Food Waste Fueling Regenerative Farming

Recycling food waste into animal feed reduces cost for farmers, however the cost to transport and make the feed often exceeds the value of the feed. 

Restaurants collect, categorize and sort food waste in 6.5 Gallon returnable containers using an app and our patent-pending GrubTubs smart container. At the feed mill, algorithms sort tubs according to nutrient-content, making a high quality dehydrated animal feed without millions in high-tech equipment.

The same container collects restaurant vegetable oils that are reused as feed or used as a zero-carbon power source for the entire feed-mill and vehicle fleet, lowering our cost structure.

By innovating how food waste and grease get recycled, the GrubTubs' cost model can trail-blaze the adoption of regenerative farming practices. For every 1200 tons of food waste collected, we feed 600 pigs, 4000 chickens and fertilizes over 40 acres. Saving farmers up to $100,000 in feed and fertilizers annually.

Small scale farms will continue to decline unless there’s an increase in net farm income. There’s 2 million farms and ranches in the USA, with 95% earning less than $50,000 a year. Net farm income has declined about 50% between 2012-2018. Farmer suicides exceed veteran suicides. In Austin, 6 acres of farmland are lost to real estate development every day and we will no longer have affordable farmland in Travis county by 2025. Of all the food consumed in Austin, less than 0.5% is grown within 150 mile radius. 

For livestock producers feed cost can easily be 60-70% of the total operating costs and even 5 percent savings in feed costs makes a significant impact on net farm income, a 30% discount revitalizes small scale agriculture altogether and provides an attractive profit margin for beginning farmers. 

Large agriculture conglomerates drive down the cost of feed regardless of where it's grown or who grows it. Making it more affordable to cut down rainforest to plant cheap soy, than supporting local pandemic resistant  family farms in America. By giving farmers the ability to grow their own feed, they regain their autonomy from this bottom dollar thinking.

Our GrubTubs are returnable, clean containers dedicated to food waste recovery. GrubTubs can be scanned and tagged using a smart device by anyone in the kitchen so chefs can use advanced waste analytics to reduce food purchases by $20,000/year. Furthermore, the vegetable oil from each restaurant is converted into biodiesel which significantly reduces the transportation and energy cost to make a dehydrated pig feed by about $100/ton of feed.

On average 1 truck route collects 7 tons of food waste and 1 ton of used vegetable oil. An algorithm determines which GrubTubs contain optimal feed characteristics for pig feed (+/-5 tons) and which food waste is more suitable for compost (+/- 2 tons).

Half a ton of used vegetable oil will be used to dehydrate 5 tons of food waste into 1.5 tons of pig feed. The feed is sold to a nearby farmer at 30% savings over conventional feed. Furthermore a deep litter piggery is integrated with a black soldier fly manure digester. This not only insures that the piggery can operate odorless in an urban setting, but the insects replace expensive organic soy meal needed to feed 4,000 chickens. Insuring a regenerative farmer $100,000 in savings annually.

Our mission at GrubTubs is freedom for farmers. We are well aware of the hardship many farmers have fallen into by existing contract farming practices that are not fair to them, their families, or the animals they take care of. When we see the word “farmer”, we see a colorless, genderless human being dedicated to bringing the best food to their fellow community. We also hire farm hands, drivers, composters, site directors, and Tubwashers with the same goal in mind. Our farmers must pledge to exceed the industry standard when it comes to animal welfare.

Beginning farmers in America start of earning less than $35,000 and require off-farm employment to stay afloat. We can train beginning farmers at our Austin farm and help them secure $1.7million in Direct Farm Ownership Loans from the Farm Service Agency. By using GrubTubs, our farmers earn in excess of $100,000 annually and can keep reinvesting in their own growth. Even conventional pig farmers say they would double their current production as grubtubs dehydrated pig feed reduces their feed cost per pig from $100 to $70. 

Likewise, chefs in Austin want our trucks to bring food back from our farmers. This is something that we anticipate facilitating later on when we are at scale.

Current food waste bans allow us to expand into the west and east coast areas where landfill costs are high. However, we do not envision that our model will only scale in areas where food waste bans are active.

