Tradeoffs in upcycling

Table of Contents

i. Introduction

Upcycling takes place in different contexts: in restaurants, in industry, on farms and in home kitchens. It has also long been practised traditionally, in many places, even if it’s only more recently come to be known by that name. In each of these contexts, the ‘best’ way to upcycle a particular by-product will differ depending on one’s goals and values.

Beyond this end-product variation, even whether upcycling a particular by-product in a particular context makes sense at all can be justifiable on different grounds. Sometimes it might make more sense to do something else with the by-product, like use it to make biomaterials, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, compost, animal feed, or for energy production. What makes sense today will also differ from what could make sense in the future, if the conditions in which upcycling takes place change. 

So how can we decide if upcycling makes sense in a specific context? In our view, there are always tradeoffs, and things are not always clear-cut but rather demand case-by-case consideration. In this essay, we examine contemporary upcycling discourse and practice through three sites of upcycling: restaurants, industry and farms. We highlight key tradeoffs we observe across these different sites of upcycling, and close by proposing a set of questions to help determine when upcycling is a sensible approach in a given context.

ii. In restaurants

First we explore multiple tradeoffs that shape culinary upcycling particularly in restaurants: how overtly or subtly to communicate about it; whether decisions about whether and how to upcycle should hinge solely on maximising material utilisation, or a more holistic set of factors; and how embedded upcycling at restaurants should be within wider systems. Our aim in outlining these tradeoffs is not to critique anyone, but rather to try to identify some patterns and challenges we in and around the restaurant industry face, so we can figure them out together.

(a) Exceptionalising vs normalising upcycling

A key tradeoff we have observed is about how restaurants communicate about upcycling. Pioneering restaurants like Silo London, former Restaurant Amass and others have long been at the forefront of culinary upcycling. Historically, at restaurants like these, upcycling was used to create innovative, delicious dishes that serve as storytelling devices to spark conversations about the problems of the current food system and inspire eaters with more hopeful alternative visions. We think this storytelling is inherently valuable, and that upcycling done in its service doesn't always have to make sense in other ways. 

More recently, though restaurants are upcycling in as creative and delicious ways as ever, the way some chefs communicate upcycling has started to shift—from a more overt position of exceptionalising it to a more subtle position of normalising it. We recently attended the Copenhagen Hotel and Restaurant School Upcycling Symposium 2025, an enriching event where many pioneering chefs expressed this narrative shift. We refer to key discussions held at the symposium throughout this article, and encourage you to watch the talks in full and/or read the nice summary article by MAD for more details. 

Speaking at the symposium, chef Matt Orlando described how his former Restaurant Amass used a ‘very aggressive’ style of exceptionalising upcycling, always explicitly communicating that ‘we made this dish from this by-product’. This approach, he reflected, ‘was fine at the time, but moving forward, if we constantly refer to them [the by-products] as stems, skins and seeds etc, that’s all they will ever be’.

Whereas at ESSE Restaurant, his new location in Copenhagen, Matt and his team are experimenting with ways to normalise upcycling. Examples include naming dish components to communicate that a by-product is another part of the same ingredient, rather than something else: not ‘smoked tomato skin oil’ but ‘smoked tomato oil, made with the skins’, as ‘it’s just tomato.’ Or framing a dish around ‘fava beans’ rather than ‘fava bean shells’ to celebrate how different parts of the same plant taste differently.

Albert Franch Sunyer of Restaurant Nolla in Helsinki noted that most guests go to restaurants to enjoy themselves, not to be lectured or overwhelmed with information. So at Nolla, they try to cultivate a ‘normal’ dining experience, rather than one that is ‘special, different, extraordinary, or strange’, by being very selective about how they communicate their practices: ‘we don’t explain what we do when people come to the restaurant’. If someone asks, they are happy to share more, but otherwise, the details are mostly kept to their website and social media, as context people can seek out of their own volition.

Exceptionalising upcycling can be limiting: it suggests that by-products are strange things that chefs are clever for having made delicious, and that guests are righteous for having eaten. It constrains how these ingredients might become a part of food culture too, because they are treated as something special and separate, almost fetishised, rather than what we hope they can be recognised as, and what they already are: just food.

