Sustainable, Smart Food Dehydration:
Cornucopia Group enables the preservation lost food resources by making it easy to capture and process/preserve them economically. We want to increase the GDP of the food supply. The final dehydrated products that result from our safe natural processes are of a much higher nutritional quality than any other dehydrated product we've encountered, at a fraction of the price.
Who We Serve:
We believe that scarcity is a problem rooted in systems and attitude, not technology. Our technology was created for growers, and makers of foods who want to make more with less. By supplementing their existing processing systems with ours, we can enable them to do just that.
How It All Works:
Our licensed proprietary, safe, GMO free, natural, GRAS, (meets all fda/usda regulatory requirements) protein coating acts as a barrier against oxygen and bacteria that would normally degrade food without the application of extreme heat or cold. This enables us to dehydrate by simply preparing the food by machine slicing or other appropriate means, then coating with automated sprayers and conveyors, before loading the treated foods on drying racks in special clean rooms with large fans at either end for airflow. The entire process takes from 12-16 hours depending on the material being dried. The resulting product maintains ALL of its nutritional content as well as superior organoleptic (aroma, taste, color) qualities than competing product due to the non-destructive nature of our process.
In a nutshell, all you need is a room, a fan, ps coating, and some know how. No added heating element, no freezing component. Simplicity.
Our Backstory:
On almost every front, technology is advancing at a breakneck pace. Food preservation and dehydration, however, remains stuck in the past. Dominated by clunky, inefficient and expensive technologies like Freezers and gas Dryers. It seemed clear to us that there should be a sustainability-focused, efficiency driven methodology that could scale to any size, anywhere. This is why we united as a team, to provide a real answer to this unmet problem. We acquired the rights to PS Coating technology and launched Cornucopia Group in 2015. Our first commercial project: Sweet Potato Magic, launched in September of 2016. Sweet Potato Magic LLC will be dehydrating up to 10 million pounds of Golden Texas Sweet Potatoes for the domestic marketplace.
More RE: our sweet potato project in Texas:
In this project, we worked out a deal with a collective of organic sweet potato farmers. Individually it may have been difficult for them to implement our processes, but together, they provided enough volume of material to make the project economically feasible for everyone involved (economy of scale is clearly evident). Between the six of those farmers, they had over 4,000,000 pounds of waste already. After dehydration that means about 1,000,000 pounds of finished product. Previously they were spending a few cents per pound to convert their waste into fertilizer, however not with us, we are buying it for $.10 a pound, dehydrating it, selling the finished product for almost 3 dollars a pound, and everyone gets a piece of the pie, food is saved, waste into abundance. I hope that gives some idea of the potential of connecting even smaller scale farmers together as a collaborative effort.
We are currently engaged in discussions regarding large projects with banana peels in South America, fish waste in Alaska, more sweet potatoes in California, and shrimp and tomatoes in the Middle East, and we are just getting started!
We recently presented our food waste technologies at the Open Innovation Marketplace of the 33rd International Association of Science Parks (IASP) Conference in Moscow, Russia on the 19th-23rd of Sept. The reception was amazing, and it is clear that the world is calling for us. Let's feed the world!
We also had the distinct honor of being invited to attend SXSW Eco as an alternate in the Food and Agriculture Startup Showcase, and as a result have drawn in even more poingnant attention from investors and implementers alike. Onward and upward, stay tuned for our global expansion.
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