Lorenzo Tirelli is head of research and development at Reduced. The main idea behind Reduced is to take byproducts from the food industry – for example, all those delicious vegetables and ingredients that don’t have the right size or appearance to end up in stores – and turn them into tasty ingredients.

One of their products is an umami mushroom sauce, perfect for adding flavor to vegetarian dishes. The sauce is made from mushrooms from a sustainable Danish farm. The mushrooms were originally discarded: they were either damaged, ‘ugly’, or the wrong size for packaging.

Denmark produces 2,500 tons of mushrooms annually, but about ten percent go straight to the trash because they don’t meet the modern food industry’s standardized criteria, such as appearance and size – superficial criteria that have nothing to do with taste or nutritional content.

"In today’s food industry, food is not only wasted because of how it looks but also due to overproduction or because ingredients are lost or underutilized. The amount of good food that goes to waste is completely insane," says Lorenzo Tirelli.

The founders of Reduced had the idea of using byproducts from the food industry to create new ingredients. Lorenzo Tirelli knew how they could do it: fermentation.

"Where should I start? I love fermentation. The most delicious foods and drinks in the world are fermented. Don’t you agree? Cheese, sourdough bread, beer, and wine. The list goes on”.

At Reduced, Lorenzo and his team have developed a unique fermentation technology that makes it possible to transform byproducts like mushrooms, broccoli, chicken, or even invasive shore crabs into super tasty sauces and broths.

"We use broken rice to grow a type of fungus called Aspergillus. Then we take some fungus and add them to the byproducts, like for instance, mushrooms. Then we add a unique blend of enzymes, mix it up with salt and water. That’s our product. Explained very, very simply," he says.