Turner Wyatt is the co-founder of four award-winning sustainable food organizations: Denver Food Rescue, Bondadosa, Fresh Food Connect, and Upcycled Food Association. He was named one of the Top 20 Emerging Leaders in Food and Ag, and the waste industry’s 40 under 40 award.
He is a Fink Fellow and was chosen by the Mayor of Denver, Colorado to serve on the City’s Sustainable Food Policy Council. Turner currently serves as the CEO of Upcycled Food Association.
Connect with Turner on LinkedIn.
What You’ll Learn In This Episode
- Food waste
- Upcycling
- Impact of upcycling on climate change
- Upcycling as a win/win for consumers, businesses, and the environment
- Upcycling certification
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Association Leadership Radio. Now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:16] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Association Leadership Radio. And this is going to be a fun one. Today on the show, we have Turner Wyatt with the Upcycled Food Association. Welcome.
Turner Wyatt: [00:00:27] Turner Thank you. Lee Glad to be here.
Lee Kantor: [00:00:31] I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Before we get too far into things, tell us about upcycled food. I’ve never even heard of that before. Can you share a little bit about mission purpose of the association and what exactly upcycled food is?
Turner Wyatt: [00:00:43] Yeah. You’re not alone. Most people have not heard what upcycled food is, which turns out to be kind of a problem. And I like to say that upcycled food is the easy way for everyone to prevent food waste with the products you buy. And right there you’re already seeing why it is a problem. Probably most people know just inherently now. Food waste, huge issue. It’s like 30% of all food goes to waste. Roughly $1,000,000,000,000 of food goes to waste every year. And according to project drawdown, preventing food waste would be the single most effective solution to global warming. So it’s a big problem. And upcycled food is kind of the big solution that allows anyone to help contribute to food waste prevention every time they walk into the grocery store. And so upcycled products are new products nutritious, healthy, useful products that are made with otherwise wasted ingredients. It’s as simple as that. So. So our organization. Yeah, go ahead.
Lee Kantor: [00:02:01] Well, I’m just trying to get clarity. Like, it seems like the recycling people have, like, good PR people, so that that’s a word that’s kind of common. People understand it upcycling. I mean, I think I’ve heard it in some nonfood related things, but this is the first time I’m kind of connecting dots on how it pertains to food. So the the premise is that food waste is happening. We are all aware of that. It isn’t just that. Okay. Too much on my plate tonight for dinner and I’m throwing some of it away. It’s happening at all stages of the production of food.
Turner Wyatt: [00:02:36] Correct. Yeah. And even if you’re perfect, even if you’re the stickler that that sneers at the guy next to you who takes one bite of his sandwich at the restaurant and sends the rest back. Don’t we all hate to see that? Well, even if you’re not that guy and you don’t have any waste in your own refrigerator, you label your refrigerator and you shop a few times a week so you don’t overbuy. And you do all the things that and you compost, right? You do all the things that we can do at home to prevent food waste. Even if you’re perfect 100% of the time, there’s still a ton billions of tons of food waste that are happening out there elsewhere in the supply chain that have nothing to do with what you consume inside of your home. Until now. Right. So until now, until upcycled food, your impact on food waste was bound to the fore walls of your kitchen, of your home. And now, with upcycled food, it helps you prevent food waste that’s helping happening elsewhere in the food supply chain, elsewhere in the world. Because it turns that otherwise wasted food into a new product that you can buy. So a couple of examples. Everyone always asks for examples. So here’s a few. For every beer that you produce, there’s a ton of wasted spent grain. So the beer brewing process really isn’t just one ingredient that you get out of that beer. You get at least two. You get beer. And then you get spent grain. And you get a lot of it, like billions and billions of pounds every year.
Turner Wyatt: [00:04:17] And it’s really nutritious stuff. You can make all kinds of stuff out of it. You can make flour and you can make chips and crackers and anything that you can make flour out of. You can make barley protein. And Molson Coors and AB InBev have both gotten into the barley milk industry to be a part of the hugely growing plant based milk industry. And AB InBev in particular just invested $100 million in a in a new barley milk processing plant in Saint Louis. So it goes to show that businesses have a huge incentive to prevent their waste, obviously. That’s like one of the acute tenets of business. Reduce your waste to zero if possible. And what this new movement is doing is it’s showing businesses, hey, consumers who we all know are increasingly concerned about the sustainability of the products they’re buying. Will buy, actually want to buy. Most of them want to buy products that are made out of otherwise wasted food. And isn’t that great? Because all these big companies are making big. Really aggressive statements about what they’re going to do about climate change by 2030. By 2035, we’re going to be carbon neutral, all this stuff. They have no idea how they’re going to get there. Leigh. But as a food business, you can get there by commercializing your otherwise wasted food. And we Upcycled Food Association are a support network. We’re here to make sure that when you do create an upcycled product, you’re successful.