Ultimately, restaurants need to derive tangible benefits for their efforts to partake in a food waste recycling program. A simple food waste ban isn't always enough. Instead technologies like Leanpath and Winnow have proven that food waste tracking using smart devices and bluetooth enabled scales can save the average restaurant owner about $20,000 a year by simply knowing how much food they throw away and adjusting their food purchase patterns accordingly. There's nothing more wasteful for a restaurant than to purchase food that is never sold. By partnering up with either Leanpath or Winnow or by developing our own in house food tracking technology, GrubTubs could pass that data along to chefs and help them reduce food waste purchasing directly. While, the same data would be needed for the algorithm that sorts the GrubTubs (according to nutrient content) at the feed-mill. Even without the software component fully in place, chefs love our grubtubs in the kitchen as they can visually tell what food goes to waste at each station in the kitchen.

Ultimately, GrubTubs seeks to solve the food waste problem for chefs and the feed and fertilizer cost problem for farmers by incentivizing both parties economically. 

Our 5-year goal is to create +5,000 zero-waste restaurants and train +50 next-generation farmers. Saving over +$100million in fresh food from being wasted at the restaurant level and increasing new farm ownership by $85million, livestock production by $35million/yr and net farm income by $7.5million/yr.

In order to turn food waste into a quality animal feed our business model does three things; eliminates the cost of energy to dehydrate and transport food waste, sorts food waste into batches using software avoiding expensive feed-equipment, and allows beginner farms to operate near cities by reducing odor with our manure management. This small change in food waste recycling creates more resilient supply chains, more food security, and increases livestock production. This creates independence from commodity soy and corn on a minimal amount of land. Can we really expect quality food from farmers if they can’t make 6 figures?

Since mid-2018, GrubTubs achieved a 10% adoption rate in our Austin test market and serviced over 200 restaurants, hotel, and cafeteria customers and pre-pandemic were collecting about 8 tons of food waste a day. We had plans to build an 18 ton a day feed mill, but those have been postponed. Volume is expected to bounce back as restaurants return to full operation as we exit this pandemic.

Our food waste and grease logistics are exiting the pilot stage and going into the growth stage and fund our operations.

Our rendering feed mill and odorless piggery are both existing but still need to be piloted to work together.

Our IoT software development the track and trace the tubs is also an exiting technology, but needs financial commitment for a team to go from concept to prototype before we can scale.

Most of our technical solutions are improvements of existing technologies that we have combined in a working model. 

• We use off the shelf RFID chips to make our GrubTubs smart so we can control feed quality without purchasing a high-tech rendering facility or feed mill, 
• We use standard dehydrating equipment modified to run on vegetable oil, wood chips or natural gas, 
• we halved the cost of black soldier fly production by doing it in small modular containers that can be placed at any farm. Centralized insect rearing facilities require an investment of about $2,000-$4,000/ton of annual output. Our equipment placed at an existing farm costs $500/ton and if approved by NRCS could be financed by small farmers with government guaranteed debt, not equity. We also simplified the technology to run on low grade food waste (low protein content) or manure that can be frequently cleaned out using a tractor.

The true innovation is in bringing all these smaller solutions together so the transportation, energy cost, and equipment cost remains affordable.

Also, we filed a crucial patent application for a coating that has to be applied to the recycled plastic containers to prevent the GrubTubs from smelling after 20 uses. This is a crucial material science solution borrowed from the automobile industry and in a novel way applied to the trash industry. Once odors impregnate the micropores of plastic, our GrubTubs would have to be discarded. With this coating, they now last over 200 uses and are much easier to clean.

Pre-covid we had over 200 restaurants who paid us to take their food waste, and we just launched our used vegetable oil program with 5 customers and expanded to 10 during covid.

Pre-Covid we were working with Westfold Farms. They were able to scale from a few hundred birds to a few thousand birds and obtain Beginning Farmer loans with USDA Farm Service Agency.

In 5 years we expect to be in 2 cities and servicing over 5,000 restaurants, supporting about 60 farmers. This will provide income and employment for an estimated 6000 people with our company combined with the farms we serve.

Work with regulatory entities proactively to introduce our model and understand the regulations.

Build out executive team and advisory board for future funding rounds and detailed business plan made to scale and match return expectations with impact investors.

Hire software talent in AI, ML, IoT and ride share logistics to farm the backbone of our operation.

