29 November, 2023

10 x 10 in Food: Amy Keller

Image Courtesy of Climate Candy.

SLEEK Magazine’s Creative Impact List recognises groundbreaking talents from a range of disciplines, including fashion, art, health, architecture, design, technology, social responsibility, green energy, food, and more. It illustrates a gathering of ambitious, forward-looking minds, whose originality has led to meaningful change and offers inspiration to others.

Each person on this list embodies the power of human potential and serves as a testament to the incredible things that can be accomplished through passion, resilience, and unwavering commitment. So, prepare to be inspired, captivated, and motivated as we unveil the ranking of these inspiring individuals. Their stories serve as a reminder that when passion and purpose align, the impact created can transcend generations and inspire a brighter future for all.

In the next issue of SLEEK, we will introduce in SLEEK`s rubric 10 x 10 food ten visionary founders and leading minds behind ten extraordinary companies and projects shaping the future of sustenance. Join us in celebrating these trailblazers dedicated to transforming the way we produce, consume, and think about food.

In this edition, we meet Amy Keller – who is crafting a sweet solution to climate change with FAVES Fruits & Veggies Sweets.

Image Courtesy of Climate Candy.

In the bustling landscape of innovative entrepreneurs, Amy Keller stands out as the creative force behind Climate Candy, a groundbreaking venture that merges sustainability with sweetness. As the founder and CEO of PurePlus, the company behind the revolutionary FAVES Fruits & Veggies Sweets, Amy Keller is not just creating a delicious treat but also making a significant impact on the environment.

Hailing from the Dum Dums lollipop dynasty, Amy Keller is the self-proclaimed “disruptive granddaughter” of Norman Spangler, a key figure at Spangler Candy Co. In 2018, she co-founded PurePlus alongside Kevin Wall, the Emmy Award-winning producer of Live 8 benefit concerts, and Susan Smalley, PhD, a renowned behavior geneticist and professor emeritus of psychiatry at UCLA. Together, they formed a company dedicated to tackling the global issue of food waste.

PurePlus’s flagship product, FAVES Fruits & Veggies Sweets, is not your average candy. Crafted from imperfect and surplus fruits and vegetables, each pack of FAVES rescues various produce items from ending up in landfills. With flavours like grape and strawberry, these plant-based candies contain PurePlus’ proprietary powder, providing a delicious and nutritious alternative to traditional sweets.

Amy Keller’s commitment to solving the climate crisis is evident in FAVES’ mission to prevent food waste by upcycling perfectly good fruits and vegetables. As a climate activist and seven-time Ironman triathlete, Ms. Keller brings a unique perspective to the intersection of healthy choices and climate impact. The company partners with farmers to transform perishable produce into nutritious plant-based powders, which are then incorporated into their candy creations. The brand has already gained traction, with availability on myfavesweets.com, Amazon.com, and partnerships with online food retailers like Foxtrot and SnackMagic.

With a goal to save 2.2 million imperfect fruits and vegetables this year, FAVES Fruits & Veggies Sweets is just the beginning. Amy Keller envisions future product developments, including hard candies that preserve the nutritional value of fruit and vegetable ingredients while delivering an indulgent, nostalgic experience.

In Amy Keller, we find a visionary entrepreneur who has transformed her family’s legacy into a force for positive change. With Climate Candy, she not only satisfies sweet cravings but also leaves a lasting impression on the fight against food waste and climate change. We speak to Amy about how it all started and the importance of thinking differently.

Image Courtesy of Climate Candy.

S: Could you tell us more about the inspiration behind FAVES and how the idea of creating climate-friendly candy from upcycled fruits and vegetables came to you?

AK: I grew up around candy, I come from a family that owns a candy factory, Spangler Candy Company. We make 2B DumDums every year along with many other nostalgic candies. I got to witness candy’s ability to instill fun into any moment. I wanted to push it further, extend it beyond simply our individual moments into something with even more lasting impact like my partners, Kevin Wall and Dr. Sue Smalley did for Live Earth with Al Gore. My worlds collided when we were in Svalbard, Norway visiting the Global Seed Bank to learn about food security.

I witnessed the United Nations installing generators due to climate change to keep the glacier refrigerated for all the back-up seeds of the world. While on this trip, I was reading Drawdown by Paul Hawken and learned that 40% of food grown globally is wasted. So, I wrote the company business plan in the Arctic Circle for Climate Candy to create FAVES candy from imperfect fruits and vegetables for the health of people and the planet

S: Upcycling imperfect produce into candy is a unique concept. How did you overcome the challenges of transforming fruits and vegetables into a delightful treat while ensuring both taste and nutritional value are maintained?

