What if the grain left over from brewing wasn’t actually “spent”? That’s the question asked by Dan Kurzrock and Jordan Schwartz, co-founders of ReGrained: an upcycled food production company that turns breweries’ malted barley, wheat, and rye byproducts into award-winning ingredients and food innovation opportunities. The Berkeley-based business closes a loop to create a more circular food economy, rescuing grain from waste and giving it new life. “Our mission is to make sure we’re eating all the food we’re growing as a planet,” Kurzrock says.
Kurzrock started homebrewing in college, and was floored by how much grain was required: 20 to 30 pounds for a five-pound batch of beer. His Southern California fraternity house had no compost bin, so it all went in the dumpster. Raised in Northern California with a conservation-minded ethos, “I viscerally felt like I was wasting,” says Kurzrock, and he began researching what to do with all that byproduct. He learned that in the Middle Ages, people used to make bread from spent grain, and some brewpubs were still doing it on a small scale. What if he turned his own barley into bread and sold the loaves to finance his homebrew?
In 2008, Kurzrock teamed up with childhood friend Schwartz, and what started as “a simple aspiration of brewing beer for free” led to reimaginings of what the food supply chain could be. Today, ReGrained is an “ingredient company and an innovation services provider” that rescues and “upcycles” spent grain into a new base ingredient for a wide variety of food products, from brownie and bread mixes to energy bars, pasta, snacks, breadings, and even ice cream. The U.S. wastes up to 40% of its food, and it takes 7 gallons of water for the average brewery to make one gallon of beer. “When we’re upcycling, we’re getting more food products out of that same water footprint,” says Kurzrock, maximizing resources and conserving energy.
Only the sugars from fermented grains are actually spent in the brewing process, he explains, leaving behind a nutrient-dense material packed with prebiotics, polyphenols, and other fuel for probiotic gut bacteria that ease digestion. But the grain spoils for human consumption within a matter of hours, which is why it’s normally only reused as animal feed. Through a public/private partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Agricultural Research Service Division, Kurzrock and Schwartz developed the technology to safely and efficiently upcycle spent grain into a nutritious food ingredient.
EAT YOUR BEER
Called SuperGrain+®, it’s a flour-like substance with 3.5x the fiber and 2x the protein of whole wheat flour, and the raw material is produced by the truckload at breweries every day. Currently, ReGrained collects spent grain from local brewery partners and takes it to their Berkeley facility, where they run it through a machine; the long-term plan is to deploy ReGrained machines onsite at breweries.
In the meantime, the company carefully selects nearby breweries to source from: those that share their focus on quality, locality, and conservation, using suppliers with similar ethos. “We’re able to work with really incredible brewery partners like East Brother,” Kurzrock says, “[and] we have aspirations to grow together,” looping in Bay Area bakery customers to create a food production ecosystem that’s “pasture to pint to plate.”
Making snacks from salvaged food waste might sound like a small step, but it’s the kind of creative thinking that can help mitigate the climate crisis. “The more ways we can do more with less, the more resilient we will be,” says Kurzrock. “When paired with upstream solutions like regenerative agriculture, we’re demonstrating how the future of the food system could work, starting with the beer industry.”