Lee Kantor: [00:06:06] Now, when you’re leading an organization that has kind of this kind of education and awareness challenge, that to me it would come with its own set of challenges by itself. Just that challenge of people don’t even know that this is important and there’s and this is not it’s a dream that could come true if more people were aware of it and just kind of, you know, we get the word out a little bit about it now in the industry, I would imagine, like you said about business. Business people don’t like to just accept the fact that, oh, well, we just have to throw all that away. And that’s just the way it is. I mean, creativity. Creatively, aren’t they always trying to kind of extract extract more value out of all their assets? And then in this case, they don’t want to look at the view their waste as as waste. They want to view it as a potential asset in some form. Like, so was this already happening internally? And it just there wasn’t kind of the awareness in the consumer’s mind, at least that, hey, why don’t we just make an effort to at least start purchasing some of this stuff?
Turner Wyatt: [00:07:17] Mm hmm. So, of course, Sara Lee. And that’s and that’s a good point and a good question. And in some cases, companies are doing things like turning it into animal feed or turning it into fuel or just composting it. Those are all good things to do. The worst case scenario is that the food goes in the landfill. So yeah, in some cases they’re doing something. And what our movement is all about, highest and best use. How can you, if you’re sending it to like a pig farm now? But it’s something that could easily be commercialized into a raw ingredient that could be used in human cosmetics or companion pet food even, or food for human consumption. That’s a much higher value. And so if we can kind of institutionalize this this concept of highest and best use, always looking for highest and best use, that’s what’s going to make this industry more. The excuse me, the whole consumer product industry, but particularly the food industry more successful.
Lee Kantor: [00:08:21] So having that true north but having that true north is kind of that changes the paradigm at that point. Right, exactly. So now we’re no longer just trying to use it, you know, in any way we can. Now we’re saying, you know what, let’s rethink this. Here is something. We’ve been using it this way. Maybe there’s a better way to use it. And that’s part of the association, is to educate them and say, hey, you know what, you people have been doing this this way. Have you ever thought about this? Because this you know, this smaller company over here was doing this with the stuff you’re throwing away or you’re using in this manner.
Turner Wyatt: [00:08:58] And and it really is the small companies that are leading the charge. We have about 200 businesses across 20 countries or so. And most there’s a handful of them that are the big CPGs, Dole, Mondelez, Target. Del Monte US foods, the biggest food companies in the world, but most of them are startups. And so they’re the ones innovating. And and I want to go back to something that you that you asked about before. Just to reiterate, there’s another reason that that we that we have to kind of be pushing on this for businesses to take hold of this. I was recently talking to a growing Oatmilk company. Their venture capital backed and their charge from the top is make as much oatmilk as possible. You know, we’re between fundraising rounds. It’s a super competitive space. Make as much oatmilk as possible. And obviously when you create oatmilk, what you also creating a ton of oat pulp. Many millions. Billions of tons probably. And so. There’s also it’s not just, yes, businesses should be inherently seeking out efficiencies and seeking out innovation to reduce waste. Just from a financial perspective, but because of the competitive nature and the financial pressures that a lot of these companies are experiencing, sometimes it’s just not on their radar. We’ll figure that out later. We’ll figure that out five years down the road and five years later, they’ve ended up wasting just an obscene amount of this ingredient that they could have been commercializing all along. But it wasn’t a priority. So what we’re like you said, it’s a paradigm shift for businesses to rethink what’s the highest value and best use of this ingredient that we can that we can use right now. And consumers want that. Consumers want to see businesses act more sustainably. The reason that we’re here is that 99% of consumers agree that food waste is a problem. Right.
Lee Kantor: [00:11:14] I mean, that’s just common sense, right? Like. Like it’s a duh. A total moment, right? Where you’re like, of course, no one wants to waste anything if they can possibly help it.
Turner Wyatt: [00:11:25] Help, help out his kids. Don’t waste food. Waste food. Right.
Lee Kantor: [00:11:29] Right. And and so and and then sadly, there’s, you know, food insecurity issues that are happening, you know, while we’re wasting all this food. So it’s just it’s the the food isn’t going to the right places at the right time is part of.
Turner Wyatt: [00:11:43] Ultimately it’s going to come down to. Absolutely. Yeah. And I was the executive director of Denver Food Rescue for seven years, which is a hunger relief food security, health equity nonprofit in my hometown, Denver, Colorado. And we did a lot of that work. And the reason that we started upcycling was to just make ourselves more financially independent. We had all this excess bread. Well, let’s turn that into something that we can actually make money off of so we don’t have to beg these foundations and high net worth individuals for the money that we need to do something that we all benefit from. Right. Because food security is a huge issue and so is food waste. And these are these are things that 9090 5% of people want to do something in their own lives about food waste. Where where do we ever see that kind of alignment in society? With something, especially with something environmental and especially with something environmental that makes businesses more money, which is usually an oxymoron. Right.
