The Small Business Project: Rescued Kitchen - making money from recycled food

Monday, 12 August 2024

Royce Bold and Siane Stanbra from Rescued Kitchen.

The $5.80 price of a pack of 12 tortilla wraps from Remarkable Tortillas is a sign of things to come for Onehunga’s Rescued Kitchen.

Rescued Kitchen takes excess, unwanted food, like bread that’s passed its sell-by date, and processes it into long shelf-life food, like baking mixes for muffins and cakes.

Caterers Diane Stanbra and Royce Bold started the business after Covid lockdowns “took care of” previous jobs.

But as a small-scale food manufacturer, the products Rescued Kitchen created for sale to the public were at the luxury end of the market, such as its $12.50 lemon and gin botanicals baking mix, or the $6 pack of 200g of “real” breadcrumbs with rescued herbs.

But Stanbra and Bold have a much, much bigger ambition than continuing small-scale manufacturing and sales out of a modest industrial unit in the Auckland satellite town of Onehunga.

They plan to see their rescue processes make a meaningful dent in reusing the roughly $3.2 billion of food wasted in New Zealand each year, by partnering with big manufacturers such as Griffins and Goodman Fielder.

Royce Bold from Rescued Kitchen inspects unwanted 'waste' apples.

Stanbra envisions a time in the not-too-far distant future where bread and cakes sold in in supermarkets, and food sold in restaurants and cafes, will contain a significant proportion of rescued ingredients.

And that’s where the tortillas made by Auckland manufacturer Remarkable Tortillas come in.

They are Rescued Kitchen’s first tie-up with a larger-scale food maker delivering food at a mainstream price for the ordinary New Zealand household which contains its rescued ingredients.

“The collaboration we did with Remarkable; that’s the business model,” Stanbra says.

“We worked with them to find out what the magic ratio of reused bread flour to normal bread flour was, and swapped it out, and voila,” she says.

“Bread is the most wasted product in New Zealand,” says Diane Stanbra from Rescued Kitchen.

The tortillas are about 20% rescued ingredient, she says.

“That was the amount that could be used in mainstream manufacturing that produced a great product, that worked at high volume, and was able to absorb the cost,” she says.

Rescuing bread, and processing it into an ingredient with a long shelf life involved dehydrating and milling it.

The business model proved, the next step for Rescued Kitchen is bringing down the cost of processing. It’s close to signing deals to import machinery from overseas to do just that, which should smash the “price barrier” to manufacturers turning their nose up at rescued ingredients.

“Within the next 12 months we will be in a position to process at a significant volume we can then be available to any manufacturer that wants to swap out anything that we are rescuing,” Stanbra says.

“That’s bread, produce, gin botanicals, spent grains,” she said.

“That’s where the magic happens,” says Stanbra.

Rescued Kitchen imagines a future in which the likes of McDonalds include rescued ingredients in their recioe mixes.

“Every product on the market that contained flour, that contains breadcrumbs, we can swap out from 1% upwards,” she says.

She hopes the likes of Goodman Fielder, Griffins and McDonalds will all see the brand benefits of embracing circular food rescue.

She imagines McDonald’s using bread crumbs from rescued bread, massively cutting food waste.

“Imagine the impact on our bread waste, if everyone’s attitude was use what we produce in our own country first,” she says.

Stanbra and Bold have learned a lot about food waste in New Zealand.

“We were so naive when we started,” she says. “We didn’t appreciate how much of a solution we found.

“Food waste just shouldn’t exist,” she says.

Rescued Kitchen products on sale in Countdown.

“The biggest eye-opener for us is the volume of ingredients we are importing from overseas while we are literally throwing away the exact same thing. It’s insanity,” she says.

She gives the example of the vast amount of onion powder imported for use in food manufacturing, when an “eye-watering” quantity of onions grown in New Zealand are dumped.

The same is happening with carrots grown here, and carrot powder imports, she says.

“And don’t get me started on breadcrumbs. Bread is our biggest wasted product. We throw out all this bread, and we import bread crumbs from Malaysia, China and Indonesia, and they contain palm oils.”

“Let’s just stop doing all this,” she said.

In addition to its luxury products, Rescued Kitchen’s products are used in the national school lunch programme.

“We are making amazing food from surplus food that’s going back into the school lunch programme to feed our future generations,” she says.

She says she feels such pride each Friday when around half a tonne of food heads off to local schools made from rescued ingredients.

The company has just gone through its first capital raise for equipment and technology to scale up.

The interest is there from manufacturers, many of which are already part of the national Kai Commitment voluntary agreement, to work to reduce food waste. Nestle, Countdown, Goodman Fielder, George Weston Foods, Fonterra, Wilcox and Foodstuffs are all members.

But she says: “The first question is always; how much can you produce?”

Rescued Kitchens will soon have the answer they want to hear, she says.

“They are buying ingredients anyway. Why wouldn’t they buy ingredients that help the local economy, and provide jobs, help the environment, and food security. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”