I was enjoying some toast with jam and noticed the jam consistency and taste was a little different than what I have expected. I looked at the ingredients and found the first ingredient to be “upcycled strawberries”.
What are upcycled strawberries?
A quick google search told me that upcycling is a hot new food trend where ingredients that would have normally been thrown away or used for animal feed are used as ingredients. Think inedible parts of food such as seeds and peels or ugly foods. The idea is that food waste is bad for the environment so we should use everything.
So my jam was made with the ingredients farms basically couldn’t sell to other humans. The jam’s website gives a few examples of “broken” or “misshapen” strawberries, but I could think of other reasons that farmers couldn’t offload their product which are less benign.
Using animal grade ingredients, this must be a discount brand?
Surprisingly, no! An 8 ounce jar retails for around $8, while an organic no sugar added brand costs $4.69 for a 9 ounce jar, about half the price. Of course you can get regular jam for about a quarter the price.
So it’s a cost thing they’re trying to hide?
Also, no! They actively advertise upycling. It’s about half way down their home page. They start from “farm outcast” foods. And just in case you don’t believe that they use the cheapest ingredients that would normally be thrown out or turned into animal feed, there’s a certification too!
I could imagine what the certification process looks like:
Inspector: Sir, we reviewed your plant and facilities and, I don’t know how to tell you this, but it looks like you’re using human grade food. You’re going to have to talk to your supplier to make sure you’re getting the absolute worst quality produce for us to certify you as uncycling.
What did it taste like?
It was pretty bland. Not very sweet. If you didn’t know it was strawberry you’d probably have trouble guessing the flavor or any flavor at all. However, the only ingredients were reject strawberries, dates, chia seeds and lime extract. Other no sugar added jams often have fake sugar, or fruit juice mixed in so it’s a bit unfair to compare.
Solutions to problems that don’t exist
I’m having a little bit of fun here and I’m sure the standards are such that the food has to be edible and safe. But it’s just weird that the modern environmental movement often creates solutions for problems that were solved since the beginning of commerce; namely through prices.
If you told the CEO of Smuckers he could get away with putting animal grade ingredients into his food without any compromise in taste, safety, or sales, he would do it in a heart beat. The profit margin of food manufacturers is notoriously slim. If you think jam manufacturer’s are passing on perfectly good fruit because it looks funny just before being pulverized, you’re insane. Although I doubt the Smucker’s CEO would go out of his way to tell customers he’s using animal feed.
All manufacturing is like that. Because it’s an extremely competitive industry and if there is any use for any byproduct, it will be leveraged to drive up revenue. The alternative is not only forgone revenue, but paying someone to dispose of the waste.
Entire industries and trends begin because someone has a cheap or free ingredient. Consider cottonseed oil and the creation of Crisco:
Procter & Gamble began using the liquid form of cottonseed oil to further decrease the cost of the raw materials used to make soap. During that period in history, cottonseed oil was produced by cotton farming as a waste product that was discarded into the rivers. Although this oil was toxic to animals, Procter & Gamble still made it into cooking oil.
And note that this was in 1911, long before the modern environmental movement or hyper-optimized modern manufacturing. Their next best alternative was just dumping it in the river!
If upcycling takes off and demand outstrips supply, I could imagine a secondary process that beats up perfectly good food in order to get the designation. If that’s what it takes to sell $8 a jar jam, so be it.
It’s interesting that animal food is going the other way. High-end dog and cat food is often advertised as being “human grade”. I guess that’s the future we’re heading towards, where the only one’s eating human grade food are our pets.