COIL Stories
Spent Goods:
Transforming waste into delicious baked goods
Spent Goods is a food waste transformer. They partner with local businesses to transform their food by-products. For instance, brewery barley grains are diverted from landfill and instead provided to a local bakery to transform those grains into delicious baked goods. Spent Goods co-brands and helps market those baked goods to local grocery stores, online food delivery companies, and farmers markets. Participating in COIL Activate Circular Accelerator (COIL Activate) enabled them to scale and become a more resilient, sustainable, circular business.
The Impact
Supporting local: Through collaboration, Spent Goods strengthens their local food supply while generating revenue which directly ties to social good. With COIL Activate’s access to experts, Spent Goods hired sales and marketing team members and launched an ecommerce site that features local products with upcycled ingredients.
Building resilience: As a result of participating in COIL Activate, they increased their B2B (wholesale) revenue from $2,000 per month to $7,000 per month in less than four months. With this increased revenue, Spent Goods is better able to shoulder slower selling seasons and maintain the team after COIL funding ends.
Reducing waste: With support from COIL Activate, Spent Goods increased the number of products they produce that contain upcycled ingredients. They continue to help local partners efficiently reallocate resources to reduce waste and the traditional costs associated with it.
How they made it work
Through COIL Activate, Spent Goods identified like-minded partners which gave them production capability without requiring capital expenditures. This partnership model allowed them to test the market at a lower risk for all parties involved.
Spent Goods also actively engages with individuals and organizations keen to upcycle waste and learn from one another. Through collaboration and knowledge sharing, they produce more effective pilots and can better identify ones that should be expanded.
The funding from COIL Activate allowed Spent Goods to hire new team members, speeding up their business growth. This enabled them to gain more market share and revenue, resulting in the ability to pay their new employees on an ongoing basis. They have become a more resilient business, ready to continue their growth and increase their offerings of upcycled, circular products.
“If someone is doing it already, consider joining them to get experience first. If no one else is doing it, perhaps you should.” – Dihan Chandra, CEO of Spent Goods