Funding for Monitoring & Evaluation to measure our impact and progress can budgeted at $15,000/yr. Also our teaching farm for new and beginning farmers in Austin will be fully funded with $695,000 investment and employ 1 full time teacher and one part time intern manager in collaboration with local extension office. Results from this farm pilot will be shared with extension services.

Most of our team got laid off due to covid. We used to be 21 strong. Currently on the executive side we have 2 full-time staff for sales and operations. R&D has been reduced as we await restaurant operations to return. We survived covid by servicing paying customers only.

Robert Olivier funded GrubTubs and is the visionary of the team constantly improving and driving down cost in innovative ways. Is pioneer in the field of insect raising technologies since 2001. Having worked over the years with Texas A&M's Department of Entomology, we have access to the leading scientist in Black Soldier Fly and want to join a National Science Foundation Center for Insects as Food & Feed to address industry wide research topics. We also work with various farm and feed consultants ranging from heritage and pastured poultry experts to organic feed mill owners and partake in various local farm to table programs.

Ben Houston joined the team after the launch at SXSW in 2018 and has grown sales by brining in various large hotel and restaurants customers. He oversees operations and customer satisfaction. 

Brian Eaglin (technology partner) has 20 years experience with animal feed and rendering equipment and his family founded Anco Eaglin and is familiar with rendering food waste specifically for pigs.

Our mission at GrubTubs is freedom for farmers. We are well aware of the hardship many farmers have fallen into by existing contract farming practices that are not fair to them, their families, or the animals they take care of. When we see the word “farmer”, we see a colorless, genderless human being dedicated to bringing the best food to their fellow community. We also hire farm hands, drivers, composters, site directors, and Tubwashers with the same goal in mind. Our farmers must pledge to exceed the industry standard when it comes to animal welfare.

50% of our new farm hires are veterans, 25% have a checkered criminal past. Also USDA's FSA's "Beginning Farmer" direct and guaranteed loan programs that promote farm ownership are especially advantageous for veterans with honorable discharge.

We want to partner with some of your partners and would like help with positioning our ideas for impact investment funders nationally and globally. We would like help simplifying our pitch and ask for impact investors and family offices.

We want to fund and create hardware for camera and scales to develop ML and AI data collection at the restaurant side and become the largest data collector of food waste in the world. Solve can help us attract the know how and talent and partnerships to build out this data layer underneath everything we do.

We currently don't have the experts for all the software for ML and AI due to covid and need advice on how to build that team and advisory board.

Food waste data is valuable for our own feed mill processing, as well as to our chefs and farmers. Other stakeholders that are interested in waste data include state and local governments (USDA) and agricultural extension programs at universities. Making this data accessible, accurate, and actionable and secure will require a strong technological component using RFID, IOT, ML, AI and block chain.

We want to explore great marketing and messaging angles for investors and customers. As our team is severely reduced, our fundraising efforts need to leverage the right platform to be efficient.

1. Uber for Logistics and Ride Share expertise
2. Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research to address regulatory and food safety concerns
3. Kroger has an incredible food waste initiative with ReFed.
4. Prepare to meet impact investors and do a road show, gain advice from Closed Loop Partners, KSF Impact how to pitch to impact investors effectively. 
5. Emerson Collective: Develop a rural agricultural program to find new beginning farmers in CA and Hawaii when we expand out of Texas
6. Tesla and Chipotle's Kimball Musk who is at the nexus transportation technology and food.
7. Amazon: For creating a local food waste analytics and logistics platform.

Sustainable communities need their sustainable farmers to scale and thrive economically. In Austin less than 0.5% of food consumed is produced within a 150 mile radius. Yet 98% of all food waste isn't even composted. By reutilizing food waste from a community to produce  a high quality animal feed that is 30% cheaper than ANY commodity store bought feed, local sustainable farms can scale and outcompete conventional farm practices that exploit farmers, animals and the environment. We need to utilize food waste to support local regenerative family farms. Paying premium farm to table prizes for local produce is great, but it isn't enough. To truly jumpstart local food production, local farmers must have a local competitive advantage over and against global and conventional farming practices. We need a new system that supports farmers from "Table to Farm" and rewards them for farming within the "Food-shed".

