“Dregs” is such an unappealing word. But the dregs are exactly what Renewal Mill prizes. This Oakland, California–based business is all about upcycling and repurposing food by-products from waste streams; a rescue mission, if you will, that starts with the smallest scrap of food not going into the garbage.
One and a half billion tons of food waste are generated globally annually, enough to feed more than 2 billion people each year. But when Claire Schlemme co-founded Boston’s first organic juice company, Mother Juice, in 2012, this fact wasn’t even on her radar. Schlemme, who studied environmental management at Yale, swiftly found herself face-to-face with mountains of fruit and vegetable pulp. “Nutrition was going to waste in all of that pulp—we did our best to repurpose into muffins, and even sold the scraps to different outlets, but it was outside the core of what we were building,” she says.