Two Victoria companies have teamed up to divert fruit from the compost pile, salvage interesting flavours and provide a twist on a summer staple with Upcycled Ice Cream.
Ice-cream maker 49 Below makes the frozen treat from unsold fruit using the ripe-and-ready pile at Root Cellar grocery stores.
“We take it at the point where it’s still good to consume, but it’s not pretty and people aren’t going to buy it,” said Amy Ayer, operations manager of 49 Below. “We generally have a one-day window to process it into jam or sauce or cut it down and freeze it and then make it into something new. And that something new has been a lot of ice cream since October last year, when the two companies teamed up.
So far, 49 Below has made eight kinds of ice cream with the old fruit, starting with peaches and rosemary, pear chai crumble, pear ginger, orange creamsicle, grapefruit creamsicle, lemon graham bar and white tiger, a twist on the classic orange and licorice ice cream, though this version comes without food colouring.
Ayer said they never know what they’re going to get, so it’s hard to say what new flavour is on the horizon, or how much they will be able to make. They just took delivery of bananas and plums that will be a new treat available soon.
For Root Cellar, it was about trying to cut down on food waste, and for 49 Below, it was about seeing what they could come up with.
The ice cream is sold at 49 Below’s Oak Bay store (2575 Cadboro Bay Rd.) and at the Root Cellar, which takes a portion of each pint sold.
“But for them it’s more about reducing waste than getting profit, which is great,” said Ayer.
Ayer said depending on the variety, it can be more challenging to work with fruit at the end of its life, and some flavours work while others don’t.
They tried making a grape sorbet that had mixed results, as it was difficult to scoop, but they found a home for it at Ghost Ramen restaurant, where it is on the cocktail menu.
“That was kind of cool — we had a grocery store give us produce and then we gave the end result to a restaurant; we just kind of passed it down the line,” she said.
It’s not the first time 49 Below has worked with a local company to upcycle byproducts or leftovers.
The company used Nanaimo bars from Working Culture Bread to make a Nanaimo bar ice cream, leftover pannettone and a slew of broken Christmas candies from the Market Garden were turned into Christmas Carnage ice cream, and even almond croissant crumbs from Goodside Pastry House have been repurposed for ice cream.
Upcycling of food is a growing trend trying to tackle what the Upcycled Food Association in the U.S. believes is a major problem. The association notes more than 31 million metric tonnes of food is wasted every year in the U.S. at an estimated cost of $200 billion.
In Canada, the National Zero Waste Council estimates as much as 2.3 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, and Canadian households waste an average of 140 kg of food annually.
A National Zero Waste Council 2022 study noted that each day, Canadian households waste 2.6 million potatoes, 1.3 million tomatoes, 130,000 heads of lettuce and 650,000 loaves of bread.
The provincial government has reported organic waste represents 40 per cent of material sent to B.C.’s landfills, which generates a significant amount of greenhouse gases.
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