Some chefs at the symposium had decided that exceptionalising upcycling no longer makes sense: the discourse has moved on. But we don’t think that means it was wrong to do so before. The conditions were then different. Without that earlier exceptionalising, and the stories it helped tell, the discourse would have never advanced in the valuable ways it has. Now the conversation has matured, the context has changed, and so has how to weigh up the tradeoffs. With a discourse now established, chefs can recognise that not all diners want or need to engage with it, and that it may be more fruitful to communicate one’s ideas in ways other than overtly during the meal.

However, we don’t see this as a permanent historical shift from an exceptionalising mode of communicating upcycling to a normalising one, with the latter now fixed as the right approach. We see this as a tradeoff that restaurants must continually navigate, with each approach making more or less sense depending on the circumstances. Exceptionalising can still have a place, for example for guests who are keen to know the details, or fellow chefs who want to know the technique. Guests differ in how familiar they are with upcycling discourse and in how willing they are to engage with it, both during a specific meal, and at all, and different approaches will be appropriate for different guests. 

Zooming out, this shift toward normalising upcycling also makes us consider what the endpoint of that approach might entail. Once a food by-product becomes widely adopted as an ingredient, it eventually stops being considered ‘upcycled’ and is simply seen as food. Products like Marmite, black pudding, or oncom aren’t thought of as upcycled today, because they have long histories of everyday production and consumption. Yet if they were invented today, they’d likely be framed that way. In this sense, the contemporary shift toward more normalising ways of communicating upcycling may help today's novel upcycled foods follow that same trajectory, gradually becoming just food, fully integrated into food culture and no longer requiring explanation. 

(b) Focus on materials vs a holistic approach

A second tradeoff is less about how upcycling is communicated and more about which inputs are included in how its viability is assessed. Materials, or the physical matter of by-products being upcycled, tend to be the primary focus in restaurant kitchens. This makes sense, since they are immediately apparent and demand action, whether through storage, processing or disposal. Yet this overt focus on materials and desire to use up every last gram of by-products can risk downplaying the importance of other critical factors—like labour, time and energy requirements—that also determine if upcycling is worth pursuing or not. These other factors can be easier to gloss over or ignore since they are more 'immaterial', particularly in the hands-on, practical, high-octane spaces of restaurant kitchens. 

If we understand restaurants as R&D ‘engines’, particularly higher-end ones that can afford to pay for upcycling R&D, then their role in exploring upcycling possibilities becomes clearer. In this context, the value of discoveries and storytelling can justify practices that are not labour- or energy-efficient. Much like basic research at universities¹, culinary upcycling can show possibilities and develop new approaches without needing to be immediately efficient, cost-effective and scalable. Indeed the only way to get to the efficient, cost-effective, and scalable solutions is to prototype them first.

But balancing storytelling with more holistic factors, too, is a tradeoff. It's hard to imagine an equitable, ecological and flavourful food system where labour, energy and other factors beyond materials aren’t an important part of the calculus of whether a specific upcycling practice makes sense. If that is the type of future we want to work toward and live in, we should be careful not to extrapolate too much from the very specific conditions in which certain restaurants are able to deprioritise these factors. Some forms of upcycling only make sense when their high labour and energy requirements are deprioritised, and this would only ever make sense in contexts where such deprioritisation is possible. As the upcycling movement grows, the materials-focused approach may not be able to travel far from such restaurants and other contexts where the priority is ‘basic research’ and inspiring storytelling.

To be clear, we are not arguing that restaurants should stop doing upcycling for storytelling or symbolic purposes. We love it and think it is valuable. We rather suggest, when pursuing and communicating such work, to be sensitive to the particular conditions that make it possible, like the typically labour-rich spaces of (especially higher-end) restaurants. In other words, once we account for factors beyond materials, not all culinary upcycling may make sense in all contexts. 

It was mentioned multiple times at the symposium that in order to judge whether particular upcycling practices make sense in a given context, chefs need to be able to make more empirically informed decisions, using more holistic information.² Ideally, they would have access to data about all the by-products and processes they use, tailored to their restaurant and context. But such data is rarely available. Existing life cycle assessments (LCAs)³ can offer some guidance, though they tend to be based on generalised data, focus solely on biophysical rather than also social factors, and are seldom context-specific. Restaurants can generate some of this data themselves, for example, by tracking the time, labour and energy requirements required to execute a particular process. But then even gathering this information required to make better decisions bears its own costs, and thus carries its own tradeoffs.

