Giving Compass' Take:

• Treasure8 has co-developed new machinery with the USDA to become a connector between different players in the food waste space, reports Food Tank.

• Will this invention — which turns ugly fruits and vegetables into chips — be a game-changer? Are there ways to scale such technology to nations with food security issues?

• Here are five more ways to dramatically reduce food waste.

In the United States, up to 40 percent of food produced for consumer consumption becomes waste between field and fork. Timothy Childs co-founded Treasure8 to address this challenge. The company’s ethos, according to Timothy, is based on the idea that, “We have to move as fast as we can and as big as we can because there is no time to waste. Period. To do so, we need to look at the entire supply chain and create and implement innovative end-to-end solutions to make change on a global level.”

Based on Treasure Island in San Francisco, Treasure8 begins with leftover or ugly fruits and vegetables from farmers’ fields and unwanted produce from food processing facilities. These normally become waste, but Treasure8 diverts some of them and turns them into nutrient-dense chips. “We can take these very large waste streams and we can upcycle them into safe, tasty, healthy products and ingredients that can work at large scale distribution. We believe we’ve cracked the code on how to do this.” Childs says.

This is the groundwork that Childs believes can disrupt and evolve the food system. By creating new machinery,  recipes, and relationships to systematically repurpose food waste, he says, Treasure8 is aiming to optimize global food supply chains.

Read the full article on repurposing food waste by Maddie Seibert at Food Tank