Reducing Food Waste: Jeremy and Adam Kaye Of The Spare Food Co How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Rather than five small lessons, one very significant thing we have realized that we really do wish we had known is that while the investment community loves new or big ideas, the performance expectations, KPIs and milestones are carryovers from more traditional industries and sectors. It feels like we’re constantly threading the needle on that front, even with the more “progressive” investors.
It has been estimated that each year, more than 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to more than $160 billion worth of food thrown away each year. At the same time, in many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. The waste of food is not only a waste of money and bad for the environment, but it is also making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.
Authority Magazine started a new series called “How Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies and Food Companies Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste.” In this interview series, we are talking to leaders and principals of Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies, Food Companies, and any business or nonprofit that is helping to eliminate food waste, about the initiatives they are taking to eliminate or reduce food waste.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeremy and Adam Kaye.
Adam and Jeremy Kaye grew up in a family of culinary entrepreneurs, a legacy that goes back at least four generations. The Spare Food Co. was born from their unique combination of life experience, including a genetic love of good food, a deep social consciousness born of their youth in South Africa, a shared passion for travel and global culture, and a recognition that each of us has the power to make a difference in the world through the food choices we make every day. The Spare Food Co. is driven by a mission to reduce wasted food by taking overlooked ingredients and creating delicious new foods and beverages.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
The origin of The Spare Food Co. is the story of our family. We are (at least) fourth generation food entrepreneurs. Our family is from South Africa, where our great grandfather, both grandfathers, and parents were all entrepreneurs in food-related businesses.
Adam Kaye: I was the certifiable brother who went into restaurants. After undergrad, I went to the French Culinary Institute in NYC and worked part time in a restaurant. Food is very important to me. Food has always been central in our family. It’s family traditions, memories, ways of connecting with others. After graduation, I found my way to Blue Hill restaurant where I was working with an up-and-coming chef named Dan Barber. The restaurant was named after the Barber’s family farm. I worked my way up at Blue Hill and was part of the team that opened Blue Hill Stone Barns on the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. I became the Culinary Director and my role included everything from menu development to procurement and education. Working at a restaurant on a farm planted the seeds for what would ultimately become The Spare Food Co.
While at Blue Hill, I co-created a pop-up restaurant in NYC in 2015 called wastED. It was devoted to ingredients in our food system that would normally be thrown away. I worked with everyone from small farmers to food processors, retailers and regional distributors to source ingredients. That’s when I also started working with White Moustache — I made a dessert out of whey and realized what massive potential there was to using whey as an ingredient. We went to London in 2017 for a seven-week version of the wastED pop-up restaurant on the rooftop at Selfridges. It was enormously successful and contributed to the wider discussion about waste in the food system in general.
I came back from that experience a changed person and saw an incredible business opportunity: the idea of building something around the latent value that exists within our food system: identifying overlooked ingredients at scale, capturing those ingredients that typically would be thrown away, and using them to create new foods. The concept is fueled by chef-driven culinary innovation and creativity to transform them into delicious food. That’s when Jeremy came into the picture.
Jeremy Kaye: Growing up in South Africa during Apartheid, I always had a very liberal and socially conscious, global perspective. I felt trapped in that oppressive society. After finishing university in South Africa, I immediately went to NYC on a student visa. I went back to school for product development and marketing specifically in the apparel industry. My first job was at J. Crew in the early days of building the company. Then I was recruited to join Patagonia, where I was part of the product development team helping to create the supply chain and transform Patagonia’s sportswear product line to use organically grown cotton. There was and is a deep ethos at the company that tapped into what I describe as the activist gene that came from growing up in South Africa at that time. I got to work alongside an exceptional group of people at Patagonia tasked with continuing to bring to life the clarity and vision of Yvon Chouinard, and had the honor of also working with Yvon’s phenomenal group of trusted masterminds that included Kris McDivitt Tompkins and the late Doug Tompkins, Rick Ridgeway and a slew of other leaders. Their clarity of vision and demonstration that business can be a force for good in the world had a huge impact on me in my mid-twenties.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company or organization?
