EP59. How Upcycled Waste built a Global Beauty Brand

Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations, the podcast that challenges you to think about how you buy, use, make and sell your natural beauty formulations. We tackle topics that will make you think and encourage debate about green beauty with your friends, followers or customers. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmeyer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organizations Organic Cosmetic Formulation School Formula Botanica. We have thousands of students in 170 countries worldwide who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. Today's podcast looks at upcycled ingredients for green beauty. Ingredients that are derived from someone else's waste or by products products. I've seen so many beauty entrepreneurs over the years talk about the potential for using different by products in their formulations. But until now, given the complexities involved with collecting, drying and reprocessing waste ingredients, I've never seen anyone do this at scale. So I am delighted today to be joined by Anna Brightman, co founder of Upcircle Beauty, who started her brand with her brother in 2015 and against all advice decided to start using waste coffee grounds in their body scrubs. Fast forward to today and they now use 10 different upcycled ingredients with many more on the horizon and manufacture hundreds of thousands of units of skincare per year while selling all over the world. Welcome to the podcast, Anna.

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

So let's dive straight in. What is an upcycled ingredient and can you give us any examples?

Of course. So upcycling essentially is about reusing an object or material that already exists in order to create something completely new that is of value. So it goes back to that well known saying of one person's trash is another's treasure. We work with two different sorts of upcycled ingredients. So the first would be what I would call a byproduct. So it's not needed in the original process. It's not actually processed at all. So often that could be the outside of a plant. Think of husks shells. An example would be hemp husks that we used to use in face masks or argan shells that we use in our face moisturiser. So they are a part of the plant. If you're using natural ingredients that is completely unneeded in the original process of farming or harvesting that plant, the second type would be something that is a non needed output from the original process so they are used in the process of making an end product, but they leave something behind that is of value. So an example of this would be the obvious one, coffee grounds, but also chai tea, spices or fruit stones. So for example, our face mask is made with powdered olive stones. Olive stones are compressed in order to make olive oil. But what is left behind, the residue, the compressed stones still have a lot of great skin care benefits. So those are the two kind of categories of upcycled ingredients that we work with outside of just skincare. I suppose we, we actually use our blog as a nice channel through which to inspire inspiration with upcycling from all different perspectives. So for example, we did a post recently on making plant stands out of the inner cardboard rolls of tape. Obviously we go through a lot of tape in our warehouse and the girl who is managing our warehouse used to always save them up. I'm like, what are you doing with that? And she showed pictures of these beautiful plant stands that she made out of them. So that would be a completely non skincare related example. Equally, one of our customers sent us pictures of her children playing at home with the cornstarch packaging that some of the bigger glass bottles that our products come in are sometimes packaged with. They're completely biodegradable. And what they had somehow noticed is that if you dampen them, they go sticky and they turn into almost like a glue. So her children were using them to make little houses and little dolls houses and things like that. So those are some kind of skincare related and completely non skincare related examples of upcycling. But the long and short of it, it is finding new value in things that already exist. And the broader outcome of that, I suppose, is that it makes you reconsider what you are thinking of as waste in the first place. And I love the expression that waste is only waste when it's wasted. That's exactly what upcycling is all about.

Gosh, that's so inspirational and so amazing that you've managed to build a whole business off the back of this ethos. So congratulations.

Oh, thank you.

So is there a clear cut definition of upcycling then? Or do different people approach it in different ways?

I think the basic sort of idea is fairly easy to grasp. There are a few different words that get used. You get recycling, upcycling repurposed, but essentially it all means the same thing. It's trying to minimize waste through being more imaginative with things that already exist, or kind of starting the journey of that material or ingredient again. So kind of moving to A more circular as opposed to a linear approach, extending life cycles, that sort of thing. But yeah, they all, they all pretty much follow the same overall aims.

Okay, so now thinking about all these beauty brands out there who might be listening as well as people who obviously want to buy products, and they're thinking, okay, how do you find ingredients in abundance that can be upcycled? For instance, I know you work with coffee grounds. How have you kept going throughout the pandemic when coffee shops have been shut?

