E079 - Amanda Weeks from Ambrosia, creator of Veles

Quick word from our sponsor, 51toCarbonZero.com. If you're a CFO or board member staring down CSRD or Scope 3 and thinking, where do we even start? We at Sustainability Solved would point you to 51toCarbonZero.com. They turn complex, fragmented emissions data into something simple and give boards clear, audit-ready visibility on exactly where the reduction opportunities are. It's not another reporting tool that adds work. It's built so the data holds up when your auditor asks the hard questions. If that's a conversation worth having, get in touch with 51tocarbonzero.com, or just drop me a message and I'll point you in the right direction. Right, back to the episode.

Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. This week we've got Veles. Veles is a company that are changing the way that we look at cleaning products. They make an all-purpose cleaning spray out of food waste. How cool is that? Welcome to the Green Element Podcast, Amanda. Thank you so much for coming on it today. I'm really looking forward to finding out more about your new product, cleaning product, Velez. Please introduce yourself and Velez. Sure.

So I'm Amanda Weeks. I'm the CEO and founder of Ambrosia, the company that makes I've been working on solutions to food waste and sustainability for about 6 years now.

Brilliant. And how did you get into this subject and/or this product and this area of life?

Sometimes I like to say that I was bored, and I think it was just that I was feeling— I'm sure a lot of people feel this way— out of school for a while. You know, I had been working for almost 10 years and just hadn't really found, just kind of getting, taking jobs as they came. Didn't really feel like what I was doing mattered. And so I started looking into food more like 2011 or 2012. I actually almost ran away from New York City to work on a dairy farm, but then I pulled back from that. And just really started looking into sustainability, products, food, supply chain, all these issues that have now become really prominent today.

Mm-hmm.

And in around early 2014 was when I started really looking at food waste. And at that same time, New York City had passed a mandate for businesses to avoid sending their food waste to landfill. And a bunch of other cities and states were doing the same and have done so since. However, there was a major lack of scalable food waste diversion solutions. So I sought to develop technologies that would utilize food waste in a manufacturing environment that could be done in cities as a waste management solution.

Okay, and so what does Ambrosia do?

So when we started, we were really focused on developing a food waste processing technology for waste infrastructure. And that's still a part of the company, that's still the other side of the company, is that we are planning a waste utility for cities around the US and hopefully globally. to take food waste out of the waste stream and do something else with it. And by doing something else with it, you also need to be considerate of the end markets. You know, there's only so much compost you can sell, and it's not very valuable. And so if you can't sell tons and tons and tons of compost, you can't compost tons and tons and tons of food waste consistently.

Mm-hmm.

And so what we set out to do was to experiment with a way to process food waste in cities that could then be further processed into more valuable products. And so the first products that we came up with was a multi-surface cleaner. It's an area where I think cleaners were one of the first types of products where people really started thinking about what the ingredients were and more natural products became the norm. Now that's happening in other areas. But it seemed like it was a natural next step for us to take the cleaning product category and start talking more about, okay, well, you have a natural cleaner now, but where are those plant-based ingredients coming from? You know, it's still in a plastic bottle and trying to then move that industry forward. And then hopefully that will impact other types of categories.

And can you take any food waste? And does it have to be segregated at source in a separate compost bin, and then you would take that compost bin and use it in your processing?

We can take any type of food waste. It was very important to us as a solution to be able to handle, you know, pre- and post-consumer food waste as opposed to just vegetative or just, you know, a certain stream. And it is source-separated. So we do have a sorting element to our process, both in the beginning and at the end. But generally speaking, yes, the food waste that we receive is put in a separate bin at its origin.

Okay. And do you get the food waste from, i.e., consumer or maybe office or catering, etc.? Or is it from major caterers. So not manufacturing side, because you can't really say you manufacture sandwiches on a lot, but it is really kind of manufacturing.

Yeah. If you're a company—

I just don't want to say that because I eat those sandwiches. I don't feel like manufacturing is the right adjective.

