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Smart startups know when to pivot, and today’s team made a big one: from vertical farms to waste processing. But they could now have a compelling offer in a growing market.

Read about Future Greens below. But first…

• We’ll be unveiling the findings from our study of the pre-seed landscape in the UK in early January, but there’s still time to take part!

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Future Greens wants to make it really easy for food manufacturers to turn waste into energy

When the vertical farm market started to lose its lustre, Future Greens decided to take some of the tech it had developed in that space and use it to power a pivot.

And thus this Sheffield-based startup began focusing on offering waste-to-energy systems for food manufacturers, transforming organic waste into renewable power on site.

To do this, they make use of anaerobic digestion, using microorganisms to break down biodegradable material in a controlled way that produces biogas. 

This biogas is high in methane and can be used as a fuel in boilers or combusted in a generator to create electricity.

Co-founder and COO Gabrielė Barteškaitė says the product is suitable for a broad range of food manufacturers, including cheese makers, distillers, confectioners, bakers, ready meal manufacturers, as well as abattoirs.

But the first market they’re targeting is breweries.

“Breweries have an abundance of organic waste that is inevitable and is also very potent in its energy yield. Brewers produce about 20 grams of spent grain for every litre of beer that they produce, and they also produce a lot of wastewater,” says Barteškaitė.

While there are existing solid or wastewater processing solutions that can offer a similar outcome, Future Greens can generate energy from both solid and liquid waste.

And Future Greens’ tech is modular, meaning it can scale in footprint depending on the amount of waste that a particular customer wants to process.

The story so far

Barteškaitė hails from Lithuania and moved to the UK in 2018 to study for a degree in artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Sheffield.

After beginning her career as a machine learning engineer in the Netherlands, she returned to Sheffield to pursue the startup life with some friends from her university days: David Dixon (CEO), Alexander La Fleur (CTO), and Alastair Roper (CIO).

They knew they wanted to build a business focused on sustainability, and decided to tackle the vertical farms space. But they soon found the market just isn’t there… at least yet.

“That was about a year-and-a-half cycle in which we got some funding together, built a vertical farm, and then we ran trials of five different business models,” Barteškaitė explains.

“We realised that the current investment climate, but also the climate in general, is not yet pressing for a solution like that. We think vertical farming is going to be exciting in about 20 years’ time, when water scarcity is going to become more of a pain. 

“Right now, it's something that's slowly happening. The climate is changing. We need to find better ways to grow food. But so far, there’s just not that clear of a pain there for us to pursue it.”

One of their concerns with building vertical farms was that they require a lot of power to operate, which is why they developed their waste-based energy system. Over time, they realised that perhaps it would be better to focus solely on that.

“Initially, our plan was not to become an anaerobic digestion innovation company, we just wanted to buy a system that would work for us. But when we went out to buy one, they all had ridiculous payback times in the realm of 10 to 12 years, and it was difficult to find a system that would work for our scale financially,” Barteškaitė says

So they ended up building one, and Barteškaitė says it cost 60% less than they anticipated. After talking to other businesses, they realised they had the potential to make eco-friendly fuel more accessible, helping to decarbonise the food industry.

Barteškaitė says Future Greens now has a working system at its base in Sheffield, running on waste from a neighbouring brewery. She says a first customer is lined up to buy the first commercial system as soon as it is ready.

“We went out and spoke to a lot of breweries this year to understand what type of commercial model would work best for them. We see a lot of potential in pursuing a hardware-as-a-service model where we charge a monthly fee instead of asking the customers to front the cost of the system,” Barteškaitė says.

“We're also speaking to asset finance banks to be able to fund these non-dilutively. And we're seeing that this could really increase adoption and accessibility of our solution, while giving us a longer lifetime value of the asset.”

Next steps

Barteškaitė says Future Greens has identified ways of refining its anaerobic digestion process to make its product more efficient.

This will separate the processing of solids and liquids to take place at different speeds.

“We are going to take a few months to finalize our trials with the optimal configuration of the different internal structures that we're developing to go inside the reactors, and we're looking to apply for a patent for that as well.

“We're looking to tick all the boxes that we need to start deploying these systems commercially. That also includes doing some technical paperwork and making sure our system can be insured. We are already working with requirements from insurers to make sure that it's going to be technologically sound and compliant in all those regards. 

“But at the same time, we're very much focused on the use case for our product commercially, and still speaking to our customers… to make sure that what we're building is needed, actually leads to business savings, and is attractive both for our customers and for us.”

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