This startup is turning leftover beer into delicious snacks

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=343025852&src=id">Malachy666</a>/Shutterstock Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by

oligarchs. Sign up for the free _Mother Jones Daily_. When you’re looking for dinner ingredients at the supermarket, you probably wince at the bruised pears, skip over those oddly shaped

carrots, and reach past ugly red peppers. This preference for pretty produce means the ugly fruits and vegetables are tossed out, filling landfills with otherwise nutritious food. A study

found that in 2010, more than 11 million pounds of food from supermarkets and restaurants went uneaten. REDUCING FOOD WASTE IS THE LATEST PUBLIC-SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT CHOSEN BY THE AD

COUNCIL. Adcouncil.org Food waste—from grocery stores, restaurants, and households across the country—is becoming a buzzword, and not just for foodies. It’s estimated that 40 percent of the

food in the United States won’t end up in people’s stomachs, costing Americans $165 billion a year. The Ad Council (the same group that came up with the Crash Test Dummies for wearing

seatbelts and Smokey Bear for wildfire prevention) just rolled out “Save the Food” as its latest public-service campaign. And earlier this month, celebrity chefs met in Washington to speak

with Congress about the Food Recovery Act—legislation that aims to curb food waste from farms and restaurants. Meanwhile, crafty entrepreneurs are repurposing and repackaging leftover

materials into new products. A recent event in the Bay Area gave me insight into what some techies are doing, making, and growing to fight food waste. That six-pack of IPA you enjoyed on

Friday night generated about a pound of waste in its making. After brewers soaked barley (or sometimes other grains) in hot water and extracted the liquid to make beer, they’re left with a

lot of spent grain on their hands. Most rural breweries, like Northern California’s Lagunitas or Sierra Nevada, haul the byproduct to nearby farms, which feed the grain to their animals.

Others recycle it as compost. But for smaller breweries in urban areas, miles away from hungry pigs, figuring out what to do with the leftovers isn’t always easy. The company Regrained turns

that spent grain into snack bars. At a Meetup event in the Mission district of San Francisco, curious eaters lined up around the company’s booth, intrigued by the displayed logo “Eat Your

Beer.” Cameron Schwartz, a tall man wearing a T-shirt with the same words, explained how his brother and buddies—all home-brewers—decided to open a business that takes beer byproducts and

bakes them into bars, costing $2.50 a pop and sold at local grocery stores. So far, ReGrained has worked with three breweries in the Bay Area.  EAT YOUR BEER. REGRAINED TAKES BREWERIES’

LEFTOVER GRAIN AND TURNS IT INTO SNACKS. Jenny Luna “It’s been really nice working with ReGrained to see an actual, viable product from something we were essentially throwing away,” said

Phil Meeker of Triple Voodoo Brewery in a video from the ReGrained website.  ReGrained’s founders say they want to eventually bake cookies, cereals, and chips with the spent grains. And to

everyone wondering: No, you can’t get buzzed off that honey almond IPA or coffee chocolate stout bar.   A byproduct that ends up in landfills from America’s other favorite beverage? Soggy

coffee grounds. BTTR (Back to the Roots) Ventures, another company at the meetup, has gained notoriety for its products that start from coffee grounds (which are actually nutritious). Using

the mushy grounds as soil, BTTR Ventures harvests a variety of mushrooms and sells them at local farmers markets and grocery stores. The idea came to them from women doing something similar

in East Africa and South America. The company has expanded to sell garden-in-a-can cilantro and basil plants, stone ground cereal, and ready-to-grow garden kits. ALEKS STRUB OF IMPERFECT

HOLDS TWO APPLES THAT WERE DEEMED TOO UGLY TO BE SOLD AT SUPERMARKETS. Jenny Luna Next to BTTR Ventures’s stacked cans were wooden boxes brimming with smaller-than-average apples—all produce

that was deemed too ugly to sell in supermarkets. Imperfect buys oddly shaped produce from farmers who can’t sell it elsewhere, and then delivers it to members’ doorsteps, much like a

community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. (You may have heard about the company from a _National Geographic_ feature earlier this year.) Aleks Strub, Imperfect’s director of marketing,

held up a petite apple and an oblong one. “It’s a tiny apple or a big apple or an apple with just the tiniest scar,” she explained. “It’s perfectly edible and delicious but we are throwing

it away, whether it be in a landfill or to feed animals, but not to feed people.” Imperfect delivers over 2,000 boxes of this ugly produce each week, equating to about 15 tons of recovered

food. So are these innovative products the solution to fighting excess at a national scale? Probably not. The Environmental Protection Agency ranks different methods of reducing food waste

in an inverted pyramid graphic. The top and most important step is making sure it doesn’t happen in the first place. Next ranks feeding the hungry with any excess food. The practice of

reusing organic materials ranks toward the bottom—not the best way, but surely a step in the right direction to changing the statistics that the American family wastes between $1,365 to

$2,275 worth of food and beverages each year. As I browsed the innovative companies featured at the meetup, I wondered: With the packaging and production of cans for gardening, the plastic

wrap on the beer snack bars, and the marketing materials involved in starting a business, do these food waste fighters have the potential to create more waste than they salvage? To prevent

such a fate, Darby Hoover, a senior resource analyst at the National Resources Defense Council, encourages the companies to minimize wrappers and boxes wherever possible. “The common-sense

approach is rather than compare the packaging or product, it’s just follow general principles that minimize packaging at all,” she said. Though I’m betting someone will figure out how to

make spent-barley or coffee-ground wrappers next. Now that’s a concept I can get behind.