The most nutritious part of a vegetable or fruit is often what gets discarded before processing. But what if you could use the discards in the product and send nothing to the POTW? No more tomato skins, apple cores and peels, orange rinds and seeds, squash seeds/pulp—and the list goes on—to waste collection/processing. Good nutrition and good for the planet.
Ten years ago, cofounders of Cape Town, South Africa-based Green Cell Technologies, Roy Henderson (CEO) and Jan Vlok (research and development director), set about to design a food processing machine that ostensibly could use every part of a vegetable or fruit—or indeed, any organic plant material—in the making of a purée, juice, emulsion or extract, creating less wastage and increasing food security for peoples of the world where crops were already in short supply. What the two South Africans found was that such a machine needed Space-Age materials to make it work, and once they were able to create a working unit, what it could do surprised even them.