ReGrained's Recent Partnerships & New Product Launches with Daniel Kurzrock

Hello, and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Today, we have Chief Grain Officer Daniel Kurzrock. Welcome back, Dan.

Thanks, Justine. Great to be with you again, and to be on the show.

Yeah, I'm so excited to have you back and to hear what's going on at ReGrained. I know there's lots of new news, and I just want to start for those viewers and listeners that maybe haven't met you before. Just gives you an opportunity to maybe reintroduce yourself so that those folks can get to know you. And then we can really tap into and hear what's going on at ReGrained.

That sounds great. Hi, everybody. I'm Dan, I am the Co-Founder and Chief Grain Officer of ReGrained. If you've heard of ReGrained before, you might know us for our consumer products. We've released a line of nutrition bars and savory snacks, these chips most recently. But really, what ReGrained is doing behind the sensors, we've developed a platform for upcycled ingredients. So we are an official partner of the USDA. And together, we developed patented technology, which is we developed the technology and then we patented it for unlocking these really interesting nutritious food supply chains that have kind of been hiding in plain sight, like the grain from brewing beer, which was an opportunity I stumbled upon as an underage homebrewer many moons ago, which we talked about, I think, in the last episode. And what we really specialize in doing is working with other food businesses on helping them create new products that tap into this upcycled food opportunity from bakery. So think breads, cookies, brownies, to pastas, to sauces, even beverages and ice cream, there's a lot of different ways that our ingredients can be used. And what we're obsessed with doing is finding the best tasting ones that deliver on nutrition and sustainability for customers, humans, and ultimately the world. And we do this with a really keen eye on the triple bottom line. So as a business, we are a for profit business, but we care a lot about impact, and about every decision that we make being something that's thoughtfully considered around, okay, what is this doing for the planet and people and so like our mission, and we're sort of at the core of all that good stuff. And what we're here to do is to help improve the way that we value resources that support all life, and ultimately to better align the food we eat with the planet and people we love. So it's great to be a part of a community doing this. It's something that's not only much more effectively accomplished together, but it's also a heck of a lot more fun, and been great getting to know you over the years, Justine, and thanks for having me on.

Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. It's much more fun to do it together as well. Much more effective and efficient and collaborative. So since we last spoke, I know that there's been so much going on at ReGrained. I think since we last spoke, you've also had a new facility too. Am I right?

Yeah. So we got this facility in Berkeley. It's kind of the first deployment of our technology that I was talking about. I was dedicated to primarily processing grain from breweries into our value added ingredients. We're also applying that same process to other beverages and their byproducts. It could be co products, so think plant based milks, think juice. I mean, we last spoke, we were just having a laugh about this before you hit record on Christmas Eve. So I guess that anything that's happened in 2021 is new. A few other highlights, we launched a product with an edible bakeable cookie dough company called Dope launched in April and ended up being one of their best selling flavors. It's going to become a permanent part of their lineup soon. It's a brownie flavored cookie dough, so they'd like me to say that that's legit. That's legit cookie dough. Super delicious and decadent. Really proud of that product, how the launch went and the ongoing collaboration that we have with them. We also have a pasta product that's actually going to be launching that hasn't launched yet, which will be launched at the end of this month and the beginning of next month with semolina pasta. We can talk more about that. There's some news around the Upcycled Food Association, which were a founding member of, and ReGained was among the first ingredients in the world ever to be certified as being upcycled, which is super exciting. Because it not only adds a layer of kind of validation and transparency around what upcycling is for the end customer, but it also enables us in our platform of helping other companies develop upcycle food products. We now have this upcycled ingredient and more to come ingredients that they can use as part of their ingredient innovation. And then behind the scenes, there's really a lot of Justine that I wish I could talk about more that we're doing with some of the bigger food companies out there. With product development, we've got a large project with a bakery that's going to be able to talk more about in 2022. I can talk about, I mentioned ice cream at the top of the show. Bi-Rite Creamery launched their second flavor that uses grain. And it's a vegan ice cream flavor that is a banana bread. I love the layers of food waste innovation in this. Because banana bread, as many of us know, is a great way, probably the best way to use brown bananas. Like when you make bread, you're not supposed to use yellow bananas, you're supposed to use bananas that are soft and brown. And that wood comes out much better when you do it like that. And so what I did is they took, and for those of you who aren't from the Bay Area, it's kind of an institution around here. They have two grocery stores that sell not only beautiful produce, but really amazing products of all kinds. And they also have a Creamery that is like, you've got to wait in a 45 minute line a lot of times to get there because it's just so popular. They were one of the groups that first popularized salted caramel ice cream flavor. So they're always on the leading edge of ice cream, which is I think one of the best things to be on the leading edge of. So this vegan flavor, it's like banana bread flavor. They actually took bananas from their market, roasted them and paired it with ReGrained SuperGrain+ to have like this bass note of a bready, multi bass note to it, and did it in a way that uses no animal dairy. So it's vegan, and it's this really delicious take on a frozen treat that I had before. It's like a frozen banana bread, it's super yummy.