At GrubTubs we seek to give farmers this competitive advantage over and against global conventional agricultural practices. We want out farmers to earn over 100,000/yr, to reinvest in local food production and be able to afford to send their children to schools like MIT and raise their animal with respect and reverence. None of this is possible within the current agricultural model where beginning farmers barely earn 35,000 a year.

The $150,000 would be utilized to build a software platform using smart phones, an RFID reader and a bluetooth scale to categorize food waste using our GrubTubs.

Although aquaculture wasn't emphesized in this application. Sustainable local fish production is a vital component in scaling regenerative agriculture. In Austin alone we identified over 2 million pounds of fish waste from just 2 fish distributors that supply restaurants. They currently pay thousands of dollars a month to haul this material to landfill, while we could easily take that material and process it in our animal feed mill to make a local sustainable aqua culture feed. Also, our black soldier fly technology can be scaled up for local farmers to produce their own fish feed that can be combined with our dehydrated fish meal. This would require little additional investment and $100,000 could be utilized fully to demonstrate this at our teaching farm.

Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Breaking down valuable fats, proteins and sugars into methane and carbon dioxide is extremely wasteful.

• Assume that 1 (wet) ton of food waste produces 1 kg of methane with a CO2 equivalency of 23 kg of CO2 per wet ton of food waste.
• With GrubTubs, each ton of food waste can produce over 100 kg's of pork, 3 kg's of eggs and 150 kg of compost. Compost applied to carbon depleted soils, increase soil carbon capture using the CENTURY model by 0.20 MTCO2e/ton. For this example that's 30 kgs of CO2 per ton of food waste.
• The fuel cost to pick up the food waste and provide the heat to dehydrate the food waste is provided by our grease recycling program. Collection and processing into animal feed is both economical and carbon neutral.
• The carbon offset from feeding animals over and against letting food waste decompose is about 53 kg of CO2 equivalent per ton of food waste.

Knowing that in the US alone we produce 60 million tons of food waste and 98% of it goes to landfill, there's a CO2 offset of 1.3 billion tons at the landfill and 1.8 billion tons sequestered within soil.

The total amount of CO2 emitted by the USA is 6 billion tons annually. Using food waste to sequester 1.8 billion tons becomes EXTREMELY significant. 100k would be used to track our waste and report our impact for stakeholders.

A high tech precision feed mill cost about 4.5 million to install, compared to 2 million for an equivalent low tech batch Anco Dehydrator dehydrator.

The problem with a simple batch cooker is that the quality of the inputs determines the quality of the feed that is being made and there's no way to upgrade the feed without further processing.

By tracking at the level of the consumer what is thrown in each GrubTubs, AI and ML can sort the incoming grubtubs into optimal batches for creating feed using data points like restaurant, employee, data, weight, selected material, age, etc

The problem with recycling any waste stream is quality control. If all the waste is thrown and mixed into a 18 tons trash truck, sorting becomes impossible. If the data is tracked at the individual level and ket in 50 lbs containers. For each truck coming in with 7 tons in 450 containers, then An algorithm determines which GrubTubs contain optimal feed characteristics for pig feed (+/-5 tons) and which food waste is more suitable for compost (+/- 2 tons).

By categorizing and keeping food waste with different characteristics separated in reusable containers, multiple valuable uses can be optimized at the processing step using algorithms. This is extremely significant and exciting as 98% of food waste isn't recycled and picked up in big trash trucks regardless if going to compost or landfill.

$200,000 would be used in conjunction with GM prize to integrate IoT with AI.

As Food Waste gets recycled into animal feed, data and transactions at every point in the food recycling cycle can be captured to demonstrate significant carbon capture. This data can then be captured in a decentralized ledger giving stakeholders from chefs, to farmers, to local municipalities and extension agents reliable encrypted access to their data and the ability to report our impact. Furthermore, this data amongst multiple users can then be utilized to assign carbon credits to each individual stakeholders in the supply chain.

Why shouldn't chefs and farmers be rewarded for the extra effort they contribute to an effective climate change solution. Only with the power of decentralized ledgers, blockchain and carbon credit tokenazation would this be posssible.

$150,000 would be utilized in conjunction with the other prices to integrate our food waste tracking data and analytics within a decentralized ledger that is both encrypted and accessible to take advantage for carbon sequestration credits and other sustainable opportunities.