Adam Kaye: When we originally launched Spare Food, Jeremy was in San Francisco and I was in NY. I was attending a conference on Sustainability and Food Waste in San Francisco in 2018. There was a journalist and author there, and after I told her my story — she had followed wastED pop-up — the reporter said to me ‘it must have been such a challenge to work with the ingredients you were having to work with.’ I responded saying this was actually the most liberating and fun time of my culinary career to date. I believe that constraints spur creativity–narrowing the options you have to work with and turn it into something really creative and delicious was exciting.
Jeremy Kaye: I often find myself reflecting on the fact that in mid-2018 when we landed on the name Spare Food for our new company, I was able to purchase sparefood.com as the url without having to try and buy it off someone else, and register (and subsequently trademark) the names and logos for The Spare Food Co. and Spare Food. The shift that this represents in the conversations around food waste and its impact is significant. We feel very fortunate that the name “SPARE” with its meanings both of “available for use” and “to leave unharmed” so perfectly reflects our ethos and our approach.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Adam Kaye: Spare Tonic formulation started in my home kitchen, and I made the flavors in glass flip top bottles. Fermentation is part of the process, and in the course of perfecting our formula there were more than a few explosions of the bottles. My wife was at home one day and heard a loud explosion coming from the kitchen. One of the bottles had exploded and to this day, there are still shards of glass embedded in the kitchen cabinets. Thank goodness no one was hurt, but needless to say, I stored the bottles in a closet in the basement after that.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
There’s a Chinese Proverb that perfectly encapsulates our approach to leadership in this complex issue we’re committed to addressing. It goes something to the effect of “It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.”
The critical issues of climate change and food waste grew out of a multitude of small decisions made over generations. We can’t simply go back to a time before this crisis of wasted food, but we do believe in creating a process that disentangles the mess and sets us on a more sustainable trajectory. We’re leading by making a series of small bets on it.
We get asked sometimes: “Why small steps if it’s all so urgent?”
From our perspective, when we take small steps, we have the opportunity to assess the impact of our choices, evolve our assumptions with new insights, check that we’re still going in the right direction and make adjustments if we determine we’re off course. With this approach, we can adapt in order to make changes that stick, with fewer unintended consequences.
We describe our approach to leadership as “Proudly Incrementalist”, learning and evolving as we go, with a clear mission to maximize the use of upcycled and surplus ingredients as our primary aim.
I also continue to be heavily influenced by Michael Porter’s ideas around “shared value” where collective impact can facilitate successful collaborations where more of society benefits. As a philosophy, it helps guide us to think differently, to enroll the various players in our ecosystem to help solve this urgent problem, which we’d not be able to do alone. The culture we are building at Spare Food truly is one where we consider the motivations of each of the key stakeholders to ensure that what we are doing together moves beyond the transactional and is sustained by the relational.
What does the ecosystem look like if you come up with a holistic approach to where everyone benefits — this is the model The Spare Food Co. follows — by buying the whey that would normally have to be discarded, we are benefitting White Moustache. The farmers also benefit, because now White Moustache can produce more yogurt and can buy more milk from dairy farmers. Captain Lawrence Brewery benefits because we use a craft beer facility line that was sitting idle when Covid shut so much of the world down.
We’re building a business model around this that we believe will ultimately lead to a more effective, equitable and regenerative food system.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
We often reference the Buddhist idea of “seeing the unseen”. We apply this daily by actively seeking the places where there is latent value in our food system, and exploring ways to put these to good use in our product development, manufacturing, and logistics.
When thinking about this question in the context of “more ways to use more” at Spare Food, we often reference a favorite quote from Doug McMaster (an amazing chef and zero waste warrior in the UK) where he states, “Waste is a failure of the imagination.” Conversations around food waste and the upcycled community are not often led by the culinary community. When they are, the practice of using whole ingredients as in ‘nose to tail’ gets applied to the food system as a whole.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. What exactly are we talking about when we refer to food waste?
Words matter and we are sticklers about talking about “wasted food” rather than “food waste”. Let’s be real: who wants to eat waste? We certainly don’t. The simple switch of the two words, food and waste, completely changes the emphasis — and opens up so many more opportunities because no one really wants to waste food.
