Food Manufacturers
The Position Paper – a colloborative endevour to further strenghten the Upcycling ecosystem
Our key takeaways for you
Procuring food is a delicate process for manufacturers. When searching for alternatives to existing virgin ingredients, e.g. for clean label, environmental impact, or nutritional value arguments, you might encounter upcycled ingredients. At the same time, as a food manufacturer, you often require all conditions applicable for the virgin alternatives and upcycled ingredients, which is often unrealistic.
You may come across upcycled ingredients when looking for alternatives to virgin ingredients for your products for environmental or nutritional reasons. However, food manufacturers need to meet all conditions (e.g. texture, colour, taste, functional aspects, price, seasonality, etc.) to use upcycled ingredients, which is often challenging since ingredients made from side streams can have different characteristics that bring new values but can also imply concessions.
Discover your role, and benefit!
For one, buying and using upcycled ingredients can contribute to a company’s overall sustainability performance. That’s particularly useful as EU regulators increasingly roll out sustainability directives like reducing greenhouse gas emissions as an impact category being part of the by the European Union required CSRD principles for reporting. Replacing conventional ingredients with upcycled alternatives gives you access to new materials with other values and benefits, while making supply chains more diversified, and more circular.
By adding upcycling as a decision criterium for your procurement and product development departments, the ‘green actions’ of food manufacturers can also be based on upcycled food and ingredients.
As a manufacturer, you can also join forces with technology providers or others who already have the tech and/or processing lines in place for upcycling in order to develop new products using food manufacturers’ own side streams. New partnerships will foster the exchange of expertise, leading to fresh innovations.
Your must-read sections
Downloads
Contact Form Upcycled Food & Ingredients
We hope this paper inspires, informs, and enthuses you about the further development of the upcycled food and ingredients market! There are several ways to turn your interest into collaboration and action. See below for options to get involved.