Flour Made From Food Waste Is Coming for Your Cookies

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- About 50 miles north of London, Cambridge Science Park has earned the nickname “Silicon Fen.” The Fenlands region office hub is the UK home to Amgen Inc., AstraZeneca Plc and other biotech companies.

Among its famous neighbors, in an anonymous building that looks like the setting for , the Supplant Co. is getting ready to launch a decidedly low-tech product that nonetheless has massive potential for disruption: flour from fiber.

All-purpose flour, the most common kind, is made from wheat kernels by discarding the germ and milling the starchy interior. But Supplant uses material found—and often ignored—in nature, including stems and agricultural waste such as husks and shells.

Right now the chief ingredient is the plentiful, fibrous hulls left over from oat milk production. But corncobs, sugar cane stalks and wheat bran can also be turned into flour. “We work with the current existing supply chain, the cheapest stuff out there,” says Tom Simmons, Supplant’s founder and chief executive officer. “If you want to make anything sustainable, plant fiber is the most abundant resource.”

US candy fanatics might recognize the Supplant name from its sea salt milk chocolate by star chef Thomas Keller. The bars are sweetened with Supplant’s sugar-from-fiber product, created in a process similar to the one used to make its flour.

Simmons founded Supplant while he was in the biochemistry department at Cambridge University in 2017. He says that in three or four years, his sugar might compete with other, better-known alternatives and that “within the decade” his company will hit scalability and be able to compete with the $11 billion sugar market. (Fortune Business Insights valued the alternative sugar market at $7.5 billion globally in 2021, and it’s expected to top $12.8 billion by 2029.)

But Supplant, which raised about $22 million in Series A funding in 2021 from investors that include Y Combinator and Khosla Ventures, says its new product will be even bigger. Anecdotal evidence is promising: Rachel Krupa, founder of the Goods Mart, a compact convenience store in SoHo in New York, says consumer interest in alternative flours is booming. “We’re constantly seeing innovation in base ingredients like flour,” she says. “We’ve seen cassava, chickpea, oat flours. One of our best sellers is Ancient Provisions Cheddar Cheezish Crackers, made with banana flour.” Other alternative starches use okra and cactus. Forecasters at Whole Foods Market Inc. are likewise looking toward the alternative flour market, naming upcycled ingredients for bakers—and specifically flour—as a top trend for 2023. In the upcycled flour space, Supplant is joined by Renewal Mill in Oakland, California, which produces dark chocolate brownie mixes, and Chicago’s Hyfé Foods, which makes high-protein flour. Both rely on food manufacturing byproducts.

Later this year, Supplant will introduce flour from fiber to the US. It’s working with chefs such as Tal Ronnen at Crossroads Kitchen and operations like the Doughnut Project on collaborations, in the same way it rolled out its sugar with Keller.

The flour has half the calories of refined white flour and replaces the starch with fiber. Supplant is testing the powder in scenarios in which wheat flour would be used; it’s been successful in almost every cooking circumstance where it’s been applied, whether bars, brownies or tortillas. (A preliminary tasting of pasta made with Supplant flour was disappointing; it had the same lack of chew that characterizes many pastas made with alternative grains.)

The production cycle will feel surprisingly familiar to many who watch foodmaking videos. The byproducts are bathed in a lye mixture to soften the ingredients. The solution is similar to the one used to make bagels, and the process looks a lot like brewing beer. The mixture is then treated with a naturally occurring enzyme derived from fungi to bring out the sugars, then cleaned and dried to produce the flour. Because the machinery isn’t custom—among the industrial equipment Supplant employs are wine presses to extract liquid—it’s easy to scale up production.

That’s one reason the company is so confident about its future. “Our goal is to be very, very big. We don’t want to be a niche market, not just for the French Laundry,” says Simmons, referring to Keller’s three-Michelin-star Napa Valley restaurant.

Currently it’s hard to define Supplant as anything but “niche.” Its 2.1-ounce chocolate bars sell for $7 on its website and at the natural food store Erewhon on the West Coast. The chocolate is being used in some co-branding partnerships; for instance, it’s in chips in San Diego’s Kula ice cream.

Still, Ruben Tadmor, Supplant’s head of business development, says its sugar might be in demand as governments put pressure on companies to reduce actual added sugar. Like the flour, it’s been successfully used in all manner of baking.

Supplant’s flour product arrives amid ongoing wheat supply shortages, brought on in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (both countries are major suppliers of wheat to the world), that have led to dwindling pasta supplies in Italy. The company is fine-tuning everything and test-marketing products to launch, including pasta.

Although Supplant is headquartered in the UK, it’s picked the Netherlands as the place to scale up flour production. Why? Because the country is the second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value behind the US, making it an excellent source of the raw materials Supplant requires.

“We like this space,” Simmons says. “We’re riding on the coattails of food tech. But we’re not one of 1 million names in alternative meat.” Supplant isn’t coming for Impossible Foods Inc.’s burgers. Instead, it’s looking at the bun.

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