The Supplant Co. and its sweeteners aim to disrupt an overreliance on cane sugar by resusing fiber-rich plant remnants typically left to rot.
It’s hard to kick the sugar habit entirely, even when we know our lives can be much healthier without the dozen-plus teaspoons many of us consume daily in cookies, our coffee and sodas, and in most processed food we use for meal shortcuts.
What if we can rethink sugar? That’s what The Supplant Co., a food startup pushing initially into baking chocolate, snack chocolate and packaged cookies but looking for wider kitchen use, has done by grinding up the typically rejected portion of crops and plants. For the scientists and their team at The Supplant Co., their approach to sugar addresses a nutritional dilemma and aims to make a dent in the food waste challenge. — Dr. Tom Simmons Supplant has tapped the world’s most renewable resource: the fibrous portion of crops, such as stems, stalks, husks and cobs that may be ground into animal feed or animal bedding, but most often are left to decompose in the field or in the waste bins of food-processing plants.
“The only macronutrient that humans don’t get enough of without supplements is fiber,” Simmons said. “And yet at the same time, fiber is the most abundant thing produced by the food system and we just throw it away. Our whole food system is really sort of topsy turvy in a really strange way.” Corn, soybeans and other crops that feed animals and mostly make oils and syrups for human consumption require irrigation too, but far less than sugar-specific crops.Renewed talk of local, even hyper-local, food sourcing has only gained traction in recent years. What’s more, MarketWatch asked Simmons if the legacy of harvesting sugar, and similarly, palm oil for baking, in mostly formerly colonized parts of the world for Western consumption factors in the thought process behind his sourcing.
“All of a sudden, there’s a major supply issue around the production of this sort of base commodity [such as Ukraine’s wheat], crops that supply our food system,” he said. “Every nation has to some degree its own its own food supply. And this basic premise of upcycling food waste, the agricultural inefficiencies of side streams [or the leftovers from harvest], that’s a localized issue across every single nation [and] that can help ameliorate the supply-chain issues.