Wasted food entails any edible food that is overlooked or unused and not consumed by people. The general numbers referenced are that 30–40% of food grown and produced in the United States is not consumed. Much of this food ends up in landfills where it decomposes and releases methane. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is 28-times more potent than carbon dioxide with 80-times the warming power. Minimizing the impact food systems have on the climate crisis starts by preventing food from being wasted.
Can you help articulate a few of the main causes of food waste?
This is a huge topic and much has been written about this socially, geopolitically, environmentally, you name it.
The root causes are different in different regions of the world. In the case of the US and many other Western countries, food waste is a modern problem that can be traced back to a few primary “innovations” post-World War II as we repurposed our munitions industry: the canning industry, fertilizer, and affordable refrigeration. This has been perpetuated and amplified by the rise of Big Food and the focus on efficiency and convenience, along with all the subsidies that support large-scale factory farming and monocrops so it’s not news that food prices in the US simply do not reflect the true cost of what it takes to create that food.
Suddenly, since we can grow and produce much more, store food for longer, and access it all more easily and cheaply, we have migrated away from rural areas and become more urban and consequently far removed from our food source and all the resources — human, environmental, economic — required to produce food that honestly, generations later we are mostly just unaware. Put differently, we don’t assign our food the value that we should and it is easy therefore to (mostly unconsciously) waste a huge portion of it.
What are a few of the obstacles that companies and organizations face when it comes to distributing extra or excess food? What can be done to overcome those barriers?
We are squarely focused on preventing food from being wasted as far upstream as we can: at the farms where food is grown and at manufacturers who are creating secondary ingredients, like the whey we use in our Spare Tonic, that is produced when Greek-style yogurt is manufactured.
For us, the challenges are not related to distributing excess or extra food. It is intercepting the supply chain which has been set up to sequester and eliminate what industry sees as “waste by-product” and convince manufacturers that what they consider “waste” is actually food that has value (nutritional, economic, social and environmental) and thus should be maintained in a food safe environment to be used as ingredients in future food and beverage products.
Can you describe a few of the ways that you or your organization are helping to reduce food waste?
Our mission is to fix the broken food system and by preventing food from being wasted before it happens and to keep it at its highest purpose, as food for people. We start with the growers and food producers to find ways to use more of what’s already grown and produced. We take these overlooked and unused ingredients and craft them into delicious foods and beverages that are better for people and the planet.
Our first product, Spare Tonic, is a perfect example of this. It’s a sparkling elixir made from the excess whey that is created during the production of Greek-style yogurt. For every one cup of strained yogurt produced, two cups of whey are created. That’s more than twice as much as all of the Greek-style yogurt you see on those grocery store shelves. Whey is liquid gold, naturally rich in probiotics, nutrients and electrolytes. Yet we mostly dump it into the wastewater stream.
Seventy percent of all strained yogurt sold in the US is produced in NY State (where we are based) creating an estimated one billion pounds of whey annually. Before this whey can be discarded into the waste stream, its natural acidity must be neutralized. If this does not happen, it damages the surrounding ecosystem by disrupting the pH of groundwater, resulting in lower crop yields, depleting oxygen levels in waterways and negatively impacting aquatic life. Our goal is to capture as much of this whey as possible to use in new foods and drinks, like Spare Tonic.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help address the root of this problem?
There is so much science that shows that the №1 way to not just prevent but reverse the effects of climate change is to prevent food waste. It is also the way any one of us fortunate enough to be able to afford a fancy latte or a C-store snack can actually make a difference. Let’s face it, we can’t all afford to drive a Tesla or put solar panels on our roof. But we can choose to spend some of our food dollars on better food choices. Why is it that so few people realize this? With this in mind, the top three things for us are:
- The media has been silent on this issue (with a few notable exceptions). This is an amazing story about personal agency and optimism in a world that can feel out of control. Let’s celebrate it and all the young companies and small organizations who are dedicating their lives and livelihoods to making this happen.
