What is ‘upcycled’ food? Leftovers can now be turned into ingredients

Wasted food is a big problem. More than 1 billion tonnes was thrown away in 2022 by households, retailers and food service companies, according to figures published by the U.N.’s Environment Program in 2024. It’s expensive too: The World Bank estimated that lost or wasted food cost $1.2 trillion in 2020.

It’s an issue that food entrepreneur Chloe Stewart first became aware of as a young adult traveling to different parts of the world. Seeing plates piled high in places like Beijing and Boston and having a sense that “there’s no way someone’s going to finish all that” made her angry, she said.

“This is actually criminal, the fact that we’re not mandated to find better use for the food that’s ending up in landfill,” she said in a video call with CNBC.

Stewart’s food business, Nibs etc., began as a blog where she wrote about “misunderstood” ingredients such as cacao nibs — the small pieces of fermented cacao beans that are used to make chocolate — as well as explored how to cook with the parts of fruit and vegetables that are typically discarded, like the scraped out seeds of a pumpkin. Stewart calls these “upcycled,” rather than waste products, because of their potential as ingredients in their own right.

In 2018, Stewart started making granola, savory crackers and banana loaves in her kitchen, selling them at London’s upscale Borough Market. A freshly squeezed juice stand was close by, and she began to make recipes from the leftover pulp — the seeds and skin that would otherwise be discarded.

“Juice pulp is only ‘waste’ because it comes out the wrong end of a juicer, but actually it’s where all the good stuff is, and it’s full of fiber,” Stewart said. As her business grew, she experimented with different fruits, settling on apple pulp that she sourced from a cider-maker in the English county of Kent. It became the key ingredient for Nibs etc.’s granola and makes up 25% of its crackers, and Stewart now sells Nibs etc. products at high-end U.K. retailers including Selfridges and Waitrose.  

Other types of so-called food waste can be upcycled in this way, Stewart said, and Nibs etc. is developing a chip-style snack made from potatoes as well as spent grain from the brewing process, an ingredient that might otherwise become animal feed. She’s also working on a digestive biscuit — a flour-based sweet snack popular in the U.K. — using rapeseed meal, the byproduct of rapeseed oil production. Both of these new products have the potential to be made from 40% to 50% upcycled ingredients, Stewart said.

The food industry can become “nature positive,” according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a charity focused on the circular economy. It can regenerate rather than deplete natural resources, for example by using crops that would otherwise have gone to waste, the charity said.

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