(c) Hyperautonomy vs being connected to wider systems

A third tradeoff is about how a restaurant understands itself in relation to the systems it is embedded in. Some pioneering restaurants have embraced what we might call a ‘hyperautonomous’ approach to upcycling, taking on responsibility for upcycling every material that passes through their doors, either themselves or in collaboration with other creators. This approach is admirable and impressive, and in many ways unsurprising, given the broader tendency of restaurants to do things in-house. This logic can be and has been pushed far, yielding all sorts of wonderful and creative new forms for by-products. It can also, we think, go so far that it starts to break down. By focusing exclusively on upcycling their by-products internally, rather than relying on, participating in or helping to develop broader shared systems of circulation, restaurants can risk losing sight of the value of interconnected networks with their (sometimes) greater efficiencies and appropriate economies of scale. This inward focus can also obscure the fact that restaurants are already embedded within wider socio-technical systems, whether they acknowledge them or not.

Few restaurants have done more to advance the upcycling cause than Silo London. Their founding question—‘what if a restaurant had no bin?’—has served as an extremely generative creative constraint, prompting all sorts of upcycling innovations—not only in the kitchen, but for all sorts of other items used throughout the restaurant, including tableware, furniture, and clothing. As above, the storytelling and inspirational value of these innovations is undeniable, and this alone, we think, makes them absolutely worthwhile. We also sense in the extremity of these innovations the kind of hyperautonomous impulse we describe above, and which we find useful for exploring this tendency as a more general pattern, rather than as a critique of Silo, whose work we applaud and find inspiring.

At the symposium, Ryan Walker, head of fermentation and R&D at Silo, spoke of the restaurant’s aim to make a ‘system with no loose ends’. This immediately raises a deeper question: where should the boundary of the system be drawn? If the boundary is the individual restaurant, it naturally encourages a hyperautonomous approach: if nothing can be allowed to flow outward, the restaurant cannot rely on other systems to absorb anything from itself. At its most extreme, we see it risking to reinforce a neoliberal, individualist, heroic logic that seeks a certain moral purity: if we have taken care of every last gram of our own by-products, this logic says, we have done all we can and morally absolve ourselves of the problems of the wider food system. To be clear, we are not charging Silo with this—we rather sense that this is what the culinary upcycling movement as it is currently practiced in restaurants risks moving toward if it does not reflect on the limits of its own hyperautonomous tendencies.

This is not to say that many restaurants are not excited about and already engage in collaborations with other makers in their communities. Many speakers at the symposium described promising collaborations, such as working with designers and craftspeople to repurpose their non-food by-products like wine bottles. Albert Franch Sunyer also described how Nolla practices what he called ‘upsourcing’, drawing on by-products like citrus and pineapple skins from neighbouring restaurants, which Nolla then upcycles in different ways, eliminating the need to purchase fresh whole citrus while still being able to use their flavours on the menu.

These collaborations were often individual-to-individual partnerships rather than participation in larger, integrated systems. Seen through the lens of restaurants as R&D engines, these bilateral partnerships are valuable—showcasing what is possible. But they can also illustrate the limitations of hyperautonomy. Albert, Ryan, and Ben Hurley from Restaurant Domestic, Aarhus, all gave examples of how their restaurants work with craftspeople to repurpose surplus wine bottles into stunningly beautiful new products. Nolla and Domestic both work with designers and glassmakers to repurpose wine bottles into glassware, such as drinking glasses, bowls, and serving bottles. At Silo, they work with a ceramicist who grinds wine bottles into a material for making ceramics. Yet, as inspiring as these collaborations are, the capacity of a single restaurant to absorb these repurposed items is limited. At some point, the restaurants have enough tableware: guests finish drinking bottles of wine a lot faster than restaurant glassware or plates need replacing. These craftspeople could potentially sell any surplus repurposed tableware not absorbed by the restaurant producing the winebottles, in which case the system boundary becomes less rigid. But whether this is worthwhile would need to be assessed case-by-case: outside of the primary bilateral collaboration with the restaurant—where conditions are presumably favourable—does it make sense for the craftsperson to commit the time, labour, energy, infrastructure, and space required to produce these particular products? The answer may very well be yes—but it may not always be, and we think asking the question in every case is important to not get carried away by the vision at all costs.⁴

