Every year, the fresh produce industry generates millions of pounds of fruit and vegetable trimmings — food that often goes to waste.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 22% of landfill waste consists of food, including produce trimmings. But what if those discarded bits, trimmings that many wouldn’t consider edible, could be transformed into something of value? That’s the aim of next-generation fiber company Floura & Co., which says its mission is to save 100 million pounds of produce from landfills.
Established by Jeni Britton, also the founder of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, in 2002 at an Ohio farmers market, Floura is transforming fresh produce trimmings that would otherwise end up in landfills and creating delicious fiber-rich snacks. Operating inside F&S Fresh Foods, one of the largest fruit and vegetable processing facilities in the U.S., Britton’s team is sourcing high-quality produce trimmings directly from the facility.
The desire to create a fiber-rich food company came from Britton’s interest in waste reduction and the personal health benefits she experienced from eating fruit.
Floura’s take on fiber-rich, eco-conscious foods addresses growing consumer interest in gut health and foods that promote “good bacteria” — primarily fiber from fruits and vegetables. Even so, Britton says 95% of U.S. consumers are lacking fiber in their diets.
To help solve this deficiency, Floura’s fiber bars are created from fruit and vegetable trimmings that are fermented, dehydrated and milled into a powder. Each bar contains 13 grams of fiber with no added sugar.
In a conversation with The Packer, Britton shared the story behind Floura, how the company transforms produce trimmings into a valuable fiber source and what’s next for the upcycled food movement.
First, here’s an example of the process to create the fiber bars:
- Crates of apples are sourced directly from farms in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania.
- Apples are peeled and cut for Mott’s, Whole Foods, Green Giant and more. The apple cores, typically considered waste, are taken by Floura.
- These cores are turned into a nutritious paste, along with fermented watermelon rinds, mango skin and cantaloupe peels, among other produce trimmings.
- The upcycled fresh produce trimmings are combined with things like nuts, seeds and puffed quinoa to create Floura bars.
The company says the process demonstrates a circular economy, transforming potential waste into value that boosts well-being.
The Packer: What path took you from ice cream to fiber-rich snacks?
Britton: Although it seems like an interesting zag, for me it felt natural. At Jeni’s, we’ve always composted in our kitchen. We’ve always been very aware of waste, and pre-COVID, we were able to get to zero waste in the front of our stores.
When I started to step away from the day-to-day involvement at Jeni’s after nearly 30 years, I got healthy for the first time in my life. One way I did that was by eating tons of fruit. I mean, I ate a lot of fruit. I started reading about the benefits because I was feeling really, really good [as a consequence]. I began to research fiber, fruit fiber in particular, what it does and why it’s important to health.
So, I was experiencing firsthand how quickly fiber can change your life, change how you feel. It happened that I was touring a massive produce company on a whole other project, and I saw the watermelon rinds kind of being hand-cut off the watermelon, by the thousands, and then carted away.
I had already read a study that watermelon rind has a specific kind of prebiotic fiber and other micronutrients that are really good for you and that we should be eating them. And I remembered that my grandmother always pickled watermelon rind. So, many of our grandmothers were pickling these ingredients or eating the whole apple (minus the seeds) or whatever. And I just remembered thinking that my grandmother knew so much and that we just ignore all that now.
It started to make me think: Is there a special fiber here that we should be harvesting to use and to make something out of? It became almost like playtime for me. There was no burden of entrepreneurship or anything like that. My business adviser, Mark Edwards, is also very into health, and we started to kind of percolate this idea. What if we could take these ingredients and make them into something? And it started from there.
Mark then moved from L.A. to New Jersey, where the produce company is located, and within a couple of weeks we were playing in the kitchen, trying to figure out if we could make them into anything, and we did. We made a pancake mix, we made cake mix, we made all sorts of really tasty stuff, and then, over the course of a year and a half, settled on a bar because we wanted to create something that people could reach for daily if they weren’t getting enough fiber — which 95% of Americans aren’t — to bridge their fiber gaps.
There’s so much in the news now about the gut microbiome, the gut-brain connection and gut health. So, are you saying that fruit is conducive to creating the right environment and feeding the gut flora?
Yes, fruits and vegetables, but we found we could get the fiber up to the range we needed using apple cores. [It’s not just fiber,] there are also the nutrients; watermelon rinds are full of micronutrients like L-citrulline and other things.
It sounds convenient being located at F&S Fresh Foods. How did that partnership come about?
We were originally working with them on another project, but then this idea popped up, and we started working with them immediately. They helped us incubate this whole idea, and they were behind us the whole time, saying, “Sure, if you want space, we’ll give you space. If you want watermelon rinds cut in an eighth of an inch perfect cube, we’ll give you all that you can take.” They were a big support from the beginning.
It’s hard to even imagine, but it’s 600,000 square feet under a roof. It’s an amazing and highly efficient place.
The fruit is being processed right inside the facility. For example, these apples come in from upstate New York or they’re from Pennsylvania, and they’re beautiful apples with the stems still on and leaves, and they look perfect. The apples come in, and they go into this beautiful system that’s like the length of a football field. It’s all water, so it’s like this gentle river where they get washed, then they get chopped and then they get packaged for various sales.
We take the apple trimmings immediately and make them into a puree, so they’re fresh produce when we get them. And if we’re not using them that day, we’re freezing them until we get enough of them, and then we basically make an applesauce out of them. We figured out how to get the apple seeds out because those are not good for you.
It’ll go through fermentation that takes a few days, then we dehydrate it, mill it into a powder and then we can store it for a long time.
When we say that Floura is a fiber company, we actually make the fiber first, then we make the bars.
So, this process of upcycling the fruit, it’s not the same as waste, exactly. How would you describe the process?
It’s not waste, although it would be, so we’re intercepting it before it becomes waste. It’s still fresh produce, and it’s not garbage. Our grandparents used to eat it. If we lived in times of scarcity, we would never be throwing these things away.
We’re not getting the waste from somewhere and then upcycling it. Rather, it’s food that would normally become waste and put into a landfill. Saving the food from a landfill is what we’re doing.
