Q: What exactly is upcycled food?
BHATT: Upcycling food is one of the newer solutions to tackle the interconnected problems of food insecurity and food waste. It basically means taking a food ingredient that has already been used once in food preparation, increasing its nutritional value, and creating a new food.
Q: So, using food waste to make new food?
BHATT: Yes. Although not every food can be upcycled, there are a ton of ingredients that are destined for the trash and still have some nutritional value and can be made into useful foods. When you brew beer, for example, the grains are generally discarded after manufacturing, but they’re still safe for human consumption and have some nutrition left. Ditto for carrot skins, which have as much nutrition as any other part of the carrot.
Q: Your research focuses on marketing upcycled foods: How easy or hard is it to sell this idea?
BHATT: This is a very new area that’s only just starting to develop, and it’s true that while there are a good number of people, especially in the United States and the developed world, who are becoming more eco-conscious, a jacket made out of waste plastic may be more easily acceptable to most consumers than upcycled food.
Q: So, it’s going to take time to convince people of the merits of upcycled food?
BHATT: The economic, social, and environmental promise of upcycled food is there for sure. But consumer psychology—how you convince people that this food is safe—is what we’re focusing on. Thus far, we find that giving people information that convinces them that this is safe, because it has gone through Food and Drug Administration safety checks, etc., works. But again, a very small percentage of the population has even heard about upcycled foods.
Q: What kinds of upcycled foods can we buy today?
BHATT: I consume a meat substitute made in Hawaii from the outer shell of the cashew fruit—the part that’s discarded when the nut is removed. It tastes like chicken. There’s a company in Minnesota that makes flour from spent grains.
Q: I guess there’s a lot of growth potential for upcycled foods.
BHATT: I believe upcycled foods will move from lab experiments done by food scientists to becoming an industry. Beyond the environmental benefits of not wasting food, and creating a solution for food insecurity, an upcycled food industry will create new forms of employment. And the raw materials—discarded foods—are basically free.
Siddharth Bhatt is an assistant professor of marketing in Penn State Harrisburg’s School of Business Administration.