It probably, I mean, I'm not going in a completely different direction, but that about the food loss. They would have thrown out these bananas, and then they would have had food loss. So now, they're taking something that they would have wasted or had. And now, they're thinking.

Yeah. That's sort of like value added processing, kind of the dorky way to describe taking, if you're in a grocery store taking that, it's like, let's use another example from inside of a grocery store. That's how things used to happen everywhere, but we've kind of lost sight of that as everything's gotten more consolidated and more efficient for the bottom line, but less efficient for food utilization. If you think of it like chicken, raw chicken that's being sold, that's maybe reproaching its code in a store, a deli can roast that versus fried chicken. Whatever they don't sell from the fried chicken, they can then make chicken salad. Like common sense kitchen wisdom, using the bananas to make something with that. It'd be amazing if in the near future, we kind of return to what was old and new again. We see more grocery stores that are like, maybe they're creating juice, there's a huge problem with produce. At an individual store, there's some challenges with some of these huge conglomerates and how they operate at scale. But I think by right it has been, either there's just an amazing example of a grocery store that has really brought the best of the actual wisdom of how to use everything up into a modern capacity. I've always been really impressed and a huge fan of their work as an organization.

And I think it really models or connects with your value system of using upcycled products and using their own, and it just really connects really well right into your upcycled products. It takes their own so they have less food loss or less food waste, and creates a whole new innovative product.

Yeah, I can't wait to see what they come up with next. And this pasta that's launching with semolina pasta in a month is also a really fun nod to a historical story. So this semolina pasta is the base of Los Angeles for a while. I think it might still be one of the only actual pasta, dry pasta manufacturers that make fresh pasta for restaurants, really high end excellent pasta. The style is called astros upreti, which is a shape that most folks aren't that familiar with. They're like little scrolls. And historically, they were actually made using whatever was not just the traditional pasta, but they'd actually mix in like days old bread and potatoes, or whatever happened to be around. And this is the style of pasta, I guess actually it was a medium for traditional upcycling, if you will. And so this collaboration between us is kind of fun again, just like a modern twist on this idea of, hey, let's remember how valuable food is in our resources and put it to all the best use for creating delicious food to feed people.

Yeah. It's exciting to see all the ways that we're going back in some ways to the old ways of doing things, what's new is old and so on and so forth. So you have so many exciting things happening. I feel like we've lived a full year in the last six months.

Oh, yeah. That's how I feel every week.

So what do you have coming up for the rest of this coming year?

We've got a few of our own products. So that collaboration, the pasta that'll be launching. We have a line of consumer products, they'll be a little vague about it actually haven't announced it yet. But it's very different from anything we've done before. It's designed to be innovative in a few ways. One, we're going to show a really wide range of applications for ingredients from savory to sweet and one product line. And we're also not going for the first time, we're actually not going to put this product in through traditional kind of brick and mortar retail. We're doing limited releases online only, we'll be sure to tell you when that comes through. And the ideas that we can find certain product applications that we can do these more agile runs where we can show. Because for us, what we care about is showing all the different ways that our product can be used, how delicious it can be in so many different applications and really shifting people's perceptions about, oh, it could just be used in bars, or just chips are. So how do we show a much broader bread, I guess if you will of product applications in a way that's still educating the everyday shopper as to what this new ingredient is and how it can be used that ultimately when our various longer term kind of B2B partnerships come to fruition, many of which are coming soon, it'll mean something to folks. They'll be like, oh, yeah, I remember trying that as a X, Y, and Z product. Of course, it looks like ReGrained was involved with this product that launched, it's gonna be great. So yeah, that's pretty exciting about what we should belaunching. That probably, by the end of August is our estimated timeline there.

