Foodvalley launches UPcycled4Food Initiative to Advance a Circular and Sustainable Food System
PRESS RELEASE
Driving demand and guiding food service providers, retailers, and manufacturers toward an impactful uptake of upcycled food products
Wageningen, 1 September 2025 – Foodvalley announces the launch of the UPcycled4Food initiative, with the goal of accelerating the transition towards amore circular and sustainable food system.
Funded by Laudes Foundation, the initiative will focus on driving market demand and guiding food service providers, retailers, and manufacturers in sourcing, production, and sale of upcycled products. The ambition for UPcycled4Food was first presented in June last year during the Halving Food Waste in Europe conference. Since then, it has gained broad-based support from across the food value chain – including retailers, food service providers, manufacturers, and numerous innovators from Foodvalley’s Upcycling Community. This collaborative foundation ensures strong industry engagement and a shared commitment to developing scalable solutions across the entire value chain, for reducing food waste through upcycling.
“By collaborating in a pre-competitive way across the entire value chain, we can address the biggest barrier to advancing upcycled food innovations: the lack of a clear value proposition for retailers and food service providers. We’re excited to change that, helping make circular solutions more accessible, scalable, and mainstream for key players across the agrifood system.”
Photography: Marnix Klooster
Photography: Foodvalley
Photography: Marnix Klooster
In phase 1, the initiative will focus on two product categories: Bakery & Confectionery
and Meat & Dairy Alternatives. In this phase, we will develop example products, which are realistic but fictional food items made with both upcycled and regular (also known as virgin) ingredients. In phase 2, these will be used to do impact assessments to see how they score on sustainability, health, and the economy compared to the virgin alternative. By using these sample recipes as reference points for all actors in the value chain, we can provide a clear and neutral standard for evaluating comparable real upcycled products that enter the market. This helps buyers and producers understand the potential impact of new products within each category. Retailers, in turn, can use this trusted baseline to assess the value of upcycled products and decide where they fit best on the shelf.
The main aim of this initiative is to make upcycled foods and ingredients the new normal, thereby reducing food loss and waste while contributing to a more circular food system.
Caroline adds: “We welcome partners who are interested in contributing to the first phase of the UPcycled4Food initiative, as well as those who can play a key role in enabling or supporting phase 2, where the real impact of representative upcycled food products will be demonstrated and validated.”
About Foodvalley and The Upcyling Community
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NOTE TO EDITORS (not for publication)
For more information, please contact our press contact at Foodvalley: Martine Binnema, martine.binnema@foodvalley.nl
End of press release