Upcycled Flour Is Rising To Meet the moment

About 50 miles north of London, Cambridge Science Park has earned the nickname “Silicon Fen.” The Fenlands region office hub is the UK home to Amgen Inc., AstraZeneca Plc and other biotech companies.

Among its famous neighbors, in an anonymous building that looks like the setting for The Office, the Supplant Co. is getting ready to launch a decidedly low-tech product that nonetheless has massive potential for disruption: flour from fiber.

All-purpose flour, the most common kind, is made from wheat kernels by discarding the germ and milling the starchy interior. But Supplant uses material found— and often ignored—in nature, including stems and agricultural waste such as husks and shells.

Right now the chief ingredient is the plentiful, fibrous hulls left over from oat milk production. But corncobs, sugar cane stalks and wheat bran can also be turned into flour. “We work with the current existing supply chain, the cheapest stuff out there,” says Tom Simmons, Supplant’s founder and chief executive officer. “If you want to make anything sustainable, plant fiber is the most abundant resource.”

US candy fanatics might recognize the Supplant name from its sea salt milk chocolate by star chef Thomas Keller. The bars are sweetened with Supplant’s sugar-from-fiber product, created in a process similar to the one used to make its flour.

Simmons founded Supplant while he was in the biochemistry department at Cambridge University in 2017. He says that in three or four years, his sugar might compete with other, better-known alternatives and that “within the decade” his company will hit scalability and be able to compete with the $11 billion sugar market. (Fortune Business Insights valued the alternative sugar market at $7.5 billion globally in 2021, and it’s expected to top $12.8 billion by 2029.)