It all starts with beer.
The ReGrained® concept took shape at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) when co-founders Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz crossed paths with a familiar combination for university students: beer, food, and lack of money.
“We started homebrewing and quickly discovered that beer was not the only delicious product of the brewing process…each batch also created food,” said ReGrained’s Chief Executive Officer Dan Kurzrock. “It smelled like bread, it looked like hot cereal, so, it was really pretty low-hanging fruit to think, okay, well maybe we can make food products out of this.”
When they discovered they could bake bread using the leftover piles of nutritious soaked barley (“spent” grain) from the brewing process, they jumped at the opportunity to fund their homebrewing hobby from its own waste stream. Realizing they were onto something, but discouraged by the short fresh life of bread, they switched to baking the first version of the SuperGrain+ bars that they distribute today. The goal of their branded products was to garner enough awareness about the flavor, health, and environmental benefits of the grain in order to create a market that would close the loop between one industry and another.
After graduation, they moved back home to San Francisco, where urban craft breweries were booming and generating about one pound of this grain for every six-pack of beer that they produced. The duo began to partner with these craft breweries to rescue and upcycle their grain. By lugging around big plastic tubs, they would harvest the grain and haul it to the kitchen where they would hand process it.
Over time, they partnered with the USDA to develop a scalable patent-pending process to create a shelf-stable ingredient. SuperGrain+ flour was born. ReGrained has since built what was once a hobby business into a thriving brand, with SuperGrain+ bars now distributed to thousands of rooftops and other products in the pipeline.
Behind the scenes, they also continued to pursue the ingredient platform in order to create and serve the market for SuperGrain+ through co-development partnerships. This is what set the stage for the relationship they would come to strike with the team here at Griffith Foods.
Griffith Foods and ReGrained:
ReGrained is a start-up company based in San Francisco, California leveraging their patent-pending technology and brand to transform food waste like brewer’s spent grain (BSG) into nutritious, great tasting ingredients.
Brewers’ spent grain is the saturated malt byproduct derived from the brewing process of beer. It has very high levels of protein and fiber, and considerably lower levels of carbohydrates (sugar), but it is typically used as animal feed, burned, or discarded. ReGrained uses their patent pending technology to rescue BSG and create SuperGrain+ flour, their primary and base ingredient for all ReGrained snacks – they call this process “Edible Upcycling.”
Griffith Foods began investigating BSG in the summer of 2016 during an internship program focused on researching food loss commercialization opportunities that can be applied to health and nutrition products.
Fast forward about one year, and our partnership with ReGrained was born. Using Rocketspace, an organization that creates a global ecosystem of people and ideas to accelerate the growth of startups and connect entrepreneurs with established companies, Griffith Foods matched with ReGrained.
“Our Purpose is to better align the food we eat with the planet we love,” said Kurzrock. “Our Edible Upcycling model changes the way we value food and the resources that support all life. We could not ask for a more mission-aligned partner that directly supports our strategic goals than Griffith Foods.”
Stay tuned for the evolution of our partnership and Creating Better Together™.
