From Trash to Table: Will Upcycled Food Save the Planet?

Nearly 40% of all food grown annually in the US goes unsold or uneaten. These companies are getting salty about food waste

When Kaitlin Mogentale was studying environmental science at the University of Southern California, she watched a friend juice a carrot and noticed the waste it produced – and wondered what was happening to all of the pulp from Los Angeles’s juice shops. She later learned that most of it was being sent to landfills, where food waste contributes to more methane emissions than any other landfilled matter.

“I was a college student, very young and naive, and I think that’s the recipe you need to get into the business,” said Mogentale, who founded Pulp Pantry, makers of fiber-filled Pulp Chips, which are created from the leftover pulp from cold-pressed juice. Mogentale said the company goes to juice-production facilities and collects 10,000lb (4,536kg) of pulp at a time – one day’s worth of leftovers – then transfers it in temperature-controlled trucks back to its manufacturer to make the chips.

She started with chips because they were an easy way to “bring fruits, vegetables and fiber to the nine in 10 who don’t get their servings daily”. Sold in about 600 stores across the west coast, including Whole Foods and Erewhon, Pulp Pantry says it has saved 174,165lb of nutritious veggies since coming to market in 2020.