So a more kind of general approach when it comes to ingredients is to keep our eyes up and to always stay curious. One of our taglines is to see potential where others don't. And we do that in everyday life all the time. It was through natural curiosity that we had the idea for our brand in the first place. You know, my brother was going to work in the morning, went into his normal local coffee shop, sees hundreds, if not thousands of people walk past him every single morning with a coffee. And so we literally just asked the barista, what do you do with all of this coffee at the end of the day? And then through finding out that answer was how the kind of seeds of this idea even began. It's just being curious, asking questions and grabbing opportunity when it comes your way. So, for example, you know, all the time I get brands who want to do, like a social media collaboration. For example, an example of this specifically was a matcha brand. And they said, oh, you know, would you like to partner with us for social media? I said, okay, yeah, sure. But by the way, when you make your matcha powders, are there byproducts like, yes, okay, you use the leaves, but do you use the stems? Is this something that maybe I could work with here from a broad perspective? Even this week we had a acai berry company who make juices and stuff contacting us. And they just mentioned in their footer that they also sell bracelets to the local communities made with the byproduct seeds like the husks. And I was like, oh, interesting. How many of those do you have? Could that be an ingredient that we could work with? I'm always just asking questions and seeing how other people work. One of the previous premises that we used to work out of was a railway arch, and all of the other archways were occupied by florists. Just through looking at how they worked every day, I saw that on Tuesdays they throw away all of the flowers that they haven't sold in the previous week. So I just started putting a bin out, a big barrel and saying, hey guys, instead of putting them in the bin, would you mind putting them in here? And now I'm working through the early stages of using those in bath products. So, you know, it's. I think all natural entrepreneurs will have this thinking outside the box, problem solving kind of attitude that's ingrained in, in people who want to start a business in the first place. When it comes to coffee and Covid, it's obviously been a challenge and we've had to draw on that natural drive to figure things out and to make it work. We were fortunate in that we had just finished a huge coffee collection literally three days before all the coffee shops started to close. So at the very start of it, we were sat on large volumes of stock, which is just pure luck. But in anticipation of not knowing how long this whole process was going to go on for, even though we were sat on such large amounts of stock, which we normally then wouldn't be starting to begin the next round because stock in, stock out, constant rotation. But we immediately started looking at solutions. So we basically worked with mobile trucks, few areas of hospitality, just other businesses that were still in operation that weren't the standard coffee shops, largely mobile trucks. So the volumes that we were able to collect were much less, but we were extremely proactive with it so that, you know, in times that we wouldn't even be needing to worry about it, we were worrying about it much sooner because the, the time taken to, to get it all ready and to get the volumes that we needed were much longer. But yeah, we were very, very lucky with the timing of it. And we've just as with everything, found a way to make it work.

The sign of a true entrepreneur. I mean, what sort of volumes are you using in your business? Because obviously upcircle beauty is growing and you must need a fair amount. So how much, how much coffee, for instance, are you collecting when the coffee shops are open?

A few hundred kilograms a day. We do it in rounds. So at the minute we're not collecting every single day, every single day of the year sort of thing, but we do it in kind of rotations. So we might collect for a month or two months and then that will make us one big, big batch of scrubs that we can then sell through. It's all kind of like a supply and demand thing. So as we're now ramping up to Christmas, obviously we are getting ready and so we're building our inventory at the minute, more so than we would do in sort of March, April kind of time. Overall, we've saved just over 275 tons of coffee grounds from being sent to landfill by converting them into our scrubs. So, yeah, it's getting into some pretty big numbers now, which is really exciting. And we collect from just over 100 small chain and independent coffee shops across London.

Wow, that is so inspirational. Well done. I can imagine you sitting there on these tons of coffee grounds and other upcycled ingredients. What are the complexities of formulating with upcycled ingredients? For instance, how do you ensure that they're dried properly from a good manufacturing perspective? And how do you get consistency between batches?

