ARLINGTON, Va. — If you have a plan to turn food waste into new alterative foods or a commercial product, Uncle Sam Wants You – well, the USDA does – and it wants to help you turn your product into gold.
Tucked away in one of the nation’s top USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) centers, Ph.D. food science expert Tara McHugh – who has shepherded several successful plates of food scrap concepts into a host of useful products – is ready for ideas.
She is a research leader heading up a team of scientists and researchers of the Healthy Processed Foods Research Unit at the Western Regional Research Center laboratories outside San Francisco.
The team’s role is to test concepts and award those innovations with exclusive USDA contracts. The end result is helping reduce the nation’s nearly 34 million tons of food waste annually – enough to fill New York’s Empire State Building 91 times.
Food waste occurs across the supply chain: on farms, in restaurants, at supermarkets and in the home. Examples include throwing away leftovers; rejecting a fruit or vegetable because it is slightly wrinkled, damaged or has a spot; or food that has been left in the refrigerator too long or stored or packaged wrongly.
Food waste was one of the highlighted topics at the USDA’s two-day 2015 Agricultural Outlook Forum – Smart Agriculture in the 21st Century conference Feb. 19-20, in Arlington. Heading up this session, which included McHugh, was Elise Golan, the director of Sustainability from the Office of the USDA’s Chief Economist.
Golan presided over a panel of experts fighting food waste and outlined programs affecting consumers, farmers and food processors across the country. Latest figures show food waste costs the U.S. economy $161 billion annually.
"Private investors," she said, "are competing in the multibillion-dollar food market to fund companies and solve food waste problems." She called on companies to "join us" to eliminate food waste – food that could go to feeding hungry families.
One of those new companies is Hungry Harvest, launched last year by founders Evan Lutz and John Zamora. Lutz, who serves as the company’s chief operating officer, said his for-profit company operates in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore areas, purchasing surplus fresh fruits and vegetables discarded by area farmers and supermarkets because they are slightly damaged or oddly shaped – lopsided tomatoes, misshapen eggplants, carrots with funny curves and more.
Hungry Harvest generates sales when it sells 5- and 10-pound bags of produce to clients on a contracted weekly basis for less than normal retail prices. For every bag purchased, Hungry Harvest donates another to help feed a hungry family and supply local food banks, soup kitchens and other venues. As the sales grow, Lutz plans on expanding to other states.
It was McHugh’s "Turning Waste Into Worth Through Innovation" presentation that appeared to resonate with many attendees at the conference. In a follow-up interview with McHugh, she painstakingly outlined nearly a dozen steps companies take as scientists and researchers take on a innovative concept.
The task begins when she and her team are contacted with a waste-saving concept. It follows with a face-to-face meeting at McHugh’s research lab where she evaluates the plan. If the concept has possibilities, the USDA moves to form an exclusive agreement with the company.
Next is a formal "statement of work" agreement which includes administrative details, a budget including how much a company is willing to invest developing the concept and USDA in-kind services by its researchers and scientists. Then it moves to final approval by the upper levels of the USDA, a process that takes at least a month.
McHugh said any one of four USDA centers can take on a concept, but she heads the unit that normally produces successful new food products. Once a concept is realized, a patent for the innovation is prepared by USDA’s patent writers and shared jointly between the USDA and the innovator.
Next, as the concept is manufactured and heads to market, the USDA continues to strongly support the product to the consumer. As the company makes money, a small portion of the profits are shared with ARS to cover administrative costs.
The success at ARS laboratories working with private companies has resulted in developing fruit bars, crackers, grapeseed oils, cookies and grape skin and seed flours; turning potato skins and rice hulls into bioproducts; wine grape and olive pomaces into healthy food ingredients; new fruit and vegetable film coverings for edible foods; and converting undersized, blemished or damaged produce into puree and processed into foods.
From development to reaching the hands of the consumer, McHugh said this can take a year or more depending on the manufacturing process.
One of the success stories she pointed to is the production of one of the first fruit bars to reach consumers. That was 10 years ago, and "Bear Fruit Bars" are still being produced today by the family-owned business, Mountain Organic Foods, under an exclusive licensing agreement and patent.
She said there are fewer than a dozen new consumer concepts being developed at the moment in her unit and even after the product is manufactured, it may still not reach the marketplace. "The economics may not be worth it," she explained.
For information about the ARS Innovation Technologies program, contact McHugh at the USDA’s ARS Western Regional Research Center in Albany, Calif., at TaraMcHugh@ars.usda.gov or 510-559-5864.
McHugh and her team will be participating in the country’s largest annual food expo, the IFT15, sponsored by the Institute of Food Technologists, July 11-14 in Chicago, where more than 22,000 attendees will be hunting for the latest in new foods, products and what’s new in production. For details, email info@ift.org
