Enrique González holds up a plastic pouch filled with a whitish powder. He assures me it is not cocaine.
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González, 27, and his partner, Flavio Siller, 26, are the cofounders of EatLimmo, a food-tech startup in Monterrey, Mexico that's finding nutritional gold where others just see garbage.
EatLimmo is using food science to turn mango seeds, peels and leftover pulp into a fiber-packed powder that can serve as an emulsifier to replace up to 50% of the eggs and fat in baked goods, substitute for sugar, pectin and anti-foaming agents in jams and jellies and even serve as a texurizer and natural preservative in sausages and other processed meats.
And they're not stopping with mangoes. The company, which has a patent pending on its proprietary process, is also researching uses for the seeds and peels of avocados and other tropical fruits produced in Mexico.
"Our mission is to feed 10 billion people in 2050 in a healthy, affordable and sustainable way," González says from his Monterrey office during our video chat. "We see a lot of byproducts and residues with a lot of nutrition. They can have a lot of functionality."
EatLimmo is one of a new crop of companies that are creatively tackling the problem of food waste, a big culprit in global warming that adds about 3.3. billion tons of carbon dioxide to the environment every year. Some enterprising startups are creating their own branded food products out of waste, such as Regrained, which makes granola bars from spent beer grains. Others, such as ag-tech startups WISErg and California Safe Soil, are turning food waste into fertilizer.
EatLimmo, which is just beginning to generate revenue, presently uses about a half-ton of mango residues a week from fruit processors, who usually have to pay someone to cart the stuff way. By the end of the year, the company hopes to handle as many as five tons at a time, says Siller. The company, which is partnering with Griffith Laboratories, a food ingredients developer, does all the processing in its own warehouse facility in Monterrey, which houses their offices, a laboratory and, soon, a commercial-grade test kitchen.
In June 2015, EatLimmo was named Grand Champion in the XCS Challenge, a startup competition for promising "early-stage innovators," at Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference. The cofounders also participated in the inaugural class of the Silicon Valley think tank's SU Labs accelerator program, receiving $100,000 in exchange for a small stake in the company. They expect to close on $500,000 in convertible debt in June or July.
The proportions of peels, pits and pulp varies depending on the particular application. The powder is rich in fiber and and phytonutrients, the chemicals in plants that help protect them from disease. Those same nutrients can extend the shelf life of foods without carcinogenic chemical preservatives, explains Siller, who has a Masters degree in biotechnology and chemical engineering.
So far, the company has supplied food manufacturers with their products (a patent is pending) to use in hamburger buns, tortillas, cupcakes and conchas, a Mexican sweet bread. They're also developing applications for a French cookie company, several producers of vegan meat substitutes and a few makers of sausages and other processed meat products, who are testing the mango powder as a texturizer and natural preservative.
González, who was diagnosed as prediabetic at the age of 15, resolved back then to find a solution to his own health challenges and Mexico's raging epidemics of obesity and diabetes. After graduating with an economics degree, he founded his first company in 2012 with his father to make sugar-free jams. Every year, he'd go back to Michigan during berry harvest season and he saw the tremendous amount of food, and nutrients, that got wasted in food processing. He began researching ways to use the discards. But they had to shut down the company the following after losing their biggest food-service customer, who wanted to cut costs.
In 2013, he entered a business plan competition to develop a process that extracts nutrition from fruit byproducts. He enlisted his friend Siller to provide the technical expertise. Originally, they were experimenting with antioxidants found in lemon peels, hence the name EatLimmo. Eventually, they decided to focus on mangoes because Mexico is one of the world's largest exporters of the fruit. In January 2014, they rented an apartment together, converting the laundry room into a small laboratory. Later that year, they officially launched Eat Limmo.
The company, which has grown to five employees, is also targeting larger food manufacturers in Mexico, who are concerned about sustainability as well as cost. "It's really important now for us to grow here and gain a lot of capacity," González adds.
Within a few weeks, the cofounders tell me, they'll be rebranding their business with a catchier name for marketing their precious white powder and other innovations yet to come.
"We've learned that it's more than an ingredient," says González. "It's a service we sell you about how to improve your food products."
