Remember the Wombles? Now a new breed of entrepreneurs is making good use of the things that they find in an effort to reduce the millions of tonnes of food waste sent to landfill every year.

From growing mushrooms in used coffee grounds to turning discarded milk into cheese, here is The Grocer’s pick of the five most innovative enterprises using food waste.

Espresso mushroom Company
Coffee and mushrooms may sound like a strange combination, but they’re perfect bedfellows for eco-entrepreneurs Alex and Robbie Georgiou (latter pictured above), founders of the Espresso Mushroom Company.

The business takes discarded coffee grounds from cafés in Brighton and uses them to grow Portobello mushrooms, which are then sold back to restaurants in the city. Alex Georgiou hit on the idea while attending a lecture on behalf of his then employer Cafédirect, about how businesses can learn from nature.

“I spent last winter experimenting and by Christmas we’d eaten our first mushroom,” he says. “There’s no shortage of coffee grounds - 70 million cups of coffee are drunk in the UK every day.”

Five months into the venture, the duo are shifting 15 to 20 kilos of mushrooms a week. Equally popular is a mini grow-your-own mushroom ‘kitchen garden’ kit the pair unveiled at the Brighton Food Festival in April. The company is now selling up to 100 kits a week direct to customers and has secured listings in Health food and gift shops in London. Next month, the kits will launch in the Kensington branch of Whole Foods Market. “We’ve taken a waste product and created fantastic mushrooms,” says Alex. “We’re using one tonne of coffee waste a month and upcycling that.”

The brothers used their own money to start the company, and although they haven’t yet recouped what they invested, Alex, who continues to work part-time in freelance marketing to make ends meet, says that the future is bright.

“We haven’t completed a financial audit of our accounts yet, but we’re on the right track,” he says. “The kitchen gardens are what we’re most excited about. The environmental side is key and central to what we do, but the kits do have mainstream appeal. The idea is strangely compelling for so many people. I think we can grow massively.”

Rubies in the Rubble
Jenny Dawson has a lot to thank her mother for. After quitting her job working for a hedge fund in March 2011 to create a business selling chutneys and jams made from discarded fruit and veg, Jenny is now negotiating listings with Waitrose. All because she learnt how to make chutneys and jams watching her mum in action at the family’s organic farm on the west coast of Scotland.

Dawson knew she had to do something when she visited New Covent Garden Market in December 2010. “When I saw the scale of food waste it made me want to react,” she says. “It really bothered me to see boxes of mange tout from Kenya that didn’t even make the shop shelves. In my eyes, they were perfect. When my mum made chutneys and jams, they lasted for two years.”

So Dawson gave up her job and with the help of a £3,000 grant from UnLtd, a charity supporting social enterprise, she set up a stall at London’s Borough Market last September to see if the concept worked. It did. This February, she registered Rubies in the Rubble as a company and by June, she had acquired her own commercial kitchen, at New Spitalfields Market, where the discards used to make the products now come from.

And Dawson’s social responsibility doesn’t end there. She employs Londoners struggling to get back into the workplace. “We have two women in the kitchen but in the next 12 months, I’d like to expand to other cities - perhaps Bristol and Birmingham,” she says.

“At the moment we’re scratching at the surface of food waste. We’re not running the kitchen to capacity. We’re using just under one tonne of discards a week, making 150 to 200 jars a day and selling them on the stall at Borough Market on a Saturday and to independent delis in London. We’re not in profit but we’re getting to a stage where we can be self-sufficient.”

In under a year that’s no mean feat. And there’s more to come. Dawson is currently in talks with Intercontinental Hotels and Virgin Atlantic, which are interested in the products, and this month she had a meeting with Waitrose to discuss listings there. “It would be really nice to use Waitrose surplus if we do win listings with them,” she says.

FoodCycle Pie in the Sky Café
A vegetarian meal made from food waste doesn’t sound like the most appetising dish on a café menu. But the concept is tickling the taste buds of residents of Bromley-by-Bow, East London.

FoodCycle, a charity bringing together volunteers (pictured below), surplus food and free kitchen space, is serving up to 50 meals a day, five times a week at Bromley-by-Bow community centre - using ingredients made up almost entirely of surplus food.

Like Rubies in the Rubble, the enterprise is using discards from New Spitalfields Market. And since it launched in May 2011, it has been a huge hit with the locals. “At first, it was mainly people already involved with the centre that came to the café,” says Steven Hawkes, FoodCycle’s communications and fundraising officer. “Now a lot of locals just pop in for lunch too.”

