As the world's leading brewer, AB InBev constantly seeks to uncover innovative ways to lead and grow the category while realizing the full potential of its ecosystem and global impact.

The best example of this focus is EverGrain, a venture incubated in ZX Ventures – AB InBev’s global innovation and investment group.

EverGrain is a sustainable ingredient company that captures the barley protein left over from the beer-making process and transforms it into nutrient-rich food and beverages. Founder Greg Belt, who led the global sustainability program for AB InBev, developed the venture concept for EverGrain after daily observations of barley entering their breweries in huge quantities, while barley protein left the same facilities in equal quantities for landfills or distant cattle farms.

Determined to find a better way to leverage the nutritional potential of the leftover barley, Belt and the EverGrain team collaborated with a Minnesota startup to create a protein isolate from spent barley, leading to its flagship product, EverPro.

EverPro easily mixes into a variety of food and beverages with lower land use, water and carbon footprints than other proteins, thanks to its proprietary Upcycled Certified™ process.

The beer industry creates more than 9 million metric tons of BSG annually, the majority of which are “spent” barley composed of more than 30 percent protein. Prior to EverGrain’s upcycling innovations, most spent barley was sold at a low fee, donated for low-value applications like animal feed and fertilizer, or sent to landfills.

EverGrain uncovered a more productive way to use spent barley. It created a new-to-market product while decreasing AB InBev’s food loss and modeling a path to sustainable growth and innovation in the food and beverage industry.

EverGrain’s process requires no additional land or energy to convert nutritionally dense barley byproducts into consumable goods. This is circular technology in the truest sense: EverGrain’s products contribute to a reduced environmental footprint for its industry and are one of the most sustainable protein sources, with lower land use, water and carbon footprints than other proteins, thanks to its proprietary Upcycled Certified™ process.

EverPro® removes the thickness, grittiness and bitterness found in most protein powders and has unmatched solubility and viscosity, allowing for advanced bioavailability, digestibility, and speed of absorption.

EverGrain helps address two of the most pressing problems of our time: food loss and food insecurity. By providing new, more sustainable raw materials for the plant-based food ecosystem, EverGrain’s innovation enables more sustainable consumption habits at-scale.

EverGrain uses a natural byproduct from one of the world’s biggest sectors – the beer industry – to help reduce food loss while creating nutrient-rich products with a lower environmental impact and better taste than alternatives.

EverGrain’s production process also aims to lower the carbon, water and land use footprints of protein production. From greenhouse gas emissions to land and water use, EverPro’s product lines beat other in-market alternatives. Finally, EverGrain’s proprietary compounds solve for issues around taste that historically limited wider adoption of plant-based products.

Through its innovative use of leftover barley, EverGrain added a new revenue stream that reduces AB InBev’s environmental impact, addresses global over- and under-nutrition, and solves a market need for better-tasting, more sustainable protein (with customers expressing 10x preference for EverGrain’s plant-based protein products). Through innovation, time, resources and support from senior leaders, EverGrain demonstrates the power of developing a culture of innovation and intrapreneurship.

The plant-based food sector was valued at approximately $10.3 billion in 2020 and forecasted to rise to $15.6 billion by 2025. EverGrain’s competitive advantages create a significant opportunity to capitalize on this market’s rapid growth. AB InBev produces 1.5 million tons of spent barley each year; EverGrain’s facilities in Europe and the U.S. have driven an 800% increase in production year over year since entering the market in 2021. Over the next seven years, EverGrain plans to increase production to deliver 7,000 tons of protein annually, while leading its peers in the Upcycled Foods Association to cut down food was by 50% by 2030.

EverGrain’s protein isolate, EverPro, is one of the most sustainable protein sources with 20x less land usage, and 40% more efficient water-use than other plant proteins.

Amidst growing awareness that food loss contributes to global emissions (estimates range between 6 and 10 percent), and with major companies seeking to fulfill ambitious climate goals, food upcycling is a growing priority for manufacturers. On average, most major consumer packaged goods companies discard a quarter or more of their raw materials — indicating the systemic scale of food loss.

In the U.S., third-party certifications for foods with upcycled ingredients are gaining traction. Some include requirements that certified foods demonstrate environmental benefits, such as entering the human food chain directly.

EverGrain’s work with spent barley is a leading example of food upcycling, proactively transforming byproducts from beer-making into new food ingredients that also decrease environmental impact. Critically, EverGrain leadership also notes that, if breweries worldwide upcycle their barley, the plant protein sector can double from this one simple shift to circularity.