Yeah, honestly, it's a process. It takes time and our testing phases take longer. There's much more experimentation, there's a much longer process of refinement. Again, goes back to your personal character and desire to make something work. You have to be willing to start over. And our partnership with our manufacturers is incredibly important. They have to get it, they have to understand why we're doing it and they have to equally have that drive to make it work because it's much more complicated. You face a lot more challenges than you would do if you were just using all fresh, brand new, perfectly processed ingredients like other brands are. But, you know, anything that someone's doing for the first time is going to be challenging, which is what makes it all the more rewarding. When we can make an ingredient really work, it takes a lot of time. We have to just question things, perhaps a lot more. You know, we have to think about potential problems much more than you would otherwise. And one of those often is, how much of this ingredient can I get and will it be the same each time? Think about the process. But the coffee, I would say is probably the main ingredient that we really have been the first to tackle. We tried all sorts of different things. Of course we have to go through the same testing and regulations as any other non upcycled ingredients. But consistency just comes down to the understanding of the manufacturer and the sourcing. So with a lot of our ingredients that we're repurposing, we actually get them from, from one source and therefore it is fairly consistent each time. So for example, the chai tea spices, they are all sourced from one UK based family run chai tea company. So that process for them is pretty much exactly the same each time they do it. So how we then receive it is the same each time and then how we process it is the same each time. The process of us figuring that out takes lots of different decisions until we make it work. But once we make it work, we just do it exactly the same way each time and then so long as our manufacturers are following a recipe sort of thing, an accurate way, the output product is consistent. I guess the kind of natural variation that you might get is just the same as any other natural skincare brand. Nothing more complicated than that. Once you've actually figured out how to process the original ingredient.

And how do you go about drying then hundreds of kilos of coffee grounds? Because obviously once they come from the coffee shop, there's still that moisture in them, they're still wet. How does that work at that scale?

So the first part of the process with the coffee happens from us. So we have our manufacturers, they're UK based, everything's made by hand in the uk, but what we do in terms of in house upcircle team is we process our upcycled ingredients before sending to them in a kind of ready to make format. So the coffee does go for a big process. We try not to say too much because we're aware that we're the only people who figured out how to do this at scale and there's lots of people trying to find out. But, yeah, it goes for a very thorough filtration process, which essentially the main thing that we're looking for there is sometimes a whole bean might slip through, which will block a tube. The education from the kind of barista perspective is also very important. So we work with, yes, we grow our list gradually as the brand grows, but most of our coffee suppliers we've been working with from quite early on so they understand why we're making it. We always go in whenever there's staff turnover and make sure we're talking about who we are, why we're doing it. That mint leaf might be an organic ingredient, but this is not compost. This must be pure coffee. And sometimes with different coffee shops, the wetness of the coffee grounds will vary a lot. So again, we've tried to work with lots more different coffee shops and then for whatever reason, the processing and all the output ingredient, their grounds are not appropriate for use in our products. So we just say, hey, I'm sorry, guys, but this isn't going to work for us. We know the consistency of what works and what we can process and we know what doesn't. Some are much coarser, some are much wetter. So some work, some, some don't work. But the list that we work with of coffee suppliers is of the consistency, the texture, the dampness that we can process and work with effectively, that works in our scrubs. But yeah, takes a lot of time. And unfortunately you do have to say no to people sometimes because it will be more of a liquid than a solid, which is not something that works for our formulations.

Wow. It sounds like you've put a huge amount of effort into this, not only in terms of building relationships, but also in terms of the and development effectively for finding the ingredients. So hats off to you because I can only imagine how much work that has been. So, playing devil's advocate for a minute, how sustainable is something like this? Because I know we're talking about, you know, waste is only waste if it's wasted. I love that. Obviously you're preventing an ingredient from going to waste, but you're still having to collect it, you're still having to dry it, having to process it. Have you looked at the overall sustainability of some of your upcycled ingredients?

