The cost of food waste to the Australian economy is estimated to be around $20 billion each year. Australian consumers throw away around 3.1 million tonnes of food—that’s close to 17,000 grounded 747 jumbo jets – and another 2.2 million tonnes is disposed of by the commercial and industrial sector. In fact, up to 25% of all vegetables produced never leave the farm and 1,460 gigalitres of water is used annually to grow Australian produce that is thrown out.

Whole. is bringing to market a proprietary technology that enables cost-effective and large-scale production of plant-based products using produce that would otherwise be wasted. What makes this technology unique is that it’s 100% free of any chemical processing, produces no waste, and maintains all of the nutritional goodness of the original ingredients. Beyond that, we are also enabling a return to eating 'whole foods', which has a myriad of proven health and disease-prevention benefits.

While most competitors are focused on the production of specialised ingredients (e.g., protein isolates), the Whole. advantage is embedded in its ability to utilise waste and efficiently process the ‘whole’ ingredient. This simplification of the process not only yields more nutritional outputs, but significantly reduces the capital and operational expenditure involved in the food/ingredient manufacturing process. Most importantly, the process eliminates waste (as well as costs associated with waste disposal) by converting it into a soluble fibre that forms an integral part of the output product.

Before incorporating the company in 2020, the Whole. founder team spent the preceding three years designing, developing and de-risking the underlying technology to the point that it is now fully ready for commercialisation. In terms of scalability of the solution, we have developed a low cost and highly-modular design that is aimed at targeting major sources of agricultural waste.