Sibling entrepreneurs Niamh and Ruairi Dooley from Athlone, Ireland, are the masterminds behind the zero-waste food brand BiaSol. This brother and sister duo are using brewers’ spent grains to create a nutritional food supplement which can be added to everything from soups, sauces and baking, to a bowl of porridge or your morning smoothie.

“We set up BiaSol to help our two homes, our planet and our bodies,” Niamh said. “Resources are valuable, food is valuable, we can’t keep taking things and throwing them out.

“A third of all food produced ends up as waste, which is a crazy statistic,” she added. “All the energy to produce it in processing is wasted, as well as the food. With brewers’ spent grain, some goes to animal feed, which is great because it’s being used, but we can also bring it back to the human food chain and it completes the circle.”

Up to four tonnes of wet spent grains from six craft breweries in the Midlands and east of Ireland are collected each week and brought to their facility in Tullamore, Co Offaly where it is dehydrated, milled and packed.

Niamh’s approach to upcycling food waste stems from Canadian roots where she worked in a vegan restaurant in Vancouver, Canada. She lived there for two years after graduating from her studies in food science at the University of Limerick.

“In the restaurant, we had extra chickpea water from soaking them for falafels and hummus, and we took the water that would have been discarded otherwise and upcycled it for use in vegan whiskey sours. That was the first time I took a waste product and added value,” she said.

Their business began in 2020 when Ruairi was living in Australia and the siblings decided they wanted to work on a project that would bring them closer together while still being apart due to COVID.

“I wasn’t going to be back from Australia for a long time,” Ruairi said. “I suppose Covid was the lowest of the low for most people and it was for us too, but every cloud has a silver lining. That’s what BiaSol has been for us.

“I wanted to eat better and understand the effects macro nutrients can have on our bodies, so when we realised spent grain was full of fibre and protein, I was interested to see where we could take that.”

“Obviously, we need to walk before we can run, but we’re Ireland’s first Upcycled Food Association member and we want to create more products and make consumers aware we can eat in this way,” she said.

“Our wider vision would be to look at other waste streams and continue upcycling and keep growing that circular economy in Ireland.”

Photo Credit: Kirsty Lyons