The company doing things with food nobody else wants

An Auckland company is taking food that would otherwise go to waste and turning it into everyday products.

Rescued Kitchen repurposes surplus food from growers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and food charities.

One product uses surplus supermarket bread and turns it into breadcrumbs.

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Rescued Kitchen co-owner Diane Stanbra says the company is building on the growing demand for sustainable food options.

“We are taking perfectly good food that for many, many reasons, is not staying in our food system," she tells RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

The techniques they use to give food a longer shelf life are centuries old, she says.

“Dehydrating, cooking, freezing, to give it a new life and keep it in the food system, and just stop it from being wasted, which just shouldn't happen.”

While community organisations do a valuable job getting fresh food back to where it’s needed, it still has a limited shelf life, she says.

“Anything fresh is going to deteriorate, so what we do is basically try and stop that deterioration, again that's dehydrating or putting it in the freezer to preserve it.

“From there, we work with manufacturers and turn it into normal products.”

Breadcrumbs, for example, are typically made from scratch, she says.

“They're actually manufactured to be a breadcrumb, which is just a crazy thing I never knew, this kind of blew my mind when I found out.

“They start as a dough. So, we throw away all our bread and then make a new dough to make breadcrumbs, and then a lot of the times, we actually import those breadcrumbs from overseas.”

Currently the breadcrumbs they make are a premium product because of the technique they use, but she’s hopeful some new equipment will bring the price down.

“We've spent the last two years in some significant R&D to find the equipment we need and get it into the country.

“And that's what we're working on now, because it's all volume based. To make a difference with the colossal amount of bread that's been wasted we need some pretty serious kit.”

They also make a rescued bread flour, she says.

“We discovered the whole thing by fluke, effectively, if you dry bread and blitz it, it turns back into flour, because basically, bread is made up of mostly flour, when you dehydrate and take the water out, it's going to go back into what we call rescue bread flour.

“That is effectively a wheat flour alternative from that, we can actually basically make anything that uses normal flour, so cakes, muffins, crackers, biscuits - you name it.”

Fresh food such as tomatoes are also rescued, she says, they save about two tonnes of tomatoes a week from one local grower alone.

“They come in, they get sorted and re-graded. The green ones we turn into a green tomato chutney.”

Orange tomatoes are left to ripen, while the “red, squishy ones” are made into a range of tomato-based sauces, she says.

“They go straight back out the door to our amazing customers that are choosing to use New Zealand grown tomatoes that were going to be wasted and not import Italian canned tomatoes.”

Montana Group is one of their biggest customers.

“They are New Zealand's largest privately owned catering company.

“They've diverted 37 tonnes of food that would have otherwise been wasted so and they just products and ingredients that they would have normally purchased.”

Growers are either paid an agreed rate for their surplus or Rescued Kitchen collects the produce, she says.

“We will cover all the cost of getting the product to us. Normally, they would be paying for it to go to compost or animal feed, so we pick up that cost.”

In the future the plan is to make products n behalf of growers that they can brand under their own name, she says.

“They can have their own kind of range of chutneys and sauces under their label, that's the dream, because currently it’s the growers that are missing out in terms of the revenue that they're getting for what they're growing.”