Veggie Digest #10
2022 food trends, sustainable upcycled snacks, fiber-based sugar, and much more!
Welcome to the latest installment of the Veggie Digest, the newsletter that keeps you on top of the latest in sustainable food innovations.
Headlines and Trends
A curated roundup of interesting food tech news from the past week.
📰 Are Alternative Protein Companies Being Honest about Their Environmental Footprint? (Plant Based News)
Is the alternative protein industry actually better for the environment? Sustainalytics, A sustainability research company that rates other companies on their environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) performance, is calling that into question as neither Beyond Meat nor Impossible Foods have disclosed the amount of greenhouse gas emissions its supply chain produces.
📰 Whole Foods Predicts 2022 Food Trends (Whole Foods Market)
The Amazon-owned grocer unveils its seventh annual trends report. Each year, a committee of Whole Foods analysts, buyers, and executives predict the next wave of big food innovations. Among the sustainability-related trends in this year’s report: ultraurban farming (e.g., indoor, hydroponic, and vertical farming), reducetarianism (the practice of reducing, but not eliminating animal-based foods), and grains that are healthier for nutrient cycling and soil ecology.
📰 Seagrass: The Plant that Removes Carbon 30 Times Faster than a Rainforest (Euronews)
The Force for Nature campaign aims to repopulate the UK’s coasts with carbon-capturing seagrass. Seagrass is one of the fastest ecosystems that we know of in terms of capturing carbon. The restoration will work by collecting seagrass seeds from healthy seagrass plants, putting them into hessian sacks that have a rope attached, and then those sacks will go into the water. The ropes and sacks will degrade over time so that the seeds can be embedded into the seabed.
🎙️ How 'cool' fertilizers can sequester carbon (Future Food)
The company Anuvia Plant Nutrients has created an organic waste to fertilizer process that can use the waste from anywhere (from food waste to manure) to enable plants to uptake nutrients more efficiently. This process will not only increase microbial colonies in the soil but also emit fewer greenhouse gases than typical fertilizers which can be very resource-intensive.
📰 Supplant is Expanding its Fiber-Based Sugar (The Spoon)
Americans consume too much sugar and not enough fiber. The Supplant Company is trying to solve this problem with its sugar made by upcycling the fibers of agricultural side streams such as corn, wheat, and rice.
Food Lingo: “Upcycling”
There’s a lot of jargon in the food technology and sustainability space. Each week I highlight an important concept to improve your food lingo literacy.
Upcycling is using waste materials or unwanted products and turning them into something of value
📰 Sustainable Upcycled Snacks (USA Today)
8 food brands that are committed to reducing food waste and creating a more sustainable food system by upcycling food waste into delicious snacks, drinks, and more. These innovative foods range from chips made of fiber leftover from juicing fruits and vegetables to tea brewed from avocado pits.
Pulp Pantry’s Pulp Chips are made from fresh vegetable juice pulp which contains over 95% of the fiber of whole vegetables.
Hidden Gems makes “Reveal”, a delicious beverage made from avocado seeds.
Philabundance takes surplus milk and turns it into cheese. To date, they’ve upcycled over 12 tanker loads of milk as part of their innovative project.
Sustainability Beyond Food
A handful of non-food-specific pieces to keep you abreast of other environmental items of interest.
📰 A Complete Visual Guide to Carbon Markets (Visual Capitalist)
Carbon markets are a policy tool for pricing the cost of carbon emissions. It’s a way for countries and industries to manage the negative externality of pollution and to help manage climate change. This helpful explainer describes two key types of markets, mandatory compliance systems as well as voluntary carbon markets, and gives readers a solid overview of how they work, their benefits, downsides, and costs.
📰 China’s Solar Power Has Reached Price Parity with Coal (Ars Technica)
The cost of solar power in China has decreased significantly over the past decade, and the installation of solar has increased dramatically as well. Right now, about 30% of the entire planet's new solar capacity is being commissioned in China. Having solar supply nearly half of China's power would be great, however, it would still fall short of the country's goal of carbon neutrality. Luckily, China also has hydropower projects and a fleet of nuclear reactors.
📰 Using Enzymes to Recycle Single-Use Plastics (Technology Review)
Carbios, a French startup, has developed enzymatic recycling, a process that uses enzymes to chop up the long chains of polymers that make up plastic. Although there are mechanical methods for recycling plastics, chemical and enzyme-based processes could produce purer products and allow us to recycle items that conventional techniques can’t process. Carbios estimates that its enzymatic recycling process can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30%.
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