Upcycling Food Waste into Delicious Superfoods — Claire Schlemme, CEO of Renewal Mill

Led by Claire Schlemme Renewal Mill reduces food waste by upcycling the byproduct of plant-based milk to create high-quality Okara flour and baking mixes. The company's Okara flour is used in products made by other plant-based food makers while its baking mixes are sold directly through its website.

Claire summarized Renewal Mill's business saying, "Renewal Mill is an upcycle food company. We upcycle byproducts from food manufacturing into superfood ingredients and premium pantry staples. We are currently working with the pulp residue from plant-based milk. This pulp material is nutritious and has a lot of fiber and protein. This leftover pulp is often wasted and certainly not processed and upcycled at scale as we are attempting to do. For soy milk residue, we dry out the pulp and produce it as “okara,” which has an East Asian heritage. For oat milk, we perform a similar process and brand the material as upcycled oat protein flour. Our goal is to ultimately move beyond the plant-based milk space and continue to capture otherwise wasted sources of fiber and protein. There are numerous opportunities to do this in the tomato and potato spaces in particular."

Claire spoke to the importance of mission alignment in seeking outside capital saying, "For the first two years, the company was funded through grants from both Yale and the Closed Loop Foundation. We recently received funding from Kroger as part of their Zero Hunger Initiative. We have also employed more traditional forms of capital raises with convertible and SAFE notes. Our funding sources have been mostly in the impact space. When we first incorporated the company, we did so as a public-benefit corporation, which I believe has been powerful in filtering our potential investor list to the most mission-aligned subset. We have received funding from traditional waste-to-value investors as well as an investor that focuses on plant-based food systems."

Here is the transcript summary of the podcast.

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