Lee Kantor: [00:12:42] It sounds like you’re you’re doing the right thing at the right time. It’s just a matter of making more people aware of it that it’s it becomes so there’s something actionable that people can do in order to solve the problem.
Turner Wyatt: [00:12:57] Right. And the reason we think that an association is the right way to do that is, is this okay? You’re absolutely right. We need to educate more people. 80% of people would want to buy more upcycled products. So the vast majority of people are interested in buying more upcycled products. But right now, less than 10% of people even know what upcycled products are. So there’s a huge consumer education gap. We as an organization are pretty small. We’ve only been around for two and a half years. Any of our companies know. Some of them are really big. Most of them are really small. And but together, know any one of these companies that might have one, five, $10 million in sales a year, they have 15, 25, 50,000 followers on social media. And that’s a small company. So when we use our collective voice and we align this industry to all be saying the same evidence based messaging that works with consumers to answer their questions about what upcycled food is and help increase access to upcycled food systematically as a collection, as a united front. That’s where we’re going to see this industry shift. So we’re really excited about our model because it’s a community organization where we’re not doing anything unique. All we’re doing is bringing this group of businesses together and amplifying their voices so that collectively they can help to close that education gap and tell a lot of people about just what is upcycled food and what’s the power of it, and how delicious is it and where can you buy it? And when you buy it, you should feel good about yourself because you’re preventing food waste and everyone loves that.
Lee Kantor: [00:14:55] So now when you were launching this concept, when did you start getting clues like, Hey, this is something that is going to work and that we’re getting traction by the right folks and that that’s making a difference.
Turner Wyatt: [00:15:09] Well, before we even formally organized. The Association, everyone who we were talking to, all these upcycled food companies were saying, Oh, I’ve thought of this. We need to create a certification. This is such a good idea. I thought of a association for upcycled businesses. We need to create a standard for product certification. Everyone was saying that and so we knew from before we even started the company, like, okay, there’s something here because the people with the lived experience of the problems that we would ostensibly be trying to solve are all saying that they’ve thought of creating this type of business to solve those problems before. So we knew we were on to something right off the bat. We started working towards a product certification and. Today we have the world’s first and only third party verified product and B2B ingredient certification for upcycled products. It’s called upcycled, certified and within. We just started it less than a year ago. And within its first year we expanded it internationally to Canada from the US. Within its first year, we started a partnership with Spins where SPINS is tracking upcycled certified as a spins is a big retail level sales data provider that count what people are buying and how much of it at grocery stores. So they’re tracking upcycled certified as an attribute. And what we’re seeing is that. Sales of upcycled products are growing by anywhere from 400% over the last 12 months in some channels, all the way up to 1100 percent in other channels over the last 12 months.
Turner Wyatt: [00:16:54] So huge growth here. And what the certification does is it allows us to kind of consolidate all this data about the industry, because for any SKU, any product that applies, they have to tell us, here’s how many pounds of food waste are being prevented as a result of that product. And so collectively, we can say, okay, there’s been about 250 products that have been certified so far, 250 upcycled certified products thus far. Together, those products are projecting to prevent more than £840 million of food waste this year. And if they are growing by 1100 percent next year, it’s going to be a lot more. By the way, we’re also certifying a lot more. So it it appears, you know, as consumers, especially after the pandemic, care more and more about the sustainability of the products they’re buying and the way that people are treated who are involved with the production, distribution, retailing of the products that they’re buying. This is aligned with the the way that consumers want grocery stores to be providing for them. And so, yeah, I mean, we’re two and a half years in, we’re less than one year into upcycled certified and we’re just super, super excited for what the future might hold.
Lee Kantor: [00:18:18] Yeah, I would think it would even go beyond the actual upcycled product. If I was a manufacturer, I would be saying, Hey, we manufactured this thing and it also spun off these 14 upcycled products. Like, you know, on my product that wasn’t upcycled. I’d be bragging about how because of us making this, we already created these other things, already making it everywhere.
Turner Wyatt: [00:18:42] Right. Well, look at AB InBev. They just bought. They just invested $100 million in a spent grain processing facility. Another another example that Barry Callebaut is a member. They the world’s largest chocolate supplier. One in five chocolate products is Barry Callebaut chocolate. And when you produce chocolate, which is made from cacao seeds, what else do you produce? You produce a ton. Millions of tons, actually, of cacao fruit. There’s a delicious white fruit that sort of envelops every cacao seed, which is what you ferment and dry and turn into chocolate. And so they have created this whole new brand around. They call it whole fruit, chocolate around utilizing that ingredient of the cacao fruit. And you’re seeing all kinds of companies using cacao fruit now. And it’s like it’s my my prediction would be it’s going to be one of these one of the next trendy superfood ingredients that you’re going to just find it everything. So, yeah, I mean, companies are saying, well, we’re already producing this stuff. Finally, the consumer attitude is in a place where we can rationalize commercialization.
