Saving the planet one brownie at a time

The average person would probably not associate eating a dark chocolate brownie with doing something to prevent climate change.

But Barnstable native Caroline Cotto has a story that connects the two with a short, straight line.

Reducing food waste and eating a plant-based diet are the number one things we can do to reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to rising temperatures, Cotto said, quoting the climate change site Drawdown.org. "If food waste were a country, it would be the third highest producer of greenhouse gases behind China and the U.S."

This is where the brownies come in.

Cotto and her business partner, Claire Schlemme, founded Renewal Mill to turn byproducts of soy milk production into a high-protein, high-fiber flour that Renewal Mill sells for baking and in baking mixes like the one for dark chocolate brownies.

The process of converting food waste into an edible product is called upcycling. The upcycle food industry was worth about $46.7 billion in 2019, according to Forbes Magazine and fooddive.com, and has an expected Compound Annual Growth Rate 5% over the next decade.

In May, the Upcycled Food Association (upcycledfood.org), of which Cotto is president, offered a formal definition for the first time: “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.”

That encompasses a broad range of efforts, from manufacturing with food byproducts as Cotto does to creating a market for misshapen fruits and veggies that would otherwise be thrown out. Misfits Market and Imperfect Foods are two companies shipping, at 40% off grocery prices, boxes of oddly shaped produce. In another effort, chicken producer Tyson Foods put out a bite-size chicken snack using trimmings from its other poultry products.

The trend toward food upcycling took a star turn in late May when longtime sustainability champions Oprah Winfrey and Katy Perry invested in a project so food science company Apeel could develop an edible waxy covering to prolong the shelf life of avocados. That project is more about preventing food waste than upcycling it, but it shone light on the whole movement of cutting the United States’ estimated 40% food waste statistic.

Closer to home, the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance and the Barnstable County Extension Service have, for years, promoted — through education and recipes — the use of dogfish and skate, species found in Cape waters but once considered trash fish. Without a demand, those fish would have been discarded or sold in bulk for animal feed.

At Renewal Mill, upcycling involves drying soybean pulp using a proprietary process and then grinding the pulped soybeans — the leftovers from squeezing out the milk — to produce a mild-tasting flour called okara, which is popular for baking in Japan but is little known here.

That’s why when Cotto visited her parents on Cape Cod this week, she shipped cases of the brownie mix to herself. Her mother, Kim Cotto, has been selling it at Sweet Caroline’s Ice Cream in Forestdale, and also using the mix to make the brownies used in sundaes at the stand, which is named after her daughter. A sign out front explains the new product.

“They love it,” Kim Cotto said. “Customers are really excited about how it supports working against climate change and (reducing) food waste.”

People like that the mix is vegan. It normally sells for $9.99 and is enough for an 8-inch square pan of brownies, but it's being introduced at the Cape stand for $7.99. Sweet Caroline’s also offers four flavors of vegan ice cream.

“I’ve had to explain the difference between upcycled and recycled,” Kim Cotto said of the product. “Basically recycled products are broken down for another use. Upcycled are used directly, with processing, and it eliminates food waste and reduces the impact on climate change.”

Renewal Mill’s half-dozen baking products — everything from a 1-to-1 mix of okara and all-purpose flour to premade chocolate chip cookies — are now available online (renewalmill.com) and in Whole Foods stores in northern California. Like coconut flour, okara is best when mixed in equal parts with all-purpose flour.

“We just got into national distribution. We are looking to expand and distribute all over the country so we want to build up consumer awareness,” Caroline Cotto said.

Renewal Mill is based in Oakland, California, because the region produces a lot of the country’s plant-based milks — and, therefore, edible byproducts.

“We’re talking tens of tons every week,” Cotto said. “The latest figures are that 1 billion tons are wasted globally and it’s estimated to be $1.2 trillion in money left on the table from food being wasted.”

Cotto explained that those figures consider the cost of growing the food and of disposing of unused byproducts.

Planting and harvesting soy beans uses energy, much of which comes from fossil fuels, and other resources. Upcycling soy bean pulp and creating food for human consumption, makes full use of both the beans and the resources used to grow them.

In an email exchange, Renewal Mill’s first partner, tofu and soy milk producer Minh Tsai, president and founder of Hodo Foods in California, said he was selling the byproduct to animal feed companies before Cotto started upcycling it into people food.

Cotto said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ranks upcycling for people one step above animal feed use. But a more practical issue, she said, is that animal feed companies don’t create a steady demand for the byproduct, meaning some weeks, it goes directly into landfills.

After starting with soy byproducts, Renewal Mill added oat milk leftovers. The company’s product developer, pastry chef and author Alice Medrich, continues to develop new offerings. Renewal Mills owners are negotiating with an Italian pasta manufacturer to find a place for oat byproducts.

Cotto, a 2010 Falmouth Academy graduate who studied human science with a focus on nutrition at Georgetown University, has worked on food projects around the world — including an internship with Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative and a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan.

The upcycling food trend is growing, said Cotto. noting that the newly formed Upcycled Food Association went from nine members to 70 in a few months.

Chefs such as Dan Barber with his New York City pop-up restaurant “WastED,” and its iconic carrot-top pesto, did a lot to bring the issue to light for chefs, she said.

“I think there was a misrepresentation of the food waste problem at one time, but in the past 10 years, that has shifted,” Cotto said. “Millennials are asking, ‘Where did this come from?’ and finding it is really cool to know their food is helping to fully use resources and fight climate change.”