Sainsbury’s, organic food company Mr Organic and local retailers have all donated surplus fresh produce to the café, which has gone from employing one full-time and one part-time member of staff to two full-time workers, paid for through grant funding, and a roster of interns.

The café serves everything from homemade chutney to curries, using about 100kg of discards a week. While reducing the amount of food waste sent to landfill is central to the charity’s mission, so is developing skills in the local community. “In the last year, we’ve had 104 volunteers come through. Twenty of those have gone on to secure work as a result,” says Hawkes.

The café is not yet turning a profit, but is generating about £4,000 a month in revenue, with meals sold for between £3 and £4 each. It is open from 9am to 2pm on weekdays, and Hawkes reckons the model could work on a wider scale. “It’s a unique and innovative way of taking the problem of food waste and using it as a resource to create something for the community,” he says. “It’s tough but with the right ingredients it’s definitely possible to run a successful surplus food café full-time.”

SugaRich
It’s not just humans that can benefit from food waste being given a new lease of life. SugaRich has made a nationwide business out of recycling surplus factory food from the likes of Cadbury, Nestlé and Kellogg’s and turning it into high-energy biscuit meals for sale to the animal feed industry.

Of course, feeding pigs human leftovers is nothing new, but recovering wet products such as bread dough and converting them into ingredients for feed in a drying facility - the largest of its kind in the UK and the only one to handle food waste - is.

“Installing a dryer has enabled us to recover wet products and convert them to homogenous free-flowing commodities,” says Alex Keogh, business development manager, of the dryer’s introduction in 2006. “In the modern era of traceable food from traceable feed made from wholesome ingredients, SugaRich lead the way in offering a service joining food manufacturers with UK farmed livestock.”

Founded in 1958, the company today employs 150 people across 12 sites in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and has an annual turnover of £78.6m. In 2011, it turned 400,000 tonnes of food waste into 360,000 tonnes of compounded feed ingredients.

“The raw materials for the process include cakes, chocolate, sweets, bread, breakfast cereals, crisps and biscuits,” says Keogh. “These products may be out of date, surplus to requirements, products from failed marketing campaigns or out of specification.”

Although other companies turn factory discards into biscuit meal for animal feed, SugaRich is the only one to do so on a national scale and to use a dryer.

“We offer the widest possible range of compounded feed ingredients and offer a closed-loop recycling solution,” says Keogh. “We believe no product generated from the food manufacturing process should go to waste. By 2012, one of the factories we service will be able to say they don’t generate any waste in the production of food. All outputs from that factory will either be primary, where they will go on to consumers, or secondary, where they will be re-used or recycled. This will be a huge change for the food industry.”

Handyface
Making cheese from discarded milk sounds simple enough - in theory. In practice, it is turning out to be more than amateur cheesemaker Andy Mahoney bargained for.

A product manager for a software company in the City, the 30-year-old has taken the hobby of cheesemaking to a new level after turning the spare bedroom of his Dulwich home into a ‘cheese lab’, where all manner of experiments are ongoing. And when he discovered Neal’s Yard dairy had over-ordered on milk last Christmas, meaning litres were destined to be thrown out, another experiment was born.

“Retailers have a tonne of milk that just sits there, and if people don’t buy it, it just gets dumped,” says Mahoney, who charts his cheesemaking journey on his website Handyface. “Neal’s Yard Dairy and Franklins Farm Shop in East Dulwich are more than happy to give it to me. A lot of the time the milk is absolutely fine, it’s gone just a little bit sour, but that’s fine for cheesemaking.”

Not that the process is as straightforward as he initially thought. “It’s quite a tricky thing to get the milk at the right stage. It can’t be completely gone.” Using different types of milk to make one cheese presents its own challenges too. “I need to find a cheese recipe to take advantage of that,” he says. “At the moment, the cheese I make from discarded milk often goes in the bin.” The cheese that doesn’t, Andy gives to local cheesemongers to give out as samples.

“I’d like to sell it back to delis, but it’s not something I’m looking to make into a business,” Mahoney says. “There’s definitely a model there though. If supermarkets can use milk that’s otherwise going to waste, it could be interesting. It’s just a matter of getting the right suppliers and making sure your dairy can cope with the quantity and varying quality of the milk.”

Even if Mahoney is not looking to turn the concept into a commercial proposition, it can only be a matter of time before someone does.

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