Renewal Mill, Pbc., a California company at the forefront of the new circular economy of food upcycling, has done the front-end work to ensure that it is rescuing valuable resources that would otherwise go to waste or be used in ways that are less sustainable. The company’s success comes from a deep understanding of the confluence of all those aspects as individual building blocks of a working upcycling paradigm. Renewal Mill co-founder and COO Caroline Cotto describes how Renewal Mill converts the byproducts of grain, seed, and legume food and ingredient processing into a retail line of clean label, organic specialty flours and baking mixes.

Prepared Foods' second installment of our two-part interview with Yves Potvin, founder and CEO of Konscious Foods Canada, Inc. Yves discusses deviating from the most common source of plant protein—soy—opting instead to use protein predominantly from peas, with supporting protein from additional sources such as chickpeas and seaweed.

Yves Potvin first created a true soy-based hot dog analog in the 1980s. From there, Yves’ culinary tinkering expanded into plant-based deli slices and until he founded Garden Protein International—a.k.a. Gardein—in 2003, where he created a line of game-changing analogs of beef, chicken, sausage, crab, and fish. Today, Yves is the founder and CEO of Konscious Foods Canada, Inc., makers of some 10 different offerings of sushi, onigiri, and poke analogs that brought the fresh raw seafood experience to vegans, vegetarians, and to consumers sick of the devastation of marine life that’s happening on a global scale.