Many companies are carbon neutral or are planning to become zero-carbon certified in the near future as part of courting a growing sustainability-focused consumer base. However, Renewal Mill stands out because, not only the packaging, but the product itself, comes from a recycling or “upcycling” process. Out of all the products you could have turned food waste into, you decided to transform it into flour and dessert mixes—why those?

My Co-founder Claire founded Boston’s first organic juice company and was appalled by the amount of juice pulp that was going to waste everyday in that process. … She had a fortuitous meeting with the owner of one of the largest tofu companies in the country and he was like, “You think you have a lot of pulp in your tiny juicing business. I’m making thousands and thousands of pounds of pulp a week at my tofu facility!” That’s because when you make tofu, the first step is to make soymilk. You boil and blend the beans and then you siphon off the liquid so it’s essentially juicing soybeans so he was just left with mountains of soybean pulp. 

As soon as Claire heard that we started getting our hands around our idea for Renewal Mill. We found out that food waste had a storied history in countries like Japan where if you made the milk at home you would never throw away that pulp, you would find creative ways to use it like sauteing it with vegetables for a side dish, or making it into a savory pancake. 

However there are two significant problems in dealing with byproducts. First, byproducts of plant-based milk are extremely heavy to transport because they are majority water and this is not carbon-friendly to transport. Second, is that byproducts can spoil very quickly--usually within the first four hours after production. 

At Renewal Mill, we solved these problems by dehydrating the byproducts and milling it into the same grain size as all purpose flour to make it easy to use. We call it flour here, but the traditional Japanese word for it is “okara”. After mastering our first byproduct flour/okara, we quickly learned that we could venture into other byproducts like oat milk. 

We started making chocolate chip cookies with the okara flour to show people how the novel ingredients can be used and items can still taste like people are used to. It was a good way to say, ‘hey there’s these powerful ingredients, they have a bunch of nutrition and they don’t change the shape or texture of products you are already familiar with’. 

You and Claire both grew up and/or worked on the east coast prior to starting Renewal Mill in Oakland, California. Was starting Renewal Mill on the west coast a strategic decision or just a coincidence?

I’m originally from Cape Cod, Claire is actually originally from California but then went to Wellesley and Yale. We ended up in California because our first partner, which is our tofu company partner, was located in Oakland, and we needed to work out of their facility for the first few years. After we grew and got a little too big to share their facility, we moved right around the corner, but it is nice to maintain that proximity to them. 

A lot of tofu manufacturing does happen on the west coast [but] the largest facility in the country is still in Massachusetts. [However] tofu is a relatively concentrated industry so even with just a few installations -- because we use a co-location model so we are putting technology into the manufacturing facilities of the partners that we work with --- we can capture a significant portion of that tofu byproduct market.

How have you and your team’s diverse personal and professional backgrounds contributed to Renewal Mill’s unique approach to food waste and sustainability?

Our team is really unique. It is myself and Claire, and then we have one full time operations colleague, Erin, and then a product developer, Alice, who is a five times James Beard award winning cookbook author who specializes in alternative flour and chocolate. 

Claire’s background, like I said, she started that juice company … She then went on to get her graduate degree from Yale in environmental management and she was doing environmental consulting around life cycle assessment which is also very important in the work that we do because we need to quantify the climate impact that our work is having and so her background in that is super instrumental. 

For me, I spend most of my time around the nutrition side of things. At Georgetown I helped start the farmers market, I was very involved with child obesity and nutrition (I even did my thesis on it), I interned with Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative at the White House focusing on child obesity programming and prevention, and then after I graduated I spent some time at the UN in Cambodia doing child nutrition. I then stumbled into tech and ended up using my experience in tech and combining that with food to work for a startup accelerator which is actually where I met Claire. She was bringing the idea for Renewal Mill into that accelerator and we joined forces and raised our first round of capital. 

Our operations colleague Erin, previously worked in Patagonia provisions so he has a background in sustainable food but he also is a trained pastry chef so for about a decade before that he worked in Michelin-starred kitchens in New York and then opened up a chain of bakeries in Dubai. 

Renewal Mill is a female-founded company. In what ways has this been a strength/obstacle in creating your unique products?