This is just of paramount importance, really, you know, the overall sustainability. And then the other thing I always mention is actually the effectiveness in skincare. We can upcycle a million different ingredients, but if they're not high performing as skincare ingredients, then there really is no point in us even looking at them. So that's the other thing that is incredibly important, is that we are only recycling upcycling ingredients that have specific benefits in the products that we're trying to produce. Yeah. You know, you can buy a moisturizer that's made with these beautiful upcycled ingredients, but if it doesn't moisturize your skin, then what's the point? And yes, the overall sustainability is very important. And we look at this on a case by case basis. A good example of this, I suppose, would be one of the newer ingredients that we've started working with, which are residual fruit waters that are by products from the juicing industry. And this is an example of taking a single ingredient and then finding a version of that ingredient that is both better for your skin and more sustainable. So why wouldn't you use it? So let's take Mandarin water, for example. We've just started upcycling that into our new face toner. It's a byproduct of the juicing industry. So Mandarin grows organically in the Mediterranean. The fruit is squeezed, the juice is collected and concentrated by reducing the water content. The water then becomes a byproduct. So we collect that water and we reutilise it. If you look in your bathroom cabinets at your skin care products, what you'll see is that with the vast majority of them, water is the first ingredient. And so often it does therefore play an important role in the overall sustainability of your formulation. If you think about a fruit water, it's kind of fortified vitamins, minerals, amino acids. It's got more skincare benefits than a filtered mineral water. And it's also a great target ingredient for replacing with a more sustainable alternative. You know, it's enriched and if you're using a byproduct water, then it's more sustainable. So in this instance, as with all of the ingredients that we work with, we talk about the win win test. Does the ingredient pass the win win test? Is it a win for us? Is it a win for your skin and is it a win for the original person, you know, farming it, I suppose, and going back to the original people farming it, that also is incredibly important, you know, the ethics of the ingredient in the first place. So another example would be date seed extract that we repurpose into our body cream. The dates are grown in Israel and the seeds are again completely discarded by the growers. They have no value. So from the fact that we are then saying, actually we think there is value in that, please can we purchase it from you? We are providing an entire new revenue stream for those growers that previously didn't even have that. So you're kind of improving the efficiency of the original ingredient. You're supporting the industry, you're supporting the people behind it by, you know, finding value in that thing that they weren't even considering before. It's all about, you know, the importance of farming a plant and then finding use in every single part of that plant, making use of all of it. The more use you can get from it, the more benefit there is from the person growing it. So that all comes into the overall sustainability, fair trade and ethics behind all of the ingredients that we're working with. Absolutely.

There's no clear cut answer, but I thought I'd just challenge you a little bit on that one.

No, no, absolutely.

How would a pity brand wanting to use upcycled ingredients look to scale? I mean, you've touched on this a little bit already and obviously, you know, you are very entrepreneurial, you are out there building relationships. But how have you managed so far to start with? Well, effectively nothing and scale to where you are today?

I think it's one of the first things that I'm, I'm asking when I'm in the very early phases of starting to work with an ingredient. How much of this are you producing? Yeah, okay, it might make a beautiful product, but if I can then only sell 50 a week, because that's all that you can give me. Then that's unfortunately not going to work. So it's about, you know, you might have the idea. So you might have the idea, okay, I want to work with flower petals. But you then need to find, is it maybe a wedding venue that hosts 100 weddings a year and therefore has a huge amount of flower petals. It's about finding the business or industry or locations around that ingredient that are producing that ingredient in vast quantities and that want to give it to you and you know, does it pass the win win test? So with the coffee, I mean, I'm quite pleased at this phase of the brand. We're still quite young, we're only four years old as a brand, but we have faced a lot of skepticism. Let's say people saying, okay, yeah, cute idea, really nice, good for you. But how on earth are you going to scale that? And I would like to think now that we are kind of a global brand, we've got more than 800 US stockists alone, that we've proven the point that it can be scalable. But it does go back to what I was saying earlier about just being willing to start again time and time again until you figure it out. And once you've figured it out, that's the point at which you scale it. So we started with one coffee shop, a lot of experimentation. Things that work, things that didn't work, and then all you need to do is multiply that. Similarly, right now we're collecting in, in London and kind of specific areas of London that are really concentrated with regards to coffee shops. Although to be honest, in London that could be all of London. And now that this process works, all that we need to do is either increase the frequency that we're collecting or increase the locations that we're collecting from. So you pick another city and set up the exact same process there. Yeah, it's, it's finding out how it works and then multiplying that process. But you have to ask the sensible questions at the very start or else you really are just wasting your own time. So yeah, I'm saying to businesses at the start, and finding businesses particularly really helps around the original repurposed ingredients that you're trying to work with. Because often it's businesses, not individuals, that are producing things in their original instance at scale. So they've done the scaling for you, essentially.

So just to inspire our listeners, then, how many units are you producing each year? How many are you manufacturing?

Hundreds of thousands. What's really exciting for us is that we started out just working with one ingredient, which is the coffee. We now repurpose 10 ingredients into our formulations and we've got another three products launching before, before Christmas, and right now we're recording in mid October. We've grown our team from. We were a team of three last year, we're now a team of nine. And we've got three potential hires coming in January. You know, 275 tons of coffee repurposed. Every single batch of our soaps repurposes. Eight tons of chai tea spices. So we, yeah, we try to look at our growth and, you know, I guess our successes through all of these different means growing the team, expanding the range, expanding the repurposed ingredient portfolio and of course, selling the products. So I like to think that we are an example of if you persevere, you can, you can make it work. No, no idea. Is too wacky. We had loads of people, investors saying, gosh, waste beauty industry, don't even go there. They're not ready. It's a fickle and shallow industry. Don't do it. But, you know, we did. And I do think that it's because we stand out from the crowd and we've taken the next step with regards to sustainability. Yes, you can be vegan, yes, you can be cruelty free, yes, you can be natural. But skincare is a very crowded market and most brands are those things. Now, that is entry level requirements. So, yeah, be bold, be brave and go for it.

