The circle of it: Food upcycling B-corp creating new supply chain by diverting bananas that do no meet export standards away from landfills, thereby creating new revenue streams and reducing waste.
Barnana
Summary
Barnana is a B corp that saves bananas from going to landfill while creating delicious dehyradated snacks from them. Barnana is a for-profit enterprise based in Santa Monica (CA) that utilizes organic bananas that don’t qualify for export to create partially-dehydrated health snacks with very similar nutritional content as a fresh banana, yet with a much better shelf-life.
Story
Caue Suplicy, a triathelete from Brazil, while on a farm visit in Brazil, noticed the problem of immense food waste when bananas are grown for export due to the strict cosmetic standards and high production demands. These two factors coupled together meant that it was easier and cost effective for farms to simply waste bananas that did not meet the required standards. Suplicy, along with his co-founders have built a business that utilizes a resource that would’ve been wasted by bringing it back into the market in a different shelf stable form by creating dehydrated snacks.
Pic Credit: Barnana website (right) and Forbes (top)
“In a way, it was a massive secret. Here, no one knew about dehydrated bananas, but in Brazil, that’s what everyone ate. I think being raised in a different country allows you to see things with different eyes, with a different perspective. There are some things that you might be able to see that others don’t.”
Caue Suplicy
Founder(s)
Caue Suplicy, Matthew Clifford, Nik Ingersoll
Headquarters
Santa Monica, California
In business since
2012
Business type
for profit, B corp
Impact
Since it’s inception, Barnana has upcycled over 100 million bananas that would otherwise have ended up in landfill
Technology
Identifying waste in supply chain; creating new supply chain to rescue produce that would otherwise go to landfill
Website
The Circular People 
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