At Salt & Straw, Sustainability Begins with a Scoop — and a Story

As beloved as Salt & Straw is for its irresistible, inventive scoops (it’s one of the best ice cream spots in the country for a reason), co-founder Tyler Malek likens the Portland, Oregon-based creamery more to a mission-minded media company than a standard food brand doling out crowd-pleasing treats — with ice cream as the chief storytelling device.

“We interact with millions of guests every month — guests that are intensely engaged and intrigued with the flavor stories that we create,” Malek tells Food & Wine. “In ways that don’t exist anywhere else in the food world, Salt & Straw ice cream is a platform to build a strong and more sustainable community.”

With 30-40% of the nation’s food supply going to waste — that’s billions of pounds of food tossed every year while millions of Americans experience food insecurity — one innovative way Salt & Straw is taking a stand on this pressing issue is through its Upcycled Foods Series, a special lineup of flavors that showcases the remarkable potential of upcycled ingredients. The idea to use ice cream as a vehicle for surplus foods first sparked in 2017 with a fundraiser in partnership with Urban Gleaners, a Portland-area nonprofit collecting and redistributing food to local communities in need. It has since evolved into a wildly creative, thoughtfully curated menu, now in its third year, that’s offered during the month of April.

“Over the last three years alone, we’ve saved over 40,000 pounds of food from going to waste just from our upcycled food menu,” Malek notes. “This is huge because not only are we making an actual impact on food waste, we’re also helping our customers see these upcycled ingredients in a whole new, delicious purview.” The most recent series featured products as diverse as “ugly” dried fruit; a beanless coffee that harnesses the power of foods like date seeds, fenugreek, and carob; and a “wheyskey” crafted from the liquid byproduct of cheese-making — all with the goal of reducing food waste while elevating brands and organizations doing industry-leading work in the upcycled space. 

Salt & Straw’s meticulously selected brand partners see the collaboration as much more than a buzzy, one-off Earth Month event. “[Tyler] and the Salt & Straw team didn’t just want to make an ‘eco-friendly’ flavor — they wanted to learn about the nuances of food rescue and tell that story in a way that felt joyful and thought-provoking,” says Nico Niebes, executive director of Urban Gleaners, which supplied rescued bananas for this year’s Banana Parsnip Sherbet.

Lydia Oxley, president of Renewal Mill, an upcycled ingredient and baking mix company, adds: “I think partnerships like this are so crucial in positioning [the upcycled narrative] effectively with the brands that are doing the right kind of work B2B, too.” The salty-meets-sweet Chocolate Malted Potato Chip Cupcake flavor from the latest lineup featured cupcakes baked with Renewal Mill’s brownie mix (made with upcycled okara flour) and chocolate-dipped Uglies potato chips.

Over the years, not every promising idea has successfully made it out of the intensive R&D process. Case in point: a noteworthy attempt to concoct a crab-roll Neapolitan ice cream in partnership with the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission. “All 20 tests of that flavor [were] categorically bad,” Malek recounts. “I strongly recommend avoiding seafood in ice cream (with a few very select exceptions).” Even the “failures,” however, are a testament to Salt & Straw’s commitment to infusing sustainability with a heady dose of innovation — along with a touch of whimsy.

Though the Upcycled Food Series is a limited seasonal release, the ice cream brand is promoting sustainability all year round with another earth-friendly initiative: certified compostable scoop cups. The new, slightly smaller 5-ounce cups (which slash 28,000 pounds of paper waste without trimming scoop portions) were recently implemented at all Salt & Straw locations, but eco-conscious serveware in general has been part of the company’s philosophy from the beginning. “We’ve actually been using compostable cups at Salt & Straw [since] 2011 but have never prominently talked about it,” explains Malek. “We’ve found that adding clear markers and compostable branding can have a huge impact on our guests’ instinct to actually compost versus dispose of [the cups].”

Whether it’s through carbon-conscious scoop cups or a full-fledged menu of inventive upcycled flavors, it’s clear that sustainability — environmental, social, and economic — was always part of the story that Malek and the Salt & Straw team hoped to tell. “We have the opportunity and obligation to create ice creams that broaden the minds of our guests [by] talking about tough subjects like food insecurity and food waste, or local sourcing and diverse food artisans,” says Malek. With a medium as ripe with impact (and joy) as ice cream, it’s hard not to listen.