For more than two decades, Jeni Britton’s life has revolved around ice cream. The brand she started as a 22-year-old art student, Jeni’s Ice Cream, now sells in 80 scoop shops and 12,500 retailers, with an annual revenue of more than $125 million.
But Britton has spent the last few years on something new: turning food scraps that would otherwise be wasted into healthy snacks designed to help people eat more fiber. The new company, called Floura, launched its first product today, a “Fruit Crush” bar in five flavors that each have 13 grams of fiber from 12 different plants.
It started when she researched her own health issues. “I had been so focused on this singular thing for so long that I think I wasn’t focused on my own health,” she says. She started to pay more attention to her diet and read about the fiber gap—the fact that around 95% of Americans don’t eat the recommended daily target of 25 grams a day of fiber for women, or 38 grams for men.
A high-fiber diet is linked to everything from a reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes to a reduction in anxiety and depression. Fiber feeds the gut microbiome—the trillions of microbes in your intestinal tract that play an important role in overall health. But it tends to get less attention in diets than protein or carbs.
At first, Britton wasn’t planning to start a business. But on a visit to a produce processing plant while helping an entrepreneur with a different project, she noticed the huge volume of food scraps that the plant created. She’d recently read an article about the micronutrients in watermelon rinds; at the plant, she watched as workers cut watermelons with machetes, leaving behind huge piles of rinds that would be wasted.
“I was like, wait a second, maybe an ice cream maker is the right one to make this taste good,” she says. “Maybe we should just play with these ingredients.”
The produce company, F&S Fresh Produce, was interested in finding a new use for its food scraps. Inside sprawling facilities, the company chops up fruit and vegetables for stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joes. The food scraps don’t go to landfills, but they’re spread on fields where they release greenhouse gas emissions as they decompose.
The company was willing to give Britton and her business partner space in its New Jersey plant, and they started to experiment. They tested making a chocolate cake made from the trimmings of around 20 different fruits and vegetables, from cantaloupe to broccoli. “It was one of the best chocolate cakes I’ve ever had, and I have a high standard for that,” Britton says.
Still, she knew that she wanted to make a product that people could eat every day. In a healthy diet for your microbiome, you’d eat 30 different plants a week; since most people struggle to do that even if they’re motivated, Britton decided to make snack bars that could serve as a supplement. (One of the new bars can satisfy 40% of that weekly recommendation.)
Through a process of trial and error, she and her partners figured out how to turn trimmings, from apple cores to mango skins, into usable ingredients. The watermelon rind, for example, is fermented, which helps make it more nutritious, and then ground up into a flour. They discovered a way to process apple cores without the seeds, turning the core into a paste that becomes the base of the bars.
“You have a hypothesis and you get out and try stuff,” Britton says. “That’s what’s cool about having this facility and these partners where we could just play and learn how to do it.” The company will likely later expand to also work with the produce plant’s facilities on the West Coast, and eventually other partners.
The flavors take some inspiration from the ice cream company—one bar, for example, is a blend of brambleberry and lavender, riffing on Jeni’s brambleberry ice cream. (The bars smell delicious, like fruit, and have a chewy texture.) The recipes, developed along with functional food researchers at Ohio State University, don’t have added sugar, stabilizers, emulsifiers, or other ingredients that could have a negative impact on the microbiome.
The company aims to eventually upcycle 100 million pounds of trimmings each year. Britton hopes to inspire other food brands to make use of similar ingredients. If 10% of commercial food companies adopted the same goal, she says, it could help avoid 6 million tons of CO2 emissions each year.
