Upcycled Food Lab

This report by Consumer Food Graduate Ella Zwagerman spotlights Dunedin Craft Distillers' pioneering use of surplus bread to raise awareness of food waste.

This review paper explores upcycled food's environmental, social, and economic impacts, underscoring its potential for sustainable food waste repurposing.

This article explores consumer sentiment toward upcycled beer, emphasising the environmental benefits to help inform food manufacturers about future promotional strategies.

This publication discusses opportunities for upcycled food manufacturers to produce more nutritious products.

Food Waste Innovation hosted the Student Showcase session at the National Food Waste Summit in September 2022. Eight postgraduate students recorded presentations about their research.

This article by Sian Menson was awarded second prize in the Food Tech Solutions New Zealand Institute for Food Science and Technology Undergraduate Writing Competition 2022.

If there is sufficient interest, a significant amount of waste can be redirected into value-added products, benefitting the consumer, the producer, and planet Earth.

This research provides recommendations to ‘upcycled food’ manufacturers and suppliers that will help improve engagement with retail product category managers. This in turn will hopefully increase the uptake of ‘upcycled food’ by retailers, thus supporting food waste reduction initiatives.

This video tutorial shows how to make our Upcycled Food Lab’s recipe for ‘spent grain cake’. This recipe utilises otherwise wasted spent grain from the brewing process.

Presentations by 10 Food Waste Innovation postgraduate and summer students on their research projects. Recorded in March 2022.

This video is a recording of a talk given by Associate Professor Miranda Mirosa as part of the New Zealand Institute of Food Science and Technology’s annual general meeting. Miranda Discusses the future of upcycled food for consumers, the food industry, and of course, for the food waste problem.

This recipe is a step-by-step guide to upcycling bread into non-alcoholic ginger beer soda. This resource was developed and tested by scientists at our Upcycled Food Lab.

This resource is a recipe for upcycling your surplus bread to make homebrew beer by replacing some of the malt with bread. Developed and tested by experts in our Upcycled Food Lab.

The food waste reduction roadmap details the barriers and potential solutions to reducing food waste from farm to fork. The roadmap highlights data gaps, particularly in production, and the need for the Government to progress data collection through a food loss and waste baseline.

This research explores the perception of upcycled foods from a panel of 1001 frequent shoppers at a large grocery retailer in New Zealand.