Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the food and beverage category.
Confronted with the challenge of fruit and vegetable waste at her juice company, Claire Schlemme’s journey took an unexpected turn when she met the owner of a tofu company, who unveiled the staggering amount of pulp his factories were discarding.
Determined to salvage this nutritious material, Schlemme embarked on a mission to reduce waste. With co-founder Caroline Cotto, she launched Renewal Mill, an Oakland-based startup focused on processing and upcycling leftovers from food manufacturers into edible ingredients, aiming to tackle waste head on.
“We looked at that and said there has to be a way to keep all of that nutrition in the supply chain,” Cotto said. “Then we learned that this wasn’t just happening in tofu facilities, but in all different sorts of food manufacturing facilities across the country.”
Today, the company produces okara flour from tofu waste, oat protein from oat milk, white corn flour from corn milling, green banana flour from bananas and pineapple fiber from pineapple juicing.
Since the two met, Renewal Mill has grown to become a national brand with its products being sold at Whole Foods, independent retailers in California and the Northeast, as well as under supermarket private labels. The company also supplies ingredients to emerging brands such as Pulp Pantry and Tia Lupita.
Additionally, Renewal Mill offers baking mixes to enhance accessibility, and partnerships with Miyoko’s Creamery for cookies and Salt & Straw for vegan ice cream to enable consumers to experience the benefits of Renewal Mill’s sustainable ingredients in familiar and convenient products, Cotto said.
“We realized that if you’re going to introduce a novel ingredient to the market, you need a way for consumers to interact with it,” Cotto said. “We started making baking mixes and ready-to-eat cookies to showcase our ingredients and have people understand they can have all the things they love, but with better for the planet ingredients.”
While Renewal Mill would not disclose specific revenue numbers, Schlemme said the company has doubled its growth every year since 2019. Last year alone, the company diverted over 300,000 pounds of waste, avoiding 1 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and saving 44 million gallons of water.
“Food waste is a huge driver of climate change,” Cotto said. “The best thing we can do to fight food waste is prevent it from happening in the first place, and the next best thing we can do is use that food to feed people.”
By turning manufacturer’s food scraps into edible ingredients, Renewal Mill redirects waste into usable energy. According to the Enviromental Protection Agency’s food recovery hierarchy, this is the second-best option for the environment after reducing the amount of extra food generated. Composting and, even worse, sending food to the landfill are the least beneficial options.
Schlemme says the company prioritizes producing products that are nutrient dense with lots of protein and fiber, ensuring that “important macronutrients make it to people rather than go to waste.”
To date, Renewal Mill has raised $3.5 million from a seed round, crowdfunding and various other grants. In June, the company announced the initial phase of a $2.5 million Series A round. Schlemme expects the round, led by Beyond Impact Investors, to close in the next two months. The company has also gone through the Food System 6 Accelerator and Techstars Farm to Fork program, and Schlemme was a 2020 Tory Burch Fellow for female entrepreneurs.
“Our mission is to show people that eating food that’s good for the planet can be fun, easy and delicious,” Schlemme said. “Since sustainability and impact are, pardon the pun, baked into the core of what our business does and what our business model is, the more we grow, the more impact we have, which is a motivating driver for both of us.”
About Renewal Mill
Location: Oakland
Industry: Food and Beverage
Founders: Claire Schlemme and Caroline Cotto
Founded: 2016
Funding: $2.5M
Major investors: Beyond Impact Investors
Why they were chosen: Renewal Mill has found a way to turn overlooked food byproduct into a range of foodstuffs in an attempt to change the way we bake, while serving a mission of sustainability.
