Written by Melissa Rubin
Fall 2017
Reduce, Reuse, ReGrained
ReGrained is a brilliant food waste company striving to reconfigure the way we use food and its byproducts. The idea came from a problem encountered while the cofounders, Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, were still under aged college students at UCLA. They were not impressed by the beer at parties and were too young to buy craft beer so they decided to brew their own. Once the brewing process was complete, they were not only left with their delicious beer but a bunch of spent grains as well.
The leftover brewer’s malt can either be used as compost or sent to farms for animal feed in a more rural setting. As it turns out, this byproduct is more than just a grain that should be fed to cattle. The beer brewing process removes the sugar from the grain and leaves behind a grain rich in protein and fiber. When weighing out the grain, 35% of it can be attributed to fiber and 20% to protein. Combined with a few other ingredients, it makes for the perfect granola bar.