Waste Hater: Sun & Swell Foods
Waste Hater is a monthly series where we interview friends in the industry doing interesting and awesome work to reduce all kinds of waste, food or otherwise. This July, we spoke with Kate Flynn, the founder and CEO of Sun & Swell Foods.
Sometimes changing perspective can alter reality, and in the case of food, it’s often for the better. Kate Flynn used to spend a lot of time counting calories, keeping track of all the numbers she associated with good health, stressing to meet her marks. Protein, carbs, fat, vitamins. So much in, so much out. It was exhausting.
When the CEO of Sun & Swell Foods shifted her mindset to instead focus on eating whole foods however, she transformed her life. Rather than doing math all day, every day, she simply read the list of ingredients on what she ate. The decision would lead to better health, a stronger bond with the planet, and the birth of her very own food retail company.
“All of the sudden, it wasn't a challenge to figure out what I should be eating,” Flynn tells Replate. “I really wanted to live this lifestyle where I'm just eating real foods, foods that are as close to the Earth as possible, things that are grown in nature not made in a lab. But at the time, I was working as a consultant in the office all day and into the night, and so I was always in need of grab-and-go snacks. I couldn't ever find any in stores that fit this diet I was trying to achieve.”
Rather than continue searching, Flynn started blending. It was five years ago, at home in her kitchen, when she began experimenting with ingredients to concoct a whole food snack item, one she could personally enjoy, but also share with others. After rounds of trial and error, she landed on a recipe and began sourcing local ingredients to produce it.
From there, Flynn found a food packager, set up a website, and hustled her way to market. That one snack bite eventually became an extensive product line known as Sun & Swell Foods, which primarily includes natural raw ingredients like nuts and seeds, dried fruit, lentils, quinoa, spices and baking products, along with Flynn’s original series of cookie and snack packs.
As the business grew, ambition followed suit. Flynn felt it was important to also incorporate sustainable packing into the brand.
“I became really aware of the fact that while we were solving a health problem, we were contributing to this single use plastic problem,” Flynn recalls. “That's when we decided to start to make the transition towards compostable packaging and it's been a long journey. It's been really difficult because most people aren't using compostables in the food packing world.”
Like most items made with natural, organic ingredients, compostables have a shelf life. That expiration process was not something grocery or retail stores were prepared to manage, nor was it a challenge Flynn anticipated. As the health entrepreneur would soon learn, her new style of packaging didn’t maintain its original form the same way plastic did, the colors lost vibrancy, the material wrinkled.
“We lost a lot of customers,” she says. “We lost some of our wholesale customers, we lost shelf space, sales slowed down a little bit. That's when we decided, in this world of transitioning the industry away from plastic, we need to have more of a focus on selling our products online...We still sell conventional packaging in grocery stores. because it's just going to create a food waste problem if we don't. So for us, instead of trying to force compostable packaging for a channel that wasn't ready for it, we decided to transition our business model.”
Compostable packaging has become a selling point for Sun & Swell Foods, which prides itself on sustainability and environmental leadership particularly now that consumers are more educated and thoughtful with their spending habits. Flynn believes she couldn’t invest in something that didn’t support her goal of creating a better food system, and cites Patagonia as an example of a company that has achieved both financial and civic achievement.
Perhaps in the future, there may be a place for compostables in traditional food outlets. It’s a dream Flynn believes can be realized. As she points out, stores accommodate organic sections, why not add one for sustainably packaged foods? It could be the next phase in rebuilding the system, and reducing waste.
Flynn also hopes more businesses and consumers will gravitate towards locally-sourced products.
“It's very normal in the packaged food industry for companies to try to source the cheapest [products],” Flynn points out. “Companies are incentivized to bring down costs as low as possible, which means when it comes to sourcing ingredients, for a lot of companies it's not about sourcing the best ingredients possible. They're trying to find the cheapest ingredients possible, even if that means coming from Europe when something’s grown here in the U.S. We are focused on trying to serve as much as we can from family and organic farms.”
She adds, “I wish that nobody ever had to buy packaged food and could buy everything from your farmers markets, but we know you can't. So, in instances where you can't buy from your farmers market, we want to give you the next best option by connecting you to a farmer and selling it. And packaging that's eventually going to turn back into soil. So it won't leave a trace behind.”