This is why we sense that when we try to ‘scale up’ the logic of culinary upcycling to a systems level, it starts to reveal some limitations. If all wine bottles were to be upcycled into tableware, for example, this would likely represent an enormous amount of extra energy, infrastructure, and labour—not to mention tableware. Is there a point at which it might actually make sense to allow at least some of one’s wine bottles to go to municipal recycling? This is probably an empirical question, and would require gathering data on relative inputs, outputs, and demands for each process. Our point here is not to say that culinary upcycling is categorical bad or good, but rather to notice how it seems that so much of whether it truly is beneficial comes down to specific context. Closing these loops is great for storytelling, but it can’t always solve the underlying systemic issue: as long as a restaurant continues to serve wine from bottles, it will never be able to absorb their production in a way that larger, integrated systems of circulation might.

What might an alternative, wider system boundary look like? A restaurant could still upcycle many/most of its food by-products, but without feeling compelled to upcycle all of them at any cost. Chefs would make discerning decisions where the gastronomic output is compelling and delicious enough to make sense, and the tradeoffs with energy, labour and other factors are balanced. Other food by-products—where the tradeoff calculus doesn’t justify in-house upcycling—could instead flow outward into broader systems, such as local compost producers, returning nutrients to the farms that supply the restaurant. Designing food production systems around principles of industrial symbiosis offers another, perhaps longer-term, route. The same principle can apply beyond food itself: a restaurant might work with local craftspeople to design tableware for its own use—with perhaps a surplus sold elsewhere where there is genuine demand—but without overloading local craft production for the sake of principle, instead passing any remaining surplus materials to local recycling. In these ways, restaurants can be committed to upcycling and also participate in a larger, more resilient ecology of circulation. We do not think it has to be a moral failing to send some by-products off-site for processing, composting or other uses, rather than attempting to upcycle every last drop in-house for ever-diminishing returns. In many cases, a restaurant utilising wider connected systems in this way is simply a sensible response to the trade-offs inherent in upcycling itself. No restaurant is an island, and culinary upcycling does not have to be based on hyperautonomy—rather, it can be one way for restaurants to connect to larger systems for sustainability, rather than feeling they have to be responsible for transforming all their outputs themselves.

iii. In industry

Many of these tradeoffs in a restaurant context must also be navigated in industry, though the conditions differ. As we outlined in section iib, some restaurants operate in contexts that allow them to deprioritise labour and energy requirements of upcycling. So not all the delicious upcycled foods made in that context would make sense as commercial products, which are subject to far greater scrutiny to be time-, labour-, money- and energy-efficient and scalable.

These differences in conditions between restaurants and food industry become clear when chefs collaborate with commercial partners, as has been increasing in recent years. While commercial upcycled products aren’t new, chefs bring a distinct perspective to their development. As Matt articulated at the symposium, ‘if your upcycled product is not at least as delicious as what you are trying to replace, preferably even more so, then you’re not only devaluing your own work, but also the work of everyone else working on upcycling.’ 

Just as some chefs are experimenting with more normalising ways of communicating upcycling in restaurants, upcycled products aren’t always explicitly marketed as such either. Matt’s start-up, Endless Food Company, has developed an alt-choc made with BSG called ‘This Isn’t Chocolate’ (THIC). They recently partnered with 7-Eleven to replace the chocolate in their cookies with THIC. To Matt’s surprise, 7-Eleven chose not to market the change, arguing that upfront disclosure might lead customers to reject the product. Matt was initially sceptical, but cookie sales have increased since switching to THIC, and apparently with no complaints. Since it would be misleading and indeed unethical to sell a chocolate cookie that doesn’t contain actual chocolate, 7-Eleven quietly switched the names to the ‘light cookie’ and the ‘dark cookie’.⁵ In effect, this is another subtle form of normalisation: by not drawing overt attention to the upcycled ingredient, the product is integrated into everyday consumption without making any fuss, showing that upcycled foods can be accepted as just food without needing to be exceptionalised.

