What building an upcycled food category taught me about creating markets, overcoming commercial barriers, and turning individual successes into systemic change. At How to Web in Bucharest earlier this month, someone asked me what I wish I'd been told before starting TransFoodMission. I answered before I could dress it up: that the market doesn't exist until someone pays for it. For the first few years, I was convinced a good enough argument would do the job. Less waste, bette

We spent a week in Denmark as part of the BIONetZero programme, meeting innovators working across biotechnology, food and the circular bioeconomy. Here are some of the questions, ideas and conversations we brought home with us, and what they made us think about the future of upcycled food.

Upcycled food is quietly becoming a real business, not just a feel-good label. You've probably seen "upcycled" stamped on clothes or furniture and filed it under sustainability buzzword. Fair enough. But here's the two-minute version of what it means for food, and why bigger players are starting to take it seriously. The short definition Upcycled food takes ingredients that would otherwise never reach a human plate (think spent grain from brewing, fruit pulp from juicing, c

Most retailers approach upcycled food the same way they approach every other sustainability initiative: launch a private label, slap on a green label, and hope consumers notice. It rarely works, and when it doesn't, "upcycled" gets quietly filed away as a niche that didn't pan out. The issue was never the concept. It was the order of operations. The system is broken, and retailers are at the centre of it Food loss and waste are responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas e

Rohlik and TransFoodMission built something that didn't exist anywhere else in Europe: a dedicated retail category just for upcycled food. Not a scattered handful of "eco" products buried across the store: one shelf, one destination, built specifically so consumers didn't have to hunt for sustainable choices. It worked. Since launch, the category has repurposed 150 tonnes of surplus food and prevented 578 tonnes of CO₂ emissions across all five markets it’s working with. The