When you say online, is it just going to be on the ReGrained site? Or will it be at other places online?

Yeah. For certain products, we'll have certain channel partners. So they'll also sell the product, but we're not going to put it through traditional distribution. We pursued this hybrid approach for a while where we were using, we built this consumer brand making packaged foods as a way to educate people about the ingredient. The theory and the strategy behind that I think is fairly sound, although it certainly stretches and organizations tend to do both that, added ingredient business. But what's been tough is in the actual retail environment, a lot of people don't realize this, there's distributors that are involved, and there's a whole venture in and of itself, which anyone who knows anything about the food business is sitting there thinking like, before you got into it. But what we've realized is that for us, as much as it would be amazing to have our products are branded every store in America or whatever, really, when you think about us as an ingredient platform, we want other companies who are already doing that to be using our ingredients or products, we can still build the consumer market, we can still show a broad range of applications without the complexity that being in a traditional retail environment. I'm not saying that we'll never do it again in the future. But for the time being, we've realized that we can be more effective by focusing our efforts on showing a much broader range of applications without focusing as much as--

Are you thinking of big companies using this as they build out their products for the supermarket? Or are you thinking of chefs as they cook in hotels and restaurants? Or do you think about both?

Both, honestly. The world of food service and restaurant kind of menu innovation is one that we are huge fans of, and we're beginning to do quite a bit of activity around until COVID hit and really shut down, a lot of that work from happening. And so now that things are coming back online, we really do look forward to working with more chefs with our various food service groups on showing some of the devices that can be used. One of my favorite examples would be pizza crust. ReGrained can be used to make an amazing piece of crust or even different pizza, flatbreads and various desserts. There's a lot of opportunity in that world that we're now ramping back up, and so it's definitely a focus as well.

That's exciting. I feel like there's a lot of opportunity in there, and I can't wait to see ReGained all over the place on menus, powered by ReGrained. You have a tagline, what is it?

We have like a powered by upcycled soup, eat up is our tagline. But we do have like our Intel Inside, or Gore-Tex, Vibram, these other brands that are known for imparting their quality onto the products that they are a part of so that's kind of similar to how people look at our products. It's not a filler ingredient. It's an integral component of that product. It is the hero ingredient, it really defines a lot of the better differences of that product compared to the competitive set. Yeah, that's the seal that we hope on front of a pack and every other grocery store.

Yeah, I was excited when I recently saw your product. When I was out in Napa, I was super excited to see it.

I love to hear that.

I was really excited. They're offering me different flavors. I was showing my friends, and I was like, okay, so which one should we try?

Which one did you try?

To be honest, I don't remember. But I remember it was like, okay, there's this one and this one. And I tried them all before, because we've done taste tests in the house. And I've had Tim try them all, and Tim loves them all. And he likes them for the reese's too, except that they're not easy to pack for reese's.

Mm hmm.

So he used to eat the bars for his reese. They were his reese's, but the other ones had too much. He doesn't like anything with air in them for the reese's.

Air is a key component of the puffing process. Yeah.

It was one with barbecue rather than that.

Texas pit barbecue. I love that flavor.

And then there was another one with salt.

Yeah, smoke sea salt and pepper. So we couldn't just have normal. Let's be normal about the flavors we launched. We had the true ReGrained way. So we've got the, this is for the lineup for those who are listening or maybe not familiar with our lineup of puft chips, the product that we launched in 2020. And that we're offering for at most of the balance of this year before we start focusing on other things, we had a Mexican street corn flavor.

For those that know that don't know, I lived in Mexico City for two years. Yeah, sent that one, that was the first one I opened. I was like, don't touch that. That one's mom.

Yeah, that's like a killer flavor. It's been our best seller the entire time. We had that product aligned and it was online, and the food was the first one to sell out. We also have an urban garden which is like a veggie bowl in a chip.

I have that one, it was a negotiation. I wanted this one. I had to give something up.

