Reducing Food Waste: Dr Tom Simmons Of The Supplant Company On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste
It’s about the journey as much as the destination. I used to think it was all about getting to a certain milestone. But I’ve learned that the path is not always predictable, and if you don’t enjoy the process, you’re going to be unhappy. I learned a lot of about this working with Chef Thomas Keller.
It has been estimated that each year, more than 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to more than $160 billion worth of food thrown away each year. At the same time, in many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. The waste of food is not only a waste of money and bad for the environment, but it is also making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.
Authority Magazine started a new series called “How Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies and Food Companies Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste.” In this interview series, we are talking to leaders and principals of Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies, Food Companies, and any business or nonprofit that is helping to eliminate food waste, about the initiatives they are taking to eliminate or reduce food waste.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Tom Simmons.
Dr. Tom Simmons is the CEO and founder of The Supplant Company, a revolutionary new company that upcycles unused agricultural fiber into sugars that have half the calories of refined sugar, a lower glycemic response, and are probiotic. Simmons holds a Ph.D. in plant science from the University of Edinburgh, and is the inventor of a patented enzymatic process that transforms plant fiber into usable sugars. He began The Supplant Company in 2018 with funding from Y Combinator and the endorsement of Michelin-starred chef Thomas Keller, and has now raised more than $27 million towards developing the Supplant line of sugars from fiber products.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
Sure, I grew up in the UK, and while I always enjoyed science and science fiction as a child, it wasn’t until I was an adult that I started becoming interested in plant science, kind of unexpectedly to be honest, but then I found that I loved it pretty quickly.
The deeper into plant science I went, the more I realized that there was this big disconnect between plant science, and food science, and that a lot of the most important research in plant science wasn’t being commercialized into food products — things that people actually eat.
That’s what led me to start The Supplant Company, where we discovered a way to convert unused or low-value agricultural products into sugars from fiber — our new ingredient is a blend of plant sugar, but with the nutritional properties of the fiber.
In terms of so-called plant “waste” most agricultural crops only use 50% or less of the actual plant for food, and the rest is either ploughed under, burned, or turned into feed or bedding for animals.
This is an enormous amount of healthy, usable fiber that never makes it into the food system — even though we’re all fiber deficient. Only 5% of people in America get enough fiber in their diet, for example.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company or organization?
It was probably the moment when Ruben Tadmor reached out to Anna Bolz, who is the pastry chef at Per Se, one Thomas Keller’s Michelin-starred restaurants in New York. We wanted to get her feedback on how we could use our new “sugars from fiber” in the kitchen, and incorporate it into the recipes of top chefs. She was really interested, and introduced us directly to Chef Thomas Keller. He was intrigued too, and we started collaborating on new versions of his time-tested recipes for ice cream, chocolate, and cookies — using sugars from fiber.
This has been an enormously pivotal partnership for us. We actually launched the company from an ice cream truck in front of his Bouchon Bakery in Napa Valley, and gave out ice cream, cookies, and chocolate to passersby. They loved them.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I’m not sure it’s that funny, or even a mistake per se, but I did initially think that I would almost certainly be a professor in academia and helping solve plant science problems from there.
I’d been working in academia for years and that was how I expected my career path to continue.
But that’s the thing about entrepreneurship, things can change quickly, and as I went deeper into plant science, and saw the possibilities to solve some pretty big problems through commercialization, I knew that I had to pivot, and go into business.
And that’s how I ended up creating The Supplant Company, which is focused on solving “the sugar problem,” which is responsible for a broad range of really challenging health problems — from diabetes to obesity to hypertension, and the plant waste problem, which contributes to biodiversity and nature loss in very real ways.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
To me, leadership is having the courage to take a leap, and to inspire others who are leaping with you. When I started my company, I’d run out of funding, and was living on a shoestring. But I had faith in my idea, and registered a patent for the enzymatic process that would eventually become the heart of the Supplant Company’s intellectual property. By making that happen, I was able to make something real, and inspire those around me to get on board with something they might have otherwise hesitated about.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“There is no failure except in no longer trying” is one that resonates a lot for me. It makes me think of the time back in 2017 when I’d finally had a major breakthrough, after two and a half years of research on using fibers and carbohydrates to make sugars. It was the same time that my research fellowship funding ran out, and I was broke. We had no money left. If I’d stopped trying, we wouldn’t have got to where we are today.
The most critical thing in entrepreneurship and building impactful businesses is to just keep going.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. What exactly are we talking about when we refer to food waste?