Lee Kantor: [00:20:02] Yeah. It must be so exciting for you to be kind of on the forefront of this and be working with so many nimble startups that are playing in this space, as well as these established brands that have kind of the, you know, they they spill more product than these startups create in a year, you know, and so together that they’re trying to solve this big problem. I mean, it must be so exciting and rewarding for you.
Turner Wyatt: [00:20:27] Totally. I mean, my my dream I say this all the time. My dream is let’s get 0.0001% upcycled ingredient inclusion in Oreo. Right. Right, exactly. Like some of these products are so scaled up, it doesn’t matter if you put like a drop a micron of upcycled ingredient in in each Oreo cookie, we sell so many damn Oreo cookies that that would prevent a ton of food waste.
Lee Kantor: [00:21:00] Right. The impact is so ginormous. You can’t even. It’s hard to even kind of picture it in your head. But that’s that’s what it takes, though, is that you decided to be the change you wanted in the world and you’re making it happen. Congratulations.
Turner Wyatt: [00:21:15] Thanks, Lee. Thanks, Lee. Really appreciate that.
Lee Kantor: [00:21:18] And then for folks out there that are the leaders of an association like this, when you’re trying to kind of create this energy and this excitement around, it’s it’s not that it’s a new idea, but it’s new to a lot of folks. Is there anything that you like? Is there a mentor? Was there some inspiration for you to to be the one that is kind of pushing for this change?
Turner Wyatt: [00:21:42] For anyone out there listening that could be a mentor. I think I could use one now. This is this is the fourth food waste related organization that I have I have founded and the previous three have done. Very, very well. But this is the first association. And so, you know, sometimes it feels like we’re rowing a boat downstream and we’re just trying to just stay above water. And this concept is just so good that we’re kind of riding the coattails of of the concept. And here I am at the helm of it. And. You know, it’s yes, it’s really exciting. And also, I have so much to learn and I just try to stay humble every day and open to feedback and open to improvement because it is. It’s a different world when you have 200 plus 220 members that are all competing with each other and they all have their own businesses like this is their livelihood. And so it’s really it’s a huge challenge, but a huge opportunity because, like you said, these are the businesses that have the ability to scale up the scale up these solutions over the very short time frame that we have to address some of these problems. Yeah, it’s worth it.
Lee Kantor: [00:23:12] It’s 100% worth it. And it’s and I hope that these larger companies see these smaller companies not as a threat, but as a partner and can really make a difference in those smaller companies livelihoods and lives and make a big impact in this challenge that you’re facing. I mean, I think that this is about collaboration and working together rather than feeling like we’re competitors and this is somebody that’s nipping at our tails. I mean, I think that this is a time for everybody to collaborate.
Turner Wyatt: [00:23:44] Absolutely. Yeah. That’s the only way we’re going to get it done.
Lee Kantor: [00:23:48] So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, be a member. Like, because the members, I would imagine, are everybody related to the food industry, right? Manufacturers, distributors, you know, marketers, every.
Turner Wyatt: [00:24:03] Ingredient companies, CPGs consultancies, researchers, retailers.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:09] Does it go down to like even restaurants or restaurant owners and things like that? Or is this more in the manufactured food space?
Turner Wyatt: [00:24:17] We don’t have I mean, we don’t have a ton in the restaurant space right now, but I would love to go there because chefs are natural up cyclers. Right. Any special you’ve ever had from a restaurant? That’s just.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:27] Exactly. They’re the.
Turner Wyatt: [00:24:29] King.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:30] They think of this every day. This is something that’s top of mind every day.
Turner Wyatt: [00:24:34] And they’re also cool. And if you can make upcycled food really sexy and delicious in a cool restaurant, that’s another way to get it to catch on.
Lee Kantor: [00:24:45] Right, and to get the consumer to be aware of it. Hey, upcycling, that’s a thing because we do it and then it translates into into these other areas as well. So yeah, that’s a great idea. And so the website is upcycled food org.
Turner Wyatt: [00:25:00] Upcycled food dot org. We have a pretty strong LinkedIn presence. Those you on there have a pretty strong Instagram presence for those of you on there and just reach out or like like all associations or like many associations I think were it’s a community organization. We’re just getting started. We’re building this movement, we’re open to feedback and we want to collaborate with as many people as possible. So I look forward to hearing from people.
Lee Kantor: [00:25:28] Well, once again, congratulations on all the success thus far. And you’re doing important work and we appreciate you.
Turner Wyatt: [00:25:35] My absolute pleasure, Lee. Thank you so much for having me.
Lee Kantor: [00:25:38] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on the Association Leadership Radio.
