While wandering through the local supermarket, it was impossible to miss the cornucopia of food on display for this week’s Thanksgiving holiday. Enormous turkeys, stacks of pies and mounds of onions and sweet potatoes made the aisles nearly impassable. Yet much of that food will be thrown out: an estimated 143mn kilogrammes, or $556mn worth of groceries from Thanksgiving alone.
What makes Actus interesting is that it gathers whey from midsized dairies that cannot afford to process it and so had previously treated it as waste or sold it cheaply to animal nutrition companies. The company is now well positioned to profit from the rising interest in protein supplements that has been supercharged by the extra protein needs of users of “GLP-1” weight-loss and diabetes drugs such as Ozempic.