An interesting industrial parallel to our earlier discussion of exceptionalising versus normalising upcycling in restaurants is the emergence of the Upcycled Food Association's ‘Upcycled Certified’ label.⁶ Certification is an overt, highly visible form of exceptionalisation—an explicit stamp saying ‘this is upcycled’—that puts upcycling on a pedestal and runs counter to the normalisation trend observed in culinary upcycling. This represents another tradeoff: should such a certification exist in a world where upcycling is already successful, and does exceptionalising upcycling through certification help accelerate its acceptance or hinder its normalisation? Or perhaps even both for different publics at different stages?

Collaborations between chefs and industry reveal a further tradeoff, between the types of impact deemed valuable, especially since some are more easily quantified than others. A good example is the Salty Caramel Sourdough ice cream that Kim, during his time as head of R&D at Restaurant Amass, co-developed with Matt for Hansen’s (a popular Danish ice cream brand) using waste bread from Jalm&B. Collaborations like this can have a serious impact at scale—both in terms of the number of people reached and the mass/volume of by-products upcycled. As Matt noted in his symposium talk, ‘what we do in the restaurant doesn’t really have any impact physically, but if we do one commercial product—like 150,000 ice cream bars—that’s more than the number of guests served at Amass in 10 years.’ His message is implicit: the more people who eat your upcycled creation, the better.

This quantitative approach makes sense in many ways, but impact is not only about the number of diners served or products sold. Much of the influence that Restaurant Amass and other pioneering restaurants had/have lies in the intangibles and/or uncountables—the people inspired, the upcycled dishes created elsewhere, the minds changed; the storytelling, the symbolic. Products like THIC wouldn’t be as acclaimed as they are without the hard work Restaurant Amass put in over the years, which allowed it and Matt to become a leading voice. Not because THIC isn’t delicious in its own right—it really is—but because of how far Restaurant Amass advanced the discourse to create the conditions in which products like THIC could succeed. The impact of the Salty Caramel Sourdough ice cream is partly material, due to its scale and reach—but it is also partly symbolic, due to the existing storytelling and brand recognition of Amass. Both forms are real.

iv. On farms

Beyond restaurants and commercial industry, upcycling also presents an opportunity for diversification and value creation at the site of primary production. Farms, for example, produce a lot of by-products: all the peels, seeds, stems, shells, pits, pulp, roots, leaves and other bits of fruits, vegetables, cereals and other crops that they aren’t typically cultivated for. Larger farms tend to produce a smaller range of by-products in bulk, whereas smaller diversified farms like market gardens might produce a huge range of by-products in smaller amounts.

While it is technically feasible to upcycle almost all farm by-products into delicious edible food, the practical question is whether farmers have the time, desire, appropriate infrastructure, and subsequent skills for it, and whether the value generated by upcycling outweighs the time and labour cost of doing so. Trying to upcycle every single by-product on-farm would be another instance of the hyperautonomy we observed in a restaurant context. While some farms may decide it makes sense for them to upcycle some of their by-products into value-added food products, their closer interconnection with and dependence on wider biophysical systems like weather and soil—far more variable than the often relatively controlled spaces of restaurants—makes the dream of hyperautonomy even more impracticable.

Farmers must also consider the opportunity cost: deciding whether upcycling is worthwhile also means weighing it against other valuable uses for by-products. Composting by-products is beneficial for soil health, keeping nutrients on the farm that might otherwise have to be purchased from elsewhere if those by-products were upcycled.⁷ Composting also requires relatively little labour most of the time and is largely passive, unlike many upcycling processes that require immediate handling, skilled labour, and some degree of energy input. Similarly, while using by-products—both on-farm and sourced elsewhere, like BSG—for animal feed is often dismissed as a ‘low-value’ use, its value is context dependent: in agroecological systems where animals are integrated into the working landscape, feeding them by-products returns manure to the soil and can actively contribute to its regeneration.

v. How to determine when upcycling makes sense

Upcycling is about much more than transforming materials—it is also about the time, energy, labour, skill and additional resources that are needed for that transformation, and about integrating and weighing all these considerations, on a case-by-case basis, to determine whether and when it truly makes sense. In other words, all upcycling has a politics, but not all upcycling has the same politics.