In the case of what we do, we’re actually upcycling the fibrous material that remains after food plants are harvested. So, for example, when rice is grown, half of the plant becomes the grains that we eat, and the other half is unused. With many food plants, like corn and wheat, the amount of plant material left over after harvest is even more than the amount of food that we get from them. With plants like sugarcane, only about 20% of the whole plant ends up becoming refined sugar. Some of it gets used for animal bedding or feed, and some gets ploughed under, or burned, which contributes to greenhouse gases. Still, all of that extra material contains beneficial fiber that we convert to sugar.
So we challenge the word “waste” to some extent because we’re just taking something that isn’t used for anything high value, and converting it to something that has a lot of value for humans, and the planet.
Can you help articulate a few of the main causes of food waste?
When food goes uneaten, it usually ends up in landfills, having taken enormous energy and labor to grow, transport, and refrigerate throughout its life. That’s wasteful on a number of different levels, so it’s no wonder that household and retail food waste contributes as much as 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Even so, it’s just part of the equation. The other is that unused agricultural fiber, that never makes it into the food system for human consumption. There is more of this type of plant fiber on earth than the total amount of cane sugar, starch, flour and vegetable oil combined.
For example, every ton of corn grain harvested results in another ton of leftover husks, leaves, and stalk. And corn is one of the most efficiently harvested crops, where the least amount of plant fiber is wasted.
What are a few of the obstacles that companies and organizations face when it comes to distributing extra or excess food? What can be done to overcome those barriers?
Agriculture necessarily creates leftover fiber — you can’t grow corn without the cob or the stalk. So for all the corn we grow, we create “waste,” and it’s the same for every other agricultural plant. Dealing with all that waste is the challenge, because burning it contributes carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and there’s only so much you can do to compost it all. But if we can transform it into sugars from fiber, that agricultural land becomes at least twice as productive, and we have not only reduced waste but created more food from what’s there.
Can you describe a few of the ways that you or your organization are helping to reduce food waste?
We use Supplant’s patented enzymatic process to upcycle agricultural by-products, which lets each hectare of agricultural land be 50 percent or more productive. Plant fiber is actually the most abundant source of sugars in the natural world. Using upcycled plant fiber for products like sugars from fiber increases the yield of every existing acre. This means more forests could potentially remain standing, and storing greenhouse gases, rather than releasing them into the atmosphere, and it even reduces the environmental impact of agriculture on marine ecosystems, which is surprising to some.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help address the root of this problem?
First, we need to pay attention to the impact that agriculture is having on the planet. Practices like deforestation in the service of creating more agricultural land just create more problems, because it destroys habitat for sensitive species, and contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere — because many forests are burnt to create fields for crops.
Next, we need to look at how agricultural waste is contributing to greenhouse gases, and consider ways to reduce that by upcycling the material and getting the most out of each acre of farmland.
Finally, we need to provide more support for people who are wanting to eat healthier diets. Foods made with sugars from fiber create a much lower glycemic response in the body because our sugars, made from unused plant fiber, also help balance blood sugar levels. Food that contains higher amounts of fiber is also associated with better gut health and even weight loss.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
Here are three:
First: It’s about the journey as much as the destination. I used to think it was all about getting to a certain milestone. But I’ve learned that the path is not always predictable, and if you don’t enjoy the process, you’re going to be unhappy. I learned a lot of about this working with Chef Thomas Keller.
Second: You have to commit to your idea, and once you’ve committed, everything else falls into place. That was a piece of knowledge I could’ve used in my years of research into carbohydrates and plant science. Once we committed to helping solve the sugar problem, things really started coming together.
Third: You can’t solve the world’s problems from behind a podium. When I first went into university, I had every intention of becoming a professor. I thought that was how you did it — by having great ideas that other people might carry out. I learned that you can have far greater impact by taking matters into your own hands. When I started my own company, that became especially clear.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food waste? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
We’re really inspired by Ellen MacArthur and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Their work to advance the “circular economy” which is the idea of an economy where nothing gets wasted, where every output becomes an input into another process, is central to what we’re trying to do here at The Supplant Company. We’re enormously grateful for their pioneering work in this area.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I’d like to see more equal distribution of nutrition. Many people in the world are undernourished, and others have enough calories, but are unhealthy. Our whole food system needs to change to get people the kind of nutrition they need to lead long, healthy, fulfilling lives.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Definitely Sir David Attenborough. We’re incredibly inspired by his work on biodiversity protection, and his tireless lifelong advocacy for nature. We would be absolutely thrilled to meet him, to thank him, and to share our work with him.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
