ReGrained : Bay Area Company Upcycles Craft Brewing’s Spent Grain Waste into Granola Snacks
It takes a pound of grain to make a six-pack of beer. That doesn’t sound like much, until you consider that billions of pounds of grain a day go to feed the booming craft beer brewing industry in the United States, ultimately creating that much “spent” grain—most of it considered food waste.
“Two new breweries open a day in the United States,” according to Dan Kurzrock, co-founder and chief grain officer of ReGrained. In the Bay Area alone, there are 162 craft breweries cycling through tons of grain each brewing day. Dan’s San Francisco–based company’s mission is rescuing and “upcycling” the spent grain, returning it into the food ecosystem, producing tasty granola bars and envisioning so much more.
What is food “upcycling?” At its core, upcycling is reusing food by-products or food waste to create new products that benefit consumers. For ReGrained founders Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, upcycling makes it possible “to have your beer and eat it too!”
Dan took up home brewing almost a decade ago as a student at UCLA, and says he became obsessed with the residual grain from each batch of beer he brewed. He was struck that “It looked, smelled and tasted like hot cereal.” With a little research, Dan and college brewing partner Jordan Schwartz discovered that some microbreweries around the country were making bread from the spent grain. So they decided to follow suit.
The pair started by selling their beer-based baked goods at farmers markets with a modest goal of making enough to recover the costs of their brewing. But with some success, the self-proclaimed “recreational entrepreneurs” soon decided to pursue a loftier mission and recognized the spent grain as a super grain. What makes it super? When sugar is processed out of beer-making grain in the fermentation process of brewing, what’s left is a raw nutritious ingredient. ReGrained describes it as “optimal protein, prebiotic fiber, a whole bunch of micronutrients, packing incredible flavor, and at the same time, environmental regenerative impact.”
Dan and Jordan launched their commercial venture in 2012 with a little crowd-funding and “Eat Beer” as their motto and T-shirt mantra. Having assessed the endless possibilities for super-grain flour products (bread, crackers, cookies, etc.), they decided to focus their initial products on granola bars. They began shipping their first branded products in 2013. Honey Cinnamon IPA Immunity, Coffee Chocolate Stout Energy and Blueberry Sunflower Saison Antioxidant bars are available via a growing retail network, including community markets in the Peninsula and South Bay.
Along the way, the company developed a patent-pending technology working with the USDA Agriculture Research Service for processing its upcycled used beer-making grains into the SuperGrain+ flour used in its products and soon by other food companies. As staunch advocates for food waste recovery, Dan sees the company’s trailblazing as simply following a natural path. “We’re trying to do what whey did for cheese, what broth did for bones, what sausage did for previously overlooked cuts of meat.” What’s next? We hear spaghetti-style pasta and savory chips, a renewed take on nutrient-rich, grain-based foods, crafted to be delightfully re-licious.
