Pet deal with maker Wagalot has launched a pet food vary constructed from unsold fruit and veg rescued from Melbourne’s Prahran Market, partnering with food-waste outfit Eco Guardians to dehydrate the excess on web site.
The brand new vary, DOGood, consists of biscuits and a meal-topper “combine” offered on-line through Standout Pets and pitched as a circular-economy nibble on the 7.6 million tonnes of meals Australia chucks annually.
The corporate says each kilo of completed product diverts as much as 10kg of surplus market produce from landfill.
Eco Guardians runs its rapid-dehydration unit on web site at Prahran Market, processing produce that didn’t promote right into a shelf-stable dried base.
From there it heads to Wagalot’s Carrum Downs manufacturing unit, the place it’s blended with chia seed and oatmeal or rolled oats, chia and canola oil.
“Decreasing landfill is the important thing to decreasing carbon emissions, and by processing it onsite we additional scale back the environmental influence,” mentioned Wagalot co-founder Alice Needham.
She began the enterprise as Diamond Canine Meals & Bakery in 2010 with Philip Chaplin, earlier than rebranding and shifting to a B2B wholesale mannequin in 2016.
The corporate is finest recognized for its doggy birthday-cake kits and now operates from its third Carrum Downs manufacturing unit, supplying round 600 pet retailers throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Eco Guardians’ head of sustainability and partnerships Sophie Thorne reckons the mannequin may go additional.
“The actual alternative right here is scale,” she mentioned. “If fashions like this have been adopted extra broadly throughout markets and provide chains, the influence on Australia’s meals waste drawback may very well be important.”
Meals waste accounts for round 3% of Australia’s annual greenhouse fuel emissions and prices the financial system roughly $36 billion a 12 months, and the nation is theoretically meant to halve it by 2030 — a goal that, midway by the timetable, is wanting formidable.
A number of Aussie climate-tech outfits have been chewing by the identical drawback from totally different angles, together with Cannon-Brookes-backed Goterra, Blackbird-backed Bardee, and Breakthrough Victoria-backed Viridian, all utilizing black soldier fly larvae to show meals scraps into insect protein for animal feed.
DOGood’s twist is to skip the maggots and go straight on the client aisle. Whether or not that lands with customers — Viridian had its personal pet deal with model, One with Every thing, which was quietly discontinued — is the half that will get examined within the bowl.