Well, I'd say you've proven everyone wrong, so congratulations. I'm surprised you have any time to sleep at night, actually.

It's funny, I'm building our meet the Team page on our website at the moment and I'm putting. So I founded upcircle with my brother and that's helpful in many ways because you can expect a lot more of each other when you're family. But there's this whole operation. I was, yes, I'm building this, this team page and I'm thinking, oh, it's a bit of a piss. Take that. I'm not putting the entirety of my family on here like my brother's wife. Whenever we are trying to hire someone and we're going through that process, that's when you're basically most desperate for more people. But the process actually increases your workload because you're distracted, you might be having to train someone, et cetera. She just steps into every single role when we're going through that process of hiring someone. She's on maternity at the Moment. So, yeah, sleep, which is ironic because sleep is so important for your skin, but it's a challenge. We're getting better every day as we grow. The team growing from three to nearly 10 has been transformational, so I hope that that sleep and work life balance will only improve. Let's see.

Fingers crossed. I identify saying because my mother is our financial controller as well. So I totally get the fact that you put your family in there because.

That'S how you get things. That's it, that's it.

So one final question then is, do you think we'll ever get to the stage that a beauty products can be made of fully upcycled ingredients or are we there already?

I think yes. I think there's absolutely no reason why not. I think that even in the last four or five years, whilst we've been doing what we've been doing, I've seen big, big brands start asking questions about upcycling ingredients in ways that they would never have even considered it before. Look at the rise of veganism, for example. That's another great example of how something that seemed so niche, so, you know, only Eco Warrior has now become completely mainstream. And I think that we'll see the same thing with a more cyclical, circular approach and people being more interested in upcycling and finding use for ingredients that already exist. You know, I don't think 10 years ago you would see the likes of Garnier, Maybelline, you know, these huge brands talking about cruelty free and vegan ingredients and yet that's now all you can see on tv. I think the same thing is going to happen with ingredient sourcing and businesses that might be in completely different industries might actually think, oh, gosh, yeah, that's, that's sensible. You know, is this something that doesn't give me any benefit in my industry, but that I might be able to sell into a different industry? And then it also, you know, it benefits me and it's more sustainable. So the amount of repurposed ingredient per formulation with our products varies massively. Some is less than 50%, some is way over 50%. So if just in four years, as one of the first brands doing this, we can do that, then why on earth can't this be the status quo in the future? And I hope it is. Absolutely.

And on those motivational words, I'll bring this podcast to a close. But I have to say I am so impressed by what you've achieved, Anna. It is truly incredible. You are a pioneer, so hats off to you and your whole family. So incredible. So well done.

Thank you.

If our listeners want to learn more about you and upcircle Beauty, where should they come and check you out and find you?

So Our website is upcirclebeauty.com there's loads of info on there. Hopefully I will have finished our Meet the Team page by then. Our Instagram is also upcirclebeauty, as are all of our other socials. As I mentioned. Like our blog, we try to discuss broader sustainability and upcycling issues not just in skincare, but in all things to kind of in space, inspire discussion and conversation. So please do check us out. Absolutely.

And we'll include those links with the podcast notes as well. Thank you so much for joining me today, Anna. It's been brilliant.

Thank you so much. What a great way to start a Friday.

So I hope this podcast has inspired you to start viewing waste ingredients in a completely different way. Anna's story is inspirational. She and her brother are pioneers in this new world of sustainability and beauty. And I hope that you also now see the unlimited potential for innovation, creativity and collaboration that upcycling can bring to beauty. Which ingredients could you think of that could be upcycled in beauty formulations? Please do join the discussion and leave us a comment on our social channels to tell us what you think. The Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you, so come and tell us your views. Thank you for joining Anna and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations where we looked at upcycling in beauty. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you subscribe to our podcast on itunes or Spotify and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanica Formula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest or LinkedIn. Visit our website at formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today. Sam.