing in the states for multiple reasons, put it that way. So this program, you're going to start seeing certified upcycle products on shelves by this summer. Exciting, because then, people, millions of consumers all over the world are going to start seeing this logo. And it's like, okay, what's that? Then you start to see the common thread between all these hundreds of products that are already out there. And start to think, I could fill my whole cart with products that prevent food waste.

Good, it would be really cool if you could create a virtual shopping cart. And in that shopping cart, you could put all these items like if you're going into Good Eggs, or you're at Instacart. And you're going into Whole Foods and you have this little virtual shopping cart, and each item that you put in that is upcycled It tallies up the impact that you're having. And every time you put something else in that is not upcycled, it shows you the impact you're having on the other side, so that you could show on both sides the impact that you're having on the planet.

That's such a great idea. It's so good that we've had that idea.

So it's not a new idea?

No, it's not a new idea.

You're just saying you had it so that when you use it, you don't have to give me credit?

Oh, yeah, let me just scribble some notes down over here.

Uh huh. Likely story.

Patent pending. So that's definitely, we want to give people a really clear idea of exactly the impact that they're having when they buy upcycle products. And what's great about the certification is that it ensures that any certified product prevents a certain amount of food waste. And so we get to make claims that no other category or sustainability claim has been able to make in the past, like for every organic apple you buy, what happens? I think most people kind of know that buying organic is better for the planet, but we don't really know why and what's happening as a result of me buying organic stuff. Like, I think it's worth this extra 15% that I'm spending on it.

And sometimes, it's not even that expensive.

Right. So why am I doing this? And the way that upcycled is different is it says, okay, for every product, upcycle product you buy, there's a discrete, very concrete, very tactile, easy to understand outcome that you're creating a pound of food waste. Or that's not necessarily the number for every product, but it's as easy to understand as if for every product you buy, a pound of food waste is prevented. And therefore, a commensurate amount of co2 emissions are prevented as well.

It's like a shopping cart illustration.

Exactly. It sounds kind of like your shopping cart. Okay, Justine, we're gonna give you credit.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

By the way, that's gonna live on our website.

It's gonna give me credit on the website?

You know what? We'll just put it on your website.

Are you gonna write powered by NextGenChef on your website?

To do that, you'd have to become a member of the association, I'm afraid.

I'd be happy to become a member of the association. I'm just not sure that we're only upcycling all the time. We support upcycling. We want to empower our members to make more informed choices. And we put together a host of talks like this and conversation so that people can make more informed choices and get educated. So by extension, I think we should become a part of the party.

I think you should too. And by the way, you don't have to be exclusively an upcycled company to be a member. In fact, if you look at our membership, growing a lot in bigger food companies like Dole.

Wow. So maybe we should let our listeners know, if any of our listeners are interested in membership, how might they get information about it?

Oh, you can go to our website, upcycledfood.org, and sign up to become a member right there.

Okay, I want to be mindful of the time because I do know that you have a bit of a hard stop. But for our founders out there, I always think it's a great inspiration to share other founders' stories whether they are projects or they are seasoned industry leaders. And I'd love for you to just share a little bit about your air quote projects. Again, if you don't mind, where are you today? What do you hope to achieve? And maybe just a couple learnings because I know that you just don't have a huge amount of time left.

Sure. So the upcycle businesses that I helped start were both social enterprises to help raise money for food rescue organizations. So going back to my whole spiel on how the upcycled industry can help to improve food security? Well, here's an example of how every food rescue organization out there has extra bread, or bagels, or doughnuts, or sweets, pastries, everyone has extra pastries, right? Because you get all the pastries from the bakery down at the corner at the end of the day. And because we all love to see a huge pastry rack that's totally fallen. But what happens to all those ones at the end of the day? Well, they get donated, probably. Hopefully, they get donated. Otherwise, they're going into the trash or compost. And that was true for Denver Food Rescue. I started seeing that, boy, there's all this bread that doesn't go to waste. What if we could figure out a way to earn money for the organization by commercializing it somehow? Like, could we sell it as an animal feed? Could we burn it and make electricity? Could we do anything with it? And it turns out that you can do something you can. There's a lot of starch, and sugar, and bread, the same kind of starch and sugar that is used to brew beer. And the otherwise wasted bread to beer model has happened all over the world. One of our members, Crust, which is a great company. Crust brewing their great company in Singapore. They have a whole company based on taking bread that would have otherwise gone to waste and brewing into beer. And so we said, let's do that. It'd be a great way to earn money for the organization and do something with all this bread. We didn't know what to do so we started brewing some beer along with another organization, Metro Caring. And we had a great brewery partner called The Post Brewing Denver, great fried chicken if you are into that in the Denver area. And we brought the rescue bread, they brewed it into beer. We sold it to restaurants in the area, and then consumers bought the beer and made a bunch of money to support them and the nonprofit's. So it's just this really amazing circular economy that supports those who have been marginalized. It supports that organizations that are doing the work to increase their capacity and prevent food waste, and it helps for profit businesses in the area.