The majority of our retail customers are female so we definitely have a perspective there. Claire is a single mom, and so a lot of our big unit products we are trying to make them super family friendly, easy to use and to make with kids. 

Additionally, it is definitely challenging to raise venture capital as women, we have often been the only females in groups of all white men. Because of this challenge, it also makes us really grateful for female investors and the fellow community of female entrepreneurs that we have found along the way. Claire was part of the Tory Burch fellows program, where they select 20-30 fellows every year and mentor them over a year-long period. Through that we have made amazing partnerships with friends. Similarly, I have had the opportunity to be part of other startup entrepreneur ecosystems here in the Bay area that are only for women. So we are super grateful for that. 

We also try to focus our partnerships on women-owned companies so we have partnered with a baby food company, a grain-free chip company that uses our flour and all of those companies are female-founded so really just trying to make sure that we support other female founders in the market.

What’s next for Renewal Mill?

The sales cycle for ingredients is about 2-3 years and we really started leaning into the ingredients sales about 3 years ago so right now we are seeing a huge conversion of companies that we started conversations with 2-3 years ago actually moving into the purchasing phase and creating new products that are ending up on shelves. 

We are excited to continue growing that end of the business and to keep adding new ingredients to our portfolio, like the additional plant-based milk byproducts, evaluating the nut and food waste left over when making cold-pressed oil, and gluten-free spent grain from beer brewing. We are really hoping to be the food industry’s go to supplier for these upcycled ingredients. 

We do have a split business model as both a B2B and B2C company, but on the branded product side (B2C), we have released a bunch of baking mixes in 2021 that have quickly become our best sellers. We are excited to keep expanding that line and are also doing some private label work--creating products for other brands that will be on retail shelves. We are also getting ready to launch a second ready-to-eat cookie product. So lots of new products [are] coming to market as well as some new ingredients!

What does Georgetown mean to you?

I am extremely grateful for my Georgetown education. It definitely changed the course of my life forever. I’ve made lifelong friends. 

At Georgetown I was a human science major and I really tried to focus that on nutrition. Because I was one of the only students in that major not pursuing pre-med, I had more flexibility to tailor my program. I did my thesis with a professor in the psychology department focused on child obesity research. I had the opportunity to work at the White House and to study abroad in China--helping me gain a global perspective. 

Since I’ve graduated, the Georgetown network has been incredible. There’s surprisingly [and] shockingly a ton of people from Georgetown that run food companies. Which is kind of weird since around the time I graduated in 2014 and before there was very little programming or targeted classes around food. ... Since then, I think there are some more classes on food and sustainability, but for not having any sort of formal education within the food space, it is really shocking how many leading food companies have come out of Georgetown like Sweetgreen, Halo Top, Health Ade Kombucha, Schoolyard Snacks, the list goes on and on. 

I entered and won the GEA Alumni Pitch Competition in 2019 and through that experience I have gotten to know a whole network of fellow alumni that I would never have come across. I was in the NHS and a lot of other entrepreneurs from Georgetown were in the business school or different schools, so GAIN really opened that whole network up to me. A lot of the alumni that I met through the pitch competition are either investors in Renewal Mill or mentors to the company and I have weekly conversations with them. 

Basically, Georgetown is responsible for my entire career, even my experience in Cambodia was through a Georgetown connection so I cannot say enough good things. I applied to Georgetown early and it was the best decision I ever made.

By upcycling food waste to create healthy and affordable flours and dessert mixes, Renewal Mill’s active involvement in fighting climate change embodies the Georgetown value of “people for others”. What does it mean to be a Georgetown alum embodying this value?

Everything that I have done throughout my career I have tried to maintain that Jesuit value of being a man and woman for others. I think we are seeing right now the very real effects of climate change. I live in California and last year I couldn’t leave my house for an entire month in September because the wildfires were too bad. I actually got stuck in the middle of a wildfire and had to evacuate in the middle of a camping trip because the sky started raining purple so these effects are definitely right here. I think food waste is something people don’t think about as being directly related, they are just like, “oh yeah I just need to drive less and buy less” but food waste actually has a huge climate impact. 