Here we offer a set of guiding questions designed to help upcyclers attune to and navigate different tradeoffs in their work, and to assess whether it is an appropriate or even desirable approach in a given situation:

• What else could be done with this by-product?

• What is it substituting? 

• What is the opportunity cost?

• What equipment or infrastructure is required to make it happen?

• What skill/know-how is needed?

• Can the by-product first be used for another process, before then being transformed into another use? e.g. an amino made from spent substrate used to grow mushrooms

• Would the product rely on the continued production of waste from extractive systems?

• What kind of supply chains could this lock us into?

• What data do I have to help inform my decision-making process? Do we have an LCA or other environmental/social impact assessment specific to this by-product and context? Can we generate useful data to inform future decision-making, and is it worth doing so? 

• Is this upcycling being done to pursue a kind of hyperautonomy or to preserve a sense of moral purity? Would it make sense to do without these goals? If so, how might it look differently?

• How much does the by-product cost to purchase? Is the viability of the process reliant on free or cheap by-products that could change in value if upcycling the same by-product becomes more widespread in future?

• What is the optimal scale/range of scales for the product to live at, and is that scale/range of scales achievable?

• Based on the above, which sector/form of knowledge sharing is appropriate: public/private, open/IP?

Reflecting on these questions can help guide upcycling that makes sense in context, and support a more equitable, ecological and flavourful future food system.

Contributions & acknowledgements

Eliot and Josh conceived this essay together. Eliot wrote the first draft, Josh provided editorial input, and they developed it further together, after Josh attended the Copenhagen Hotel and Restaurant School Upcycling Symposium 2025, which sparked further ideas for this essay and from which several presenters are quoted. To watch the full talks, see here. Thanks as well to MAD for publishing a great recap of the symposium, covering in particular the shift from exceptionalising to normalising.

The header image is taken from the delightfully strange Codex Seraphinianus (Luigi Serafini, 1981).

Endnotes

[1] ‘Basic research’ refers to fundamental scientific inquiry aimed at generating new knowledge or exploring possibilities, rather than immediately producing practical, marketable or cost-effective applications. It is not ‘simple’ or trivial research; rather, it often lays the groundwork for applied innovations in the future.

[2] Labour costs, for example, are increasingly being scrutinised. Albert mentioned how Nolla’s labour costs increased significantly due to their focus on upcycling, but that this tradeoff was well worth it to them, as their ingredient purchasing costs fell significantly. We applaud this attention to measuring these tradeoffs and can only encourage more open and empirical discussion of these topics.

[3] LCAs are standardised, systematic methods for quantifying the environmental impacts of products and processes, measuring impacts across categories like greenhouse gas emissions, fresh water use and land use. They can provide useful empirical data to help determine if upcycling makes sense. For more, see: Henrikke Baumann and Anne-Marie Tilmann (2004) The Hitch Hiker's Guide to LCA: An Orientation in Life Cycle Assessment Methodology and Application, Studentlitteratur: Lund, Sweden. 

[4] A related consideration here is that goods made from recycled materials can sometimes be of lower quality or durability, particularly if circulated multiple times. Albert touched upon this tradeoff when he discussed the tension between using upcycled furniture with a shorter lifespan compared to hardwood furniture that could last for a hundred years or more.

[5] For coverage of this wider phenomenon in the candy industry, see here.

[6] Curiously, we’re not sure we’d even considered many of these certified products to be true upcycled products. While many are made with classic by-products like BSG, quite a few are made using perfectly edible but ugly fruit, rather than parts of the fruit not typically considered edible like the pits, skins etc. This is still valuable, but more a response to overly strict cosmetic standards in supermarkets than, in our view, true upcycling.

[7] From a more-than-human perspective, upcycling that diverts material directly to human consumption can be considered quite humanist: it prioritises human use of nutrients over allowing them to cycle through other organisms, such as soil microbes, insects or other animals, before eventually returning to humans. Composting within integrated agroecological practices, by contrast, maintain these multispecies nutrient flows and support broader ecosystem functions, which in many cases may make it overall more desirable than upcycling. Again we suspect this must be assessed on a case-by-case basis. 

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