- The people leading the conversations around Climate Change and Climate Solutions almost never talk about food waste prevention as part of the strategies to slow and reverse the impacts of global warming. Truly, read the tome that came out of Glasgow last October. If I remember correctly, there was one formal panel dedicated to the topic and perhaps two mentions in the final Cop26 agreement. What will it take to make this a serious topic for discussion on the Hill? The phrase “food waste” does not appear anywhere in the text of both the Green New Deal and the Build Back Better Act, yet it does include “$42.3 billion in tax credits for the wealthy to purchase electric vehicles.” I don’t know… a $3.00 drink seems so much more attainable for many than a $35,000+ Tesla.
- The investment community. Systemic change takes time and requires different capital structures and KPIs. There are so many amazing funds out there today focused on climate change but only a very small portion of those are actively investing in climate food solutions that are not tech propelled. We’d love to help change this.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
It is different starting a company like Spare Food in midlife and mid-career. We’ve both seen a lot and done a lot. We’ve also made a lot of mistakes along the way and watched others do so too. We’re mindful of trying not to repeat those, or those of others we’ve worked with and for, and yet sometimes… not so easy.
We’re trying to do a lot at once: new product, new ingredient stream, new supply chain partners, a global pandemic so fewer opportunities to share and trial our drinks. But we’re doing it.
Rather than five small lessons, one very significant thing we have realized that we really do wish we had known is that while the investment community loves new or big ideas, the performance expectations, KPIs and milestones are carryovers from more traditional industries and sectors. It feels like we’re constantly threading the needle on that front, even with the more “progressive” investors.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food waste? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
We are members of the Upcycled Food Association (UFA), and Adam was elected to the board of the organization this year. The goal of the organization lines up perfectly with the ethos of The Spare Food Co. as it’s focused on preventing food waste by coordinating hundreds of companies around the world and empowering millions of consumers to prevent climate change with the products they buy. UFA is spearheading the movement to bring awareness to upcycled foods and making it easier for consumers to identify these products with an Upcycled Certified™ logo. Upcycled Certified™ products and ingredients like ours have undergone a rigorous, third-party certification to ensure that the product leads to measurable, verifiable food waste prevention.
Again, Doug McMaster is also a pioneer of the zero-waste movement with the creation of the Zero Waste Cooking School. He is committed to eradicating waste in any form and uses his platform to showcase radically innovative work. He is a prime example of what is possible when you don’t take “no” for an answer.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
The Upcycled Food Movement, or more specifically, the Whole Ingredient approach within the Upcycled Food movement. While it is still in its infancy, if more people realized the impact that reducing food waste has on climate change and on being able to feed more people real, nutritious food, we would do the most good. For Spare Food, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we could do with crops and parts of plants getting left behind or overlooked.
The reality is that we’ve gone beyond the point of “sustainability” being a viable solution to this crisis. We must figure out how to “regenerate” successfully. Eliminating waste in all forms is at the core of what it means to regenerate. There is no waste in a truly regenerative food system.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Jeremy Kaye: Time is short to make a difference here. It is our duty to act now, for ourselves and for future generations, so we need to enroll people with the broadest, deepest platforms to help. Michelle Obama, Emma Watson and Steph Curry would be my dream breakfast roundtable to spread the word and ignite the movement where a broad swatch of our society would be inspired to act. Each represents a key constituency that is highly influential and would create meaningful impact.
Adam Kaye: I’m fascinated and inspired by chefs who have chosen to direct their incredible talents and energy in the service of a larger cause. People who achieve incredible culinary heights and either step away from high end kitchens entirely or use their platform to be the change that they want to see in the world. Two that come to mind are Jose Andres (World Central Kitchen) and Dan Giusti (Brigaid). And, Michael Pollan — because every movement needs a storyteller and he is one of the best when it comes to food (and plants and mind-altering substances and we need to rapidly change people’s minds).
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find us online at SpareFood.com or follow us on Instagram — @sparefoodco. We regularly opine on ideas like this in our blog, Spare Food Shed. We’re just getting started and future products are on the horizon as we look for more ways to take “overlooked” ingredients and transform them into delicious value-added products and dishes for foodservice, hospitality and restaurant partners.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Reducing Food Waste: Jeremy and Adam Kaye Of The Spare Food Co How They Are Helping To Eliminate… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.