fbpx
Connect with us
Apply Now

Business

Food Company Makes Snacks That Promote Soil Health

Carina Ayden

There’s a growing concern on the speed with which we lose the top soil. It takes hundreds of thousands of years to form the soil. Soils is a non-renewable resource. Today, we lose 50% of topsoil due to monocropping, changing weather patterns and detrimental agricultural practices.

Pulses like peas and chickpeas do not need fertilizers, they bring nutrients to soil, help restore the acidity and pull nitrogen.

Carina Ayden, the Founder of Unimaginable Foods, reformulating traditional staple snacks to open more room for soil-healthy pulses.

Her pulses-based Unimaginable Bites is a hybrid between a cookie and a granola. The products focus primarily on gut biome health through the use of probiotics, prebiotics, and high fiber in the products. But the main mission is to push the demand for environmentally healthier ingredients like peas and chickpeas.

Carina, startups are hard. Food startups are even harder: FDA, regulations, dealing with inventory, logistics… What made you interested in creating a food company with a mission that seems so complex?

Before I knew the word “sustainability” I was already an environmentalist and a naturalist. I saw a Greenpeace commercial when I was a kid and the idea of human-made pollution became very disturbing to me. No matter what business I would have chosen, I would always try to find the ways we can innovate through the holistic lens of nature.

In 2016 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released a report in which they stated that “Soil and pulses can make major contributions to the challenge of feeding the world’s growing population and combating climate change”.

I read that report and did my own research on everything “pulses”: the agricultural practices, the nutrition, and the ability to solve world hunger, production challenges etc.

I saw the opportunity, the white space, if you will. The idea of carving out more space for healthier crops within the traditional snacks category was enticing. The breakfast snack category was interesting to me: it was dominated by processed snacks, full of empty calories and sugar. A few years prior I worked with chickpeas for another startup as a consultant on R&D and discovered even more versatility of this wonderful plant.

That’s how the first-ever pulse-based granola bites were born.

How is the soil benefiting from the process of growing chickpeas and peas?

Pulses are environmentally resilient crops, make our diets more nutritious and make soil in which they grow more nutritious, too. They are also great carbon sequesters!

Pulses such as peas, chickpeas, lentils, benefit the soil because of their unique ability to fix nitrogen. Therefore pulses do not require synthetic fertilizers as other crops. This helps nourish the soil and create better growing conditions for other plants. According to FAO “cereals grown after pulses yield approximately 1.5 tonnes more per hectare than those not preceded by pulses, which is equal to the effect of 100 kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer.” Considering that fertilizers are horrible to human health and also degrade the soil it’s an exciting statistic!

Pulses require less water which makes them a good drought-prone crop.

Do you want to cooperate with the bigger players like Nestle, Unilever or Beyond Meat on working on the mission of sustainable food production?

 Absolutely. More power behind small sustainable brands means a better world for all of us.

 

Continue Reading


Copyright © 2022 Disrupt ™ Magazine is a Minority Owned Privately Held Company - Disrupt ™ was founder by Puerto Rican serial entrepreneur and philanthropist Tony Delgado who is on a mission to transform Latin America using the power of education and entrepreneurship.

Disrupt ™ Magazine
151 Calle San Francisco
Suite 200
San Juan, Puerto Rico, 00901

Opinions expressed by Disrupt Contributors are their own. Disrupt Magazine invites voices from many diverse walks of life to share their perspectives on our contributor platform. We are big believers in freedom of speech and while we do enforce our community guidelines, we do not actively censor stories on our platform because we want to give our contributors the freedom to express their opinions. Articles are not commissioned by our editorial team, and opinions expressed by our community contributors do not reflect the opinions of Disrupt or its employees.
We are committed to fighting the spread of misinformation online so if you feel an article on our platform goes against our community guidelines or contains false information, we do encourage you to report it. We need your help to fight the spread of misinformation. For more information please visit our Contributor Guidelines available here.


Disrupt ™ is the voice of latino entrepreneurs around the world. We are part of a movement to increase diversity in the technology industry and we are focused on using entrepreneurship to grow new economies in underserved communities both here in Puerto Rico and throughout Latin America. We enable millennials to become what they want to become in life by learning new skills and leveraging the power of the digital economy. We are living proof that all you need to succeed in this new economy is a landing page and a dream. Disrupt tells the stories of the world top entrepreneurs, developers, creators, and digital marketers and help empower them to teach others the skills they used to grow their careers, chase their passions and create financial freedom for themselves, their families, and their lives, all while living out their true purpose. We recognize the fact that most young people are opting to skip college in exchange for entrepreneurship and real-life experience. Disrupt Magazine was designed to give the world a taste of that.