It is actually food manufacturing. So a bag of chips, I mean, you know, a mass-produced bag of chips. Yeah, that's food manufacturing. So what we do is we're trying to plug into the existing waste industry. So we partner with waste haulers. That could be a public waste hauler, like from a city that's collecting food waste from residents, or that could be a private waste hauler that serves commercial customers. So that could be a restaurant or a stadium or a hotel, an office building, any business that's generating food waste.

Brilliant. Okay, that's great. That's really, really good. It is a big issue. What's nice is it's actually becoming a bigger issue, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

I've been doing this for nearly 20 years now, and we would get our— the businesses we worked with to compost. But if I'm being honest, we would be putting in wormeries. We would be trying our best to— and because you get commercial wormeries, and it was hard work. It was quite hard work to work out what to do. with that waste. And I— there are biodigesters now, that's commercial ones, that a lot of the waste, food waste, does go to in the UK. But it's still— they have to have those volumes in order to keep it running. And it's hard for the biodigesters as well. And the technologies have changed massively over the last number of years, and they've certainly got more competent, or, you know, they don't break down as much as they used to. But that's brilliant. That's really, really good. And so you've got a cleaning product that you have put together out of the food waste. I don't want to go into the process of how you do that, but the end product is a cleaning product as good as— I can't name many brands because the audiences around the world are not going to know what those brands are anyway. So a well-known brand of cleaning product. And is it a particular type of cleaning product as well? Because, you know, you've got glass cleaner, you've got bacterial cleaner, etc.

Yeah, so it is a multi-surface cleaner. So we've tested it on glass, we've tested it on stainless steel. And I think that that's, you know, general purpose cleaning seems to be more of the norm now. You don't have 5 different cleaning products under your sink for 5 different surfaces. You just have one. And we have done a number of third-party tests on different surfaces against different types of cleaning product brands, from conventional brands to natural brands. And one of the reasons why we decided to launch this product ahead of some of the other things that we had originally been working on— this is something we actually stumbled across accidentally— is because it performs so well. It outperformed our expectations every single time we've tested it. We're actually about to do another round of tests now that we've just launched and finalized our formulation. But yeah, it performs really, really well. I use it at home and I've been using it for a long time now. I've used all of our past iterations and samples.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, it performs well cleaning a variety of surfaces and a variety of different types of soils. So, a couple of the tests that have been done, there's actually standardized tests that cleaning product labs specifically do that recreate soap scum, for example. So, there's a specific ratio of ingredients like hair gel and toothpaste that a lab will use to create soap scum so that it's standard across the tests. And we performed really well on those. It's actually going to be— some of those test results are actually going to be on our website.

Okay.

And something that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to share with people and educate them about is how are these tests actually done and what do these claims mean? Because I think that, you know, what we're trying to do as a brand is we're, you know, not only making this product that is utilizing a waste material that left to rot would contribute to climate change through methane emissions, or simplifying the supply chain by deriving our own ingredients and manufacturing our product ourselves as opposed to sourcing raw materials from all over the world. And then it's also transparency. It's trying to peel the curtain back a little bit on how your average product really is made and tested and gets to you.

Okay. And I would have been surprised if you'd have turned around and gone, no, it's not nearly as good as some of them, but we've made it out of food waste. So it's nice to know that it actually is really, really good.

Oh yeah, right. I mean, that was the whole thing when we were— so last year we worked with a design agency to do all of our packaging design and everything. And we were working on, you know, our copywriting and our messaging. And we were talking about all this stuff, all these food waste stats and all the impact and everything. And I kept saying, but we can't forget to tell people that it works.

Yeah.

And because we need to make sure we fit that in because it does. And we want to make sure that You know, we're not just selling a message, that we are selling an effective product.

Yeah.

The other thing that we were— that we spent a lot of time on was the fragrance. We wanted it to smell good but not be overpowering or too fragrancy. It's the first thing that people ask me when I talk about this product is, what does it smell like? And I can tell you that we had 600 gallons of it for our first bottling run on Tuesday. being put into bottles and the entire place smelled great and we were very happy. That was another big objective of ours, was getting the fragrance right.

