Re-user guide

“IN A MARKET WHERE TOP-QUALITY PRODUCE IS KING, HOW DO YOU ENSURE NONE OF IT GOES TO WASTE?”

Words: Emily Gussin

Step into Borough Market to see what inspiration strikes and you’ll immediately get swept away by the food on show. Abundant displays of fresh fruit and vegetables piled up to the sky, whole wheels of cheese and stacks of freshly baked bread offer a feast for the senses before you’ve even taken a bite. The traders showcase some of the finest food in the country. But in a market where top-quality produce is king, how do you ensure none of it goes to waste?

Many of the market’s produce traders have started to address this question by developing their range beyond raw ingredients. “Once you put a nice big display out to sell your wares, customers peruse it and some of it can get a little bit bruised,” says Charles Foster, the director of fruit and veg stand Turnips (pictured top). “It’s not perfect to sell anymore but the flavour is still amazing.” Around 15 years ago, “before it was really in vogue to talk about sustainability”, Turnips started whizzing up any not-quite-perfect fruit into juices and smoothies.

This closed-loop way of working “transformed everything”, Charles explains. Now many of the stand’s hot food offerings serve the dual purpose of reducing waste and adding new streams of revenue. Homemade ketchups and curry sauces use up over-ripe vegetables from the displays, while any wild mushrooms that reach the end of their saleable life form the base of the stand’s mushroom risotto. “Not one single mushroom is ever wasted,” insists Charles.

Turning fresh ingredients into cooked products is a method similarly employed by Ginger Pig. The stand’s marketing manager Nicola Swift describes their team of cooks as “our secret weapon for avoiding waste,” employed to create “all sorts of pies, sausage rolls and cooked items” from surplus meat and any flavour-packed trimmings from the butchery. Thinking of the business as an “ecosystem”, they analyse the patterns of demand from their customers and plan the creation of additional products that help manage seasonal spikes. “Everybody wants beautiful ribs of beef at Christmas, so we know we’ll have quite a lot of beef trim at that time of year,” Nicola explains. “We’ll turn that into beef sausages and beef pasties.”

Steve Hook of Hook & Son thinks of his raw milk dairy as a closed-loop system. Whenever Steve makes yoghurt and butter from the milk of his grass-fed Friesian Holstein cows, he’s left with a couple of natural byproducts: whey and buttermilk. Both items can be found on the shelves of his Borough Market stand and Steve is passionate about familiarising customers with them. “While in other parts of the world, whey is readily used, there’s not much understanding of it here,” he says, “so we’re developing a market for it. It’s a very Scandinavian thing to boil vegetables in whey instead of water. It’s great in dressings, it’s great for marinating meat.” He similarly champions buttermilk for cooking and baking. “It’s incredible how it lifts food. If you use buttermilk instead of milk in mashed potato, for example, it gets so much more flavour.” Hook & Son also makes a chocolate buttermilk ice cream, the buttermilk making it rich rather than overly sweet.

Steve isn’t the only trader using frozen desserts in the fight against food waste. “The most wonderful thing about ice cream is that it’s the perfect carrier for food waste,” explains Josie Wells, whose Greedy Goat business sells goat’s milk ice cream flavoured with “wonky fruit” that doesn’t meet supermarket standards. “Ripe strawberries, fresh peaches, all the soft fruits – anything that’s not at its best visually is always at its sweetest. There’s nothing wrong with it whatsoever,” she explains. “It’s cooked down into strawberry jam, raspberry jam and then rippled through our ice cream, and it’s amazing. That lovely sweetness means we add less sugar.”

One of the many benefits of trading at Borough Market is the potential for collaboration with other stalls, with traders finding fruitful uses for each other’s surplus produce. Josie has made a marmalade toast ice cream using unsold bread from The Flour Station, and a vanilla brownie ice cream using the trimmings from Comptoir Bakery’s huge brownie slabs. “It tastes the same, it just looks unattractive because it’s the corners.”

Over at Kappacasein, reducing waste was the catalyst for the creation of the business. Bill Oglethorpe first thought of making cheese toasties while working at Neal’s Yard Dairy, where cracked cheddar and day-old sourdough bread may have been past their peak but were still incredibly good. “Putting those two things together took care of a huge wastage problem and created something very desirable,” he explains.

Now, Kappacasein’s toasties are too popular to rely solely on cheese and bread that would otherwise be wasted, but Bill has applied this low-waste approach to other products sold on the stand. For example, he extends the life of his yoghurt by turning it into labneh, then uses the whey left behind from that process to make ricotta. The production of ricotta, which involves whey being heated again to form new curds, works best when the whey is fairly acidic, and Bill discovered that the labneh leftovers do the job perfectly. “It means I’m self-sufficient in my own ingredients, in a sense,” he says.

When the traders themselves can’t make use of their surplus food, Borough Market’s partnership with Plan Zheroes means it can still find a good home. At the end of the trading day, Plan Zheroes volunteers work like matchmakers, connecting the market’s leftover produce with a wide range of local charities. They use these high-quality ingredients – past their peak but still amazing to cook with – to create meals for their service users. Instead of being wasted, the traders’ wonderful food is used to feed people in the community.

Charles Foster at Turnips sums it up perfectly. “We’re selling really high-end products,” he says, “so to throw any away is criminal.”