Danone creates new yogurt brand using ugly, rejected fruit

The world’s largest yogurt maker is betting waste-conscious consumers will try snacks made with misfit produce.

Danone SA’s Two Good line of dairy snacks is adding Good Save, a new yogurt brand that uses surplus produce or rejected fruit deemed too ugly for store shelves, the Paris-based company said Wednesday in a statement. Rescued lemons are the key ingredient for the first flavor, and another variety will begin selling in the second half of 2021.

Danone partnered in the year-long project with Full Harvest Technologies Inc., which runs a marketplace for farmers to sell their would-be waste produce to food-and-beverage companies. The cups will be marked with a first-of-its-kind seal verifying the produce used for the ingredients would have otherwise been wasted, helping consumers understand the footprint their food leaves — or doesn’t.

“We really believe that by putting otherwise wasted fruit into our yogurt we’re creating a sustainable business model that puts food waste at the center of our innovation platform,” Surbhi Martin, vice president of marketing for Danone North America, said in a phone interview.

About a third of the world’s food is never eaten and the waste is responsible for about 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, according to Project Drawdown, a group advocating action on climate change.

“There’s this massive shift within the consumer market happening as we speak and we see it firsthand with major companies coming inbound to us,” Full Harvest founder and Chief Executive Officer Christine Moseley said in an interview. “This is going to be a huge new category, the same way that organics was.”

Source: bloomberg.com