They make great kinds of healthy gluten alternatives or as like a topper to soup. It's a really fun product idea. It's funny in retrospect, those were already introducing this kind of crazy new idea for people of upcycling. Shouldn't we just maybe make the flavors normal? But where's the fun in that?

For the listeners that don't know, can you go over the flavors again?

Yeah. So there's smoked sea salt and pepper, smoked salt and cracked black pepper. There's an urban garden. There is aged sharp cheddar, which also has some parm and some blue cheese. And it's got kind of funky, it's almost actually got the flavor profile of a Green Bay. So it's like a really sharp kind of very adult cheese. And then there's the--

Almost.

Why probably should have just done that, orange cheese. But again, where's the fun in that? Texas pit barbecue, which is like, so for those of you who are barbecue aficionados, there's a bunch of different regional barbecues, some are more sauce based. In Texas, it's more of a slow cooked, like smoked meats like that brisket with a spice rub without any sweetness. So that's that one. And then while we are talking about it, yeah, Mexican street corn would be the--

So if anyone wanted to go get these, where would they go find these?

Yeah. There are a lot, you can find them online for sure. We're in a region where Kroger Fred Meyer sets up in the northwest a few hundred stores, markets, and places like small markets, Bi-Rite. We also do, they're available through services like snack magic, which does like office snacking, Thrive Market carries them. So they're a bunch of different ways to get them going. Well, they're not gonna be around forever. Someone will bring them back.

Okay. Well, we hope to carry them in the pantry when we launch it soon before they're not around.

Yeah, yeah. The path you could plug for the pantry. Excited about that too.

So that's gonna be launching soon. But in the meantime, Dan, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so glad that we got to get a little update on what you guys are doing. It's really exciting. I just wanted to say for those people listening, the Upcycled Association, or I just want to ask you to maybe just let people listen or watch if you can maybe just talk to the Upcycled Association so that listeners that are watching this or listening know what we're talking about. So it gives them an opportunity to maybe learn more, or we can give them a place to go to get more information.

Yeah, for sure. So the Upcycled Food Association is what we're talking about as an industry nonprofit. So it's a member driven nonprofit organization that started with less than 10 companies in the Bay Area in a room with ReGrained, Perfect Foods, TBJ Gourmet, the list goes on. There's this kind of tight knit group that we came together with. Today, we're all doing upcycling, let's create a more of a center of gravity for this. And so now, there's almost 200 members. And I was saying, the center of gravity for the Upcycled Food, the Upcycled Food Movement, it's much bigger than ReGrained or any of the individual companies that are members of it. If you've heard of an Upcycled Food company from Martiark Foods, to Pulp Pantry, gosh, there's so many revealed tea, there's just a lot happening in the Upcycled Food where many of these kinds of, the majority of the upcycled companies now have joined this association. And we, as an association, develop the definition of upcycled foods. There's now a certification standard that's administered by the Association that's open for enrollment. There's all things, all things upcycled. You can check out upcycledfood.org, check out the upcycle food Association and all the great work that the association is doing and its member companies.

We also interviewed Tyler.

Tyler from?

Upcycled. So for those listening--

Turner, Turner.

Turner, sorry, Turner. So for those of you that want to learn more about the Upcycled Association, you can catch the episode of Essential Ingredients with Turner as well. He talks a lot about it. He tells you a little bit about the mission, how to get involved and some of the benefits, all about the association. So I thought that, just gives you an opportunity to learn more about that. So Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for giving us an update. Keep us posted on how things progress because I'm always interested. And as always, you guys are just doing such great work both for the world, the planet. I'm always excited to share it with our audience, so thanks so much for joining us.

Outstanding. Thank you Justine. Thanks, everyone for listening.

Yeah, thanks guys for listening. As you always do, we're here every Tuesday, and there's a new episode every week. To find out more about this episode of Essential Ingredients and access show notes, check out NextGenChef and choose podcast in the menu bar. If you like this episode, head to iTunes or NextGenChef's YouTube channel to subscribe. Learn more about NextGenChef, the platform that powers this podcast by checking out our website or visit us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at NextGenChef. You can also check out my Instagram at Justine_Reichman. If you have thoughts about this episode or future episode ideas, leave us a comment at NextGenChef's YouTube channel or drop an email at team@nextgenchef.com. Thanks for joining us.