AK: With the rise of health concerns like obesity and diabetes that inhibit the growth of the candy market, manufacturers have come up with sugar-free and low-calorie candies to tackle this situation. At Climate Candy, we observed these improvements but realised we have much bigger challenge to face because we are not just trying to make zeroed out label or alternative sweetener candy – we are redefining the category of healthy candy to include high nutrition content. Our goal is to recreate candy using fruits and vegetables, but keep all the nutrition intact. We have tested dozens of recipes, form factors and flavours of candy that can be congruent with our mission. And most importantly they all had to achieve high run rates at full scale factory operations to be sure our positive environmental and social impact is maximised. When we started, factories and high run rate equipment weren’t ready for this challenge.

A huge differentiation we achieved in the candy market was engineering equipment that can handle plant based fibres and a product that provides that stealth nutrition through candy. We realize that the really exciting businesses are innovative and differentiated in categories that have yet to be disrupted and that is what we are bringing with FAVES. Climate Candy is part of a broader category with a lower carbon footprint, sustainable packaging and upcycled ingredients.

Image Courtesy of Climate Candy.

S: FAVES not only focuses on reducing food waste but also on supporting local farms. Can you elaborate on your partnership model with these farms and how it contributes to the dual mission of benefiting people and the planet?

AK: The way we eat and produce food is a significant contributor to climate change. 10% of all greenhouse gas created is from food waste.We use FAVES as an educational moment around what is in your food and the need for people to get their 5-8 servings of fruits and vegetables per day and to discuss climate change in an accessible way through candy.

25% of perfectly imperfect produce goes unharvested on farms. Unharvested produce wastes vital energy and contributes to climate change. Climate Candy rescues unharvested fruits and vegetables from farms and gives them new life as FAVES fruit chews.Food is the single strongest lever to optimise health and environmental sustainability on Earth. This requires a substantial shift towards plant-based dietary patterns and a 50% reduction in food waste. Our world is overfed but undernourished, calorie rich but nutrient poor. Nearly 870 million people in the world are undernourished and 9 out of 10 people don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables.More than 20 billion pounds of produce go to waste each year simply because they are excess or not perfectly shaped for grocery stores. Meanwhile, climate change is escalating and people are going hungry. This is unacceptable wasting so much food, all while running out of land, water and healthy soil.

S: The climate crisis is a complex issue, and people are looking for actionable ways to make a positive impact. How do you see FAVES fitting into the larger landscape of sustainable food choices and environmental responsibility?

AK: Food loss starts at the production level. Low market prices and high harvest costs often make it uneconomical for farmers to gather all that they produce. Strict cosmetic standards exclude imperfect-looking produce. Labor shortages cause further challenges. Despite farm-to-food-bank efforts to recover this unharvested food, the vast majority is left in the fields. And with food service closings during COVID, farms that typically sold to those markets found themselves with huge surpluses that ultimately went to waste. Cutting food waste by half in the would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 million metric tons each year. It would also generate an economic return of $75 billion each year. And importantly, reducing food waste also leads to several key co-benefits that get at critical issues of climate justice, climate adaptation, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss. The way we eat and produce food is a significant contributor to climate change.

In fact, agriculture is estimated to contribute between 24% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Given this enormous footprint, wasting less food presents a key opportunity to address climate change. Food is the single strongest lever to optimise health and environmental sustainability on Earth. This requires a combination of substantial shifts towards mostly plant-based dietary patterns and dramatic 50% reductions in food waste. There is a rising demand for sustainable CPG products – half of shoppers would be prepared to stop buying their favorite brands if they don’t commit to measuring their products’ carbon footprint. It’s time to help people realize their power in our highest potential solution to heal ourselves and the planet: What we choose to eat and this includes all of us.

Image Courtesy of Climate Candy.

S: Creating a new product and bringing it to market can be a significant undertaking. What were some of the key milestones or breakthrough moments you experienced while establishing FAVES, and what advice do you have for others looking to launch their own ventures with a strong social and environmental mission?

AK:Increasingly, we expect our professional endeavours to line up with our values, interests, personal histories, and beliefs. I wanted to have a clear and deeply satisfying answer to the question, “Why did you spend all that time and effort producing that product or service or starting that company? When I decided to create Climate Candy, I determined I wanted it to make a positive impact on people’s health and the health of the planet. This business idea is consistent with my values and lifestyle, and it contributes to my personal goals and dreams. Its directly and positively affects lives beyond mine and the world will be better off if I succeeded. It will have a positive environmental impact.

As a 7 time Ironman triathlete and having a career focused on climate change, I found that I enjoyed setting a goal and beating it. This is a very complicated world and people will only remember so much about us so we needed to be really clear on what we stand for. This is a world that is evolving faster than ever, we must rely on mission to unlock differentiation through our unique power to move people’s hearts and minds in a positive way. You may have the greatest product in the world, the greatest ideas, but if people can’t understand the problem they solve, they’ll never buy into it.