From Garbage to Revenue: GTF’s Food Waste-to-Powder Tech Brings Unique Solution to Large Food and Beverage CompaniesFrom Garbage to Revenue: GTF’s Food Waste-to-Powder Tech Brings Unique Solution to Large Food and Beverage Companies

Food and beverage companies generate prolific flows of liquid-laden waste that they must figure out what to do with.  Some of them give it away as animal feed or compost—at least as much of it as they can find a home for.  But most of their manufacturing byproducts get landfilled, generating colossal volumes of greenhouse gases and leachate.

GTF Technologies is one early innovator saying there is a higher use for the material, enabling generators to turn a liability into revenue and to tell a happier environmental outcome story.  The Michigan company sells food and drink producers equipment that pulverizes their fruit, vegetable, and grain manufacturing “leftovers” and converts them to a shelf-stable powder.

The first few customers are either putting the nutrients back into their own products or selling it to other food and drink companies for similar applications. Some plan to sell the powder to packaging suppliers as a drop-in replacement for plastic.

Gary Schuler, GTF Technologies’ founder, believes the ability to quickly and thoroughly drain these fast-rotting discards of their liquids could be a game-changer for large generators. He points to what it could mean for brewers (among his top targets) as one example.

“Some brewers produce up to four or five million pounds a week of spent grain. We are able to take that coproduct’s very high moisture content down to 5 percent or below, enabling them to produce about 800,000 pounds of powder. And there are near-endless uses for it.”

GTF’s process happens at generators’ sites, eliminating the cost- and emissions-intensive step of transporting the material, whether for disposal or for some lower-level reuse.

Transportation has been a heavy-weight problem, literally. Byproducts of the industries that Schuler is eyeing are up to 85 percent moisture.

“So, you're basically trucking water. It's not really environmentally friendly, but we can quickly stabilize it and turn it into a lightweight powder on site. It’s easy to transport and shelf-stable for up to three years.

“And now [manufacturers] have a revenue stream that they've never realized before while having a direct carbon-reducing impact,” he says.

He’s trialed streams with potential to become real money spinners— like onion, tomato, and mushrooms.  The onion powder market is worth $12.11 billion while the tomato powder market is valued at $1.5 billion.  Some mushroom powders go for up to $250 a pound.

The startup is working to connect its first few customers to offtakers and just inked a deal to sell powder direct to a compostable packaging supplier, Better Earth, who will blend it with other biobased materials.

Schuler envisions dropping the material into nonfood applications beyond compostable service ware, like trash bags now made of 100 percent petroleum, wood pallets, or the stretch wrap encasing those pallets.

“It could even be used for beer twelve-pack holders, giving brewers one more use for their spent grains. The list goes on,” Schuler says.

Compostable packaging from food waste is not brand new, but it’s usually made from sugar cane, corn husk, or other fairly dry grain, which does not present the stabilization challenges of wet food discards.

But suppliers are hard pressed to get ahold of enough feedstock that meets their material specs and for a decent price. Schuler pitches that the powder opens up more scalable options and can replace five to 50 percent of petroleum-based materials, depending on performance requirements.

Corumat also leverages food waste to bring more choices in biobased packaging; only the startup targets postconsumer discards. Its processing machinery allows for one-third to one-half conventional plastic replacement, says company founder Mike Waggoner.

The technology was developed with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), National Science Foundation,  and support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  

Corumat has trialed its plates at Amazon and worked with AMP Robotics to show they can be successfully recovered and sorted. 

Next on the agenda is a demo in Washington State. And a hopeful goal is to launch a pilot in 2025 following recent completion of an acceleration program with Shell and Boston-based Greentown Labs.

A scientist in Australia is developing a pretty novel food waste-to-packaging concept. Federation University scientist Dylan Liu is working to convert cellulose from fruit and vegetables into transparent packaging – think Saran Wrap or Glad Wrap.

But Liu envisions leveraging the feedstock in another way: to develop “smart packaging” that would determine when food is about to spoil. He’s looking to embed compounds in the cellulose that would sense acidity changes and trigger a color change when food starts to spoil.

Dropping food discards into packaging has other potential advantages few if any people would likely fathom.

What those benefits are depends on the waste stream. Each feedstock has its own unique makeup of antioxidants, nutrients, and compounds, says Angel Veza, director of Innovation at ReFED.

“That said, some [active packaging developers] often use plant-derived materials and principles of biomimicry [imitating biological processes]. Plants naturally produce volatile compounds to protect against environmental threats, and these compounds can be used to develop packaging that combats postharvest diseases and enhances the product's natural defenses, ultimately extending its shelf life," Veza says.

On the upcycled food product front, innovators are churning out ideas from bite-sized noshes to full prepared meals to supplements.

Matriark Foods uses surplus from farms and cut remnants to make sauces and broth. The company says each gallon of broth concentrate contains nearly a pound of would-be-garbage, avoids over two pounds of greenhouse gases, and saves 102 gallons of water.

Pluck makes teas from fruit peels, cacao shells, and other food manufacturing byproducts, and there are others plowing paths in the upcycled food space.

Returning to GTF’s story and next steps, with over $15M invested in technology improvements, the company just released its first few systems and is testing out a newer generation design. The latest model works with a broader spectrum of byproducts, has increased capacity, and faster processing.

Reflecting on future-focused aspirations, Schuler says, “We are looking to enable companies to create product lines from even more historically overlooked materials.

“We are really trying to build circular economies within companies and help them both increase their profitability and do their part to improve the environment.”