Brilliant. I guess a good litmus test would be to give it to your grandmother or— because, and actually I was gonna say, to be honest with you, what I was actually gonna say was your office cleaners, because one of the things that we have a real Not a problem with, but it's quite hard work sometimes is saying, use more environmentally friendly cleaners. The business that we're working with, they're going, yeah, brilliant. Let's get that. Cleaners come in and they sneak bleach in. It actually happens less now than it used to, but the bleach did come in years ago, but now we're seeing more of just, well, there's almost a reticence of, well, if I have to do it quickly, then I have to do it. It was just a litmus test of, you know, people are quite stuck in the way that they think. And I would imagine that that's going to be a barrier to entry for you is that's— and you were talking about and inferring to it about the messaging that you are going to have to do about, yes, our product does work. It's great that it's made out of this. And, but actually it does work. And we've seen quite a big Barrier to— and I love how you put inverted commas on green products because for obvious reasons we push those. But, you know, if there's a better product out there, then we'll blatantly be pushing— we're pushing that. But at that point, it's still quite hard to push the green products. It's getting easier now because more and more commercial cleaning companies are going, yes, we're environmental, we're sustainable, the stuff that we use is sustainable. But I remember the first When green products started to come out and Ecover or Method or some of the better-known brands were pushing their cleaning products, the cleaners were going, no, we'll use bleach, we know it works. And no, you can't. And it's going to be quite hard to get that, that change happening and getting people to use products.

I think so. Well, I think that where When we launch, we're going to be targeting a very specific consumer, someone who is already looking for alternatives. And I think that that pool is growing. And so hopefully as we build our awareness, as we develop our brand and refine our messaging, hopefully we'll reach more people who maybe aren't the early adopters. But my mother is not a very eco-friendly, environmentally conscious person. And I mean, I guess it's kind of— she's also biased, but she's very excited about the product. She can't wait to use it. I don't know if it's just because it's a thing that I made. Maybe it is. Maybe this is a horrible—

I would imagine that that's got something to do with it.

But she's been telling all her friends about it, and she has friends who, you know, who are boomers and who are the kind of people who you would think maybe wouldn't be interested in a product like this. And she's telling me that she has friends who use all the green products and are really into it. So, I think that there are more people, especially when you bring it back to public health and when people start to think about the chemicals that they're using and their own health, and that's the first— that's sort of the gateway of people beginning to look at the ingredients of their products and be open to trying more products. That are more, you know, clean or environmentally friendly, then I think that it's not a hard push from there to think about also the impact and the sustainability of that product. Because, you know, as I was saying before, not only are we making this from food waste, we're also making our own ingredients and manufacturing it ourselves, which is very unusual. Most products require third-party formulators. They supply all their raw materials from outside vendors. Sometimes they use different manufacturing partners and they don't manufacture any of their products at all.

Mm-hmm.

And just the fact that we're making all of that under one roof and we're cutting out that whole supply chain, I think even beyond the fact that it's being about food waste, I think that just that reducing that footprint alone, I think could be Yeah. And is more sort of digestible, so to speak.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Have you actually looked at the carbon footprint of that whole process, and, or in your case, the lack of it, as it were? Because that's, as you say, is actually going to make quite a big difference on the way that you run your business.

Yeah, not definitively. Those studies are pretty expensive.

Yeah.

Generally want to hire a firm to do them. So it's something that we've talked about before, but I think it's probably a little bit in the future for us to get into making any specific claims around that. But I think that just generally speaking, if you have a material that changes hand 5 times and if you have a material that changes hand 2 times, Then, you know, the one that changes hands 2 times is going to have a smaller footprint. But I think anything more definitive than that, I think we're going to have to wait until we can really pay for a comprehensive study.

I know a very good company that does that called Green Elements. I'm joking. We were talking about the food waste, and it'd be good to explore the diversion of the food waste and how much— because you've got some of the statistics on your website about how much food waste has actually been diverted from landfills, and you've worked out, what, 2.5 million tonnes?

