29/05/2025
In our last Crowd Sauce post, we shared how our eco-chef Chris experimented with surplus produce from the market, creating pantry ingredients and testing recipes to transform food that would’ve gone to waste into something delicious.
By this stage, we’d discovered:
✔️ There was plenty of surplus produce
✔️ With some kitchen alchemy, we could turn 97% of it into something tasty
Next, we had to work out which rescued produce to focus on for potential retail products—recipes that ticked a few key boxes:
✔️A steady supply of the ingredient
✔️Something we knew (or hoped!) customers would love
✔️Easy to preserve and store
This came with challenges. Some produce arrived in gluts (like 300+ kg of sweet potato in a single week), while others were highly seasonal or came in small, one-off batches. Thankfully, some “hero” ingredients, like bananas, bread, and lettuce, came in regularly, making it possible to develop products like Banana ketchup, Bread Pasta, and Lettuce Furikake (a savoury seasoning usually made with seaweed).
For large gluts, our eco chefs preserved produce by freezing, fermenting, dehydrating, or pickling, creating options for use across multiple recipes. For smaller batches, we cooked, fermented or dried ingredients to become flavour-packed pantry staples or seasonings.
We learnt a lot during this phase. With limited storage space, we became more strategic in deciding what to preserve and started thinking creatively about how to redirect excess produce we couldn’t process, like sending it to restaurants or using it in whole form.
In our next post, we’ll share which circular retail products customers loved the most, and which ones are still a work in progress.