It sounds like a win-win for everyone.

The win-win, win-win.

I love that.

I think you can still get it sometimes in Denver, it was called Penny Loafer. Every year, they would donate $1. So it's like a penny loaf of bread, Penny Loafers like that.

That's very clever.

I don't know, I guess one of the messages that I have is for everyone to start thinking about what you're putting in the compost. Like, we all have a compost bin. Hopefully, no one is throwing their food directly into the landfill anymore. And that's great. It's a good first step. And what I want to encourage people to do is think about, is there an even higher value? Creating soil, nutritious soil is a better use than putting it in a landfill and creating carbon emissions, then is there some above soil. And the answer is yes, you can take your banana peels, soak them in water and it turns into a great plant food for the house plant that's right behind you, Justine.

Really? That's amazing. I love that.

Take your veggie scraps--

Banana peel, we got to go back to the banana peel. What do I do with the banana peel?

You've literally let it sit in water for like a couple hours, then the water sucks out all the phosphorus and other nutrients from the banana peel and you have this amazing fertilizer for your houseplants.

What do I do with the banana peel?

You put it in the compost.

Okay, fine. Vegetables, I'm interested in the vegetables,

It's all about constantly elevating how we can get even more out of this? We already produced this, so let's get every last--

I want to know what to do with the vegetables at the edge of my seat, what do I do--

Put it in the water and you boil it, and then you get stock?

I've done that. Okay, well, I got that one.

A loose value that is kind of hidden in plain sight are in your kitchen.

I love this.

Don't let it slip through the cracks because it's good stuff. And you can save a lot of money. And it really helps the environment.

I just want to tap into one thing before we wrap up, and that's really talking to our founders from founder to founder. What are some of the key challenges in building an upcycled food business? For those founders that are listening, maybe it can resonate with them. And maybe you can give them a couple workarounds or recommendations?

Well, starting a food business is really hard. Yes, everyone knows that. And starting an upcycled food business has kind of an extra level of complexity because in addition to doing the same stuff, the same product development, marketing and sales, and everything that everyone else has to do, you kind of have to do this consumer education. You have to educate some consumers who might not really care, busy, they're just trying to get something that tastes good and that saves money. You have to convince them like, hey, pay attention to this word upcycle and do something good for the planet. So the first three drivers of purchase, food purchases are always taste, costs and nutrition. I think in that order. Maybe it's cost, then taste, then nutrition.

I mean, if it doesn't taste good, forget about it. It has to taste good.

But luckily, it can taste great. So first, make the product taste great. And then the reason this whole community of upcycling, within the Upcycled Food Association here is to work together so that we can all take your part and do a little bit of consumer education, so that it's not all on the shoulders of independent entrepreneurs that are just getting started. There's kind of some momentum that's been built. And consumer awareness is generally a little bit elevated. So rule number one, make it taste great. Rule number two, get on board and let's educate consumers about the impact that they can have by buying an upcycle.

And if anybody wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the best way to connect?

upcycledfood.org. Sign up for a newsletter list. We have a great newsletter, all the latest in the industry. We also have a really active LinkedIn if you're a person in the biz and want to follow us on LinkedIn. We're also on Instagram at Upcycled Food. Look out for Upcycled products on shelves at your local grocery store starting in the next few months.

Awesome. Thank you so much Turner, and I want to thank our listeners for joining in today. And if you like this podcast and you like this episode, you can find this and other ones on Essential Ingredients which is on every station from iTunes to Spotify, you just name it. We are here every week, every Tuesday, we drop a new episode. Please do download the NextGenChef app, we invite you to join our complimentary app and community to connect with other minded food and beverage entrepreneurs. And I hope to see you again soon. Thank you again Turner for joining me.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Good to see you again soon. And thank you to our listeners for joining us.