Yeah.

If we could explore how you've come to those conclusions. That would be great, please.

Yeah. And so that's a hypothetical. So that's a scenario on our website where we said if every household bought, I think it's like a bottle, like went through a bottle every month of cleaner, they would be saving 2.5 million tonnes of food waste from landfill, I think is the stat that's on the website. And that's based on our own process. So that's just based on what we know about our yields of how much food waste goes into making that many bottles for every household in the US.

Mm-hmm.

And then that's also based on how much water we know is in food waste. So the, the amount of water that's in the product that we're deriving from food waste then informs the water savings. And then the greenhouse gas estimate. So it's estimated that every ton of food waste generates about 2 tons of methane or greenhouse gas equivalent emissions in a landfill in its lifetime. And so we estimated how, based on the millions of tons of food waste, that we would divert by making our product, what equivalent of that would be in greenhouse gas reduction. And then I looked up like a stat, I'll have to find it again, for how, what kind of emissions a car generates every year. So then we just calculated based on that, that would be the equivalent of taking, what is it, 1.5 million? Is that—

Yeah, that's what you've got on there, yeah.

Yeah. So that's essentially where those numbers are coming from.

That makes sense. It's interesting to read that because the messaging will be different in different countries because of the different waste strategies. Coming from the UK and knowing the UK waste strategy, very little of our food waste goes to landfill. It's already diverted into either big compostable commercial compostable usually, or as I was talking about before, biodiversity, biodigesters, and etc. And the packaging that you have for your cleaning products, how have you made that? Is that something that you make yourself or?

No, it's not. And I also want to, want to say that I'm not very up on my knowledge of this, but I'm fairly certain that in the UK your biodigesters are heavily subsidized by the government.

Yeah.

Because it's a very expensive process. And what we're trying to do is to make a process that doesn't need to be subsidized because we're We're diversifying our end revenues and also creating a less expensive operation. So just to touch upon that really briefly.

That's good. And it's actually quite— that's actually really important to highlight, actually, because we do forget that there is technology out there, but it is massively subsidized. And just because it's out there doesn't mean that it's the right thing to do, even though it's the right thing at that time being subsidized. That makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. So for our packaging, we don't make our packaging. We're a small team, maybe someday. But our bottle is aluminum. And aluminum today is probably the most robust option in terms of circularity for a packaging material. It never downgrades, it's infinitely recyclable, it can be recycled quickly. I think there's a stat that aluminum can be back on the shelf in 2 months after it's recycled, that there's still aluminum in circulation from the 1940s.

Whoa.

Because it's actually cheaper to make aluminum from recycled than from raw.

Interesting.

Yeah, and aluminum has been in circulation for so long that generally you can assume that anywhere you live it will be recycled and it will be accepted, as opposed to, you know, depending on where you live, certain plastics are or aren't— glass sometimes isn't, at least in the US, accepted by your municipal recycling. And then bioplastics are still in its very early stages. And it— there currently isn't a pathway in the waste industry to reliably separate and recycle bioplastics. I like to say it's less bad if it ends up in the ocean. But we felt in terms of a— and also the thing is with bioplastics is that they're so new that we would have had to have spent a lot of money designing a custom bottle. And we just didn't have those resources. Our aluminum bottles are actually sourced from a domestic overstock supplier. So we buy standard size bottles that are surplus. So that's another element of our sustainability that we're trying to do with our packaging.

That's brilliant. So you really— and How is it? Is it a— do you pour it into a— what are they called? And of course this is audio, so therefore you can't see me moving my hands as if I'm pulling a lever on a bottle. I can't remember what they're called.

Like a sprayer?

Trigger. Yeah, trigger. Yeah, trigger. Do you have the triggers built into it, or is it a bottle and then you pour it into a trigger bottle?

Yeah, so it's the bottle and it has a sprayer on it. So when you buy it, it's— you get the bottle with the sprayer. And then we're going to be rolling out refills. So then you would get a refill bottle and then you would fill your main bottle up and the refill bottle will likely be aluminum as well, but it's just not as branded. So we can try to keep the cost down of our refills. We're probably going to do them in aluminum cans.