After China and the U.S., if food waste was a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases so that’s very instrumental to our business model. We are definitely doing this for like a triple bottom line approach, we are not trying to get rich we are very much focused on having an impact and why we focus on the ingredients space is because that is the largest impact that we can see like to more large volumes of this product and going back to my roots in nutrition is ultimately to keep this valuable nutrition in the supply chain so that by 2050 there is going to be like 10 billion people in the world and feeding these people is not going to be a matter of growing more food because we are not going to be able to but more about using the food that we already grow more efficiently. 

Also just in the day to day practice of our business we are in the heart of Oakland which is a systematically disadvantaged neighborhood. We really try to focus on putting resources back into that community both through donation and where we choose to spend our money for the business. 

When I find Georgetown people out in the wild they are mission-driven people who care about the impact of their work and I think it's really special and it is definitely not the case with every person that goes to a high academic institution. I have many a lot of people in venture capital from Ivy League schools that don’t embody that same kind of mentality and I think it is really unique to that sort of Jesuit values that undercurrent of an entire Georgetown education.

Why did you apply for funding through GAIN? What was the highlight of your experience with GAIN?

I had been vaguely involved in the burgeoning upcycle community at Georgetown. When I was there it was pretty small, it was pretty much Jeff at the business school and the social entrepreneurship professor from sociology. I kind of just kept a pulse on what was going on and then before I started Renewal Mill I was in between jobs after leaving tech and I had come across the new Georgetown incubator that they were running at WeWork in D.C. so I had stayed involved with that and it was through email that I saw the GEA Alumni Pitch Competition and I decided to give it a shot. 

It was really cool because in the final for that competition it was four female entrepreneurs which almost never happens. So that was super exciting and a really cool opportunity to meet other fellow female entrepreneurs from Georgetown. 

GAIN has been really helpful to me, even though the majority of them are white men and older than me, they have been extremely generous with time, money, and connections. They have gone above and beyond to help make our company successful and just made me feel super supported. It’s been a really great experience.

Even the people I have met through GAIN who have no business talking to me-- like Bill Creelman from Spindrift, Doug Bouton from Halo Top -- people who have had huge success they are as humble and as willing to sit down with me and take personal phone calls and that really means the world.

Is there anything else that you can share about how your Georgetown experience (school, friends, clubs, etc) has influenced your entrepreneurial success?

Like I said, because I wasn’t pre-med I took a lot of random classes at Georgetown that a lot of my peers in the NHS weren’t able to take. My freshman year I took ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ and that definitely opened my mind to this whole new world [where] you can have a for profit business that does social good and is mission driven. I definitely had not really experienced that concept before. 

One of the hardest classes I took was called ‘Improvisation for Social Change’, which sounds like a total throw away class but actually it taught me a lot about how to communicate like when I’m pitching for venture capital. It definitely taught me how to think on my feet and be creative and how much of communication is nonverbal. 

I also was really involved in Leadership and Beyond which is a pre-orientation at Georgetown [that occurs] the first week before school starts. From that, I have lifelong friends from that program and then I went on to run that program ... It immediately catapulted me into a leadership position and so I was basically running this autonomous organization within the student activities commission so that experience was pretty fundamental to how I operate as a leader and how important organization is to running an effective operation.

If you could give a piece of advice to a Hoyapreneur, or aspiring Hoyapreneur, what would it be?

What I always try to impart to Georgetown grads in particular is there is a narrative coming out of Georgetown that there is only one right way to do life and career and I think that is categorically untrue. 

I always just try to tell hoyapeneurs and hoyas in general to take the road less traveled. It might be hard but it’s definitely more rewarding and if you have an idea just go for it. What is failure really? You will learn from it, you’ll pick yourself back up. You will have a much more fruitful story. Like I always say, I’m trying to write an interesting story, not a perfect one and I think that is something that Georgetown students in particular can always be reminded of.

I think there’s a narrative that you have to go to grad school or get a six-figure paying job right out of college that is in investment banking or consulting but there are so many ways to succeed and I would just encourage any hoyas that have an idea to reach out for help, ask questions, prototype your life before you jump in.