Okay.

Yeah, but the initial product is an aluminum bottle with a trigger sprayer on top.

And the trigger sprayer made out of?

Trigger sprayer is made out of plastic. We, again, we didn't have the resources to design something custom, and you really having a metal— I think maybe in the future we might design a fully metal bottle when we have the funds to do so, but the trigger sprayer is plastic. However, There are no metal parts, there are no metal springs, it's fully plastic. A lot of the time with plastics, the reason why they can't be recycled is 'cause they have other pieces in them or other parts or other types of plastic altogether in one thing. So we made sure to use a trigger sprayer that didn't have any extra pieces to it, didn't have any other materials, and it's also clear. So clear plastic is more valuable and more likely to be recycled. Because then you can dye it any color. Generally, colored plastics are harder to recycle and less valuable, and sometimes they end up having to be dyed black.

So you really have thought about the whole lifecycle of the product. I mean, the whole product, not only just the product itself that you've got inside it, but you've actually— the whole everything about Velez is Yes. Circular economy. It's true circular economy, really, isn't it?

Yes, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be true to the circular economy. And the other thing that we're looking into is adding a carbon offset option when you check out to buy carbon offsets for your shipping of the product. So that is something that we are looking into and trying to implement.

Interesting. And how would you work out Work that out? Would it be zip code to zip code, and it would just automatically be calculated, or would it be a set amount? Or you haven't got that far yet?

No, there are actually a couple of companies that do it, and you just integrate it as a plugin into your ecommerce site. We're looking at a couple of those.

Okay, okay, cool. What a brilliant product! And you must be so proud. You must be so pleased and proud that you've made it. Your mum must be very proud. That you've done what you've done?

Well, we'll see if people buy it. It's not over yet.

True.

It's— yeah. And also, I'm the kind of person who is never satisfied, and I'm always looking at the next challenge. So yes, we made it this far, but, you know, we haven't truly launched it yet. People could hate it. It could be a dud. We'll see.

I'm sure it won't be. If everything you've said is true, which I doubt any of it isn't, then Why would people not want to buy it? Where can you buy it from? You can buy it from your website. Not now, I can see, but by the time this goes live, it probably will be.

Yes, hopefully by the end of the day today, it will be— the website will be live. We're waiting on updates from our web development and design partner. But yeah, it should be going live today. So by the time this airs, you'll be able to purchase on our website, bellas.com. And we're also going to start looking into retail as well.

Okay, brilliant. That's great. That's really good. Congratulations on this. Thank you very much for being on the podcast. It's been really interesting listening to you and pushing the boundaries in cleaning products, which is what you are doing, isn't it? I mean, you are literally pushing the boundaries of cleaning products. And it's so nice and refreshing to see another company that's going, right, we can strive to make it better than what it was before. And that's how we are going to become more and more sustainable as a society. And it's how it's gonna—

Right. Yeah. And this is only the beginning. We're hoping that if this launch is successful, then it will show other large corporations and manufacturers that there's demand for products made this way. And so we're hoping that in the future we can work with other companies to develop new ingredients from food waste that can replace some of the other ingredients that they're using in their products.

I'm sure you will. You know, it's changed so much in the last 15, 20 years, this whole economy, and And I think fairly recently it's almost more aggressively moved up the importance scale for so many organizations. I mean, if the likes of RBS, who, granted, they're not the biggest bank in the world anymore, but at one point they were, and if their CEO is saying, yeah, we've got 3 pillars and sustainability is one of them, then you can see this shift, this massive shift. changing in society, and it's really cool to be a part of it. But thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the end of this episode of the Green Element Podcast. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'd love to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation. What are you going to do differently? Please Please share your thoughts across social media and tag us so we can see them too, @GE_podcast. For links and show notes for this episode, visit our website, greenelement.co.uk/podcast. Thank you again. I hope you will join me on the next episode, and together we can help create a better world.