Sustainable products
Our talents program has built a nice track record with sustainable product development, created from collaboration with farmers, producers, entrepreneurs, customers and educational and healthcare institutions. These exceptional products were developed within the context of short food chains and with the conviction that things must and can be done differently.
These are some examples of products and projects that have emerged from this practice and in which our student communities have played and continue to play an important role, for real impact.
Pride Juice
The queer community in rural areas still notices every day that acceptance is not a given and therefore they do not dare to be themselves. A stark contrast to society for the queer community. Pride Juice, a 100% locally produced vegetable and fruit juice hopes to change this.
Pride Juice is an initiative of Amped, Local2Local and Impact Hub, in partnership with Young Gay Farmers, and the special fruit and vegetable juice is produced by Martin Topper of Zonneheerdt and Flevosap. Together we call for acceptance of queer youth in rural areas.
Campaign photography:
Through many pre-orders of boxes of Pride Juice on our reversed marketplace Let’s Get Local, we were able to finance, produce and launch this special product.
Pridejuice.nl – Tasty by Nature…It’s the diversity that makes the flavour!
On Purple Friday (Dec 9th 2022) we officially launched Pride Juice, on the Utrecht Science Park campus!
Utregs and Mokums Supersap
Fruit growers from the province of Utrecht, in cooperation with Amped and the students of Amped Academy, created special apple, pear and apple-pear juices under an appropriate name: Utregs Supersap, i.e. Utrecht’s Super Juice. Juice from organic fruit that was “too ripe,” “too small,” “too big” or damaged from hail. Still great fruit of the first category, of course, but supermarket buyers rejected it. We found that more than a shame, this ‘residual stream’. With the creation and pre-sale campaign of Utregs Supersap we saved this substantial part of the harvest. A 100% win-win!
Supersap grower William Pouw
Utregs Supersap was created in 2019 through Amped’s collaboration with organic fruit grower William Pouw in Schalkwijk. The clay soil of his 18 hectares of fruit orchards at the bottom of the Lek dike is known as the best and most fertile soil in the Netherlands.
William is one of the driving forces behind strengthening the local food chain in the province of Utrecht and he wanted to make this Utregs Supersap possible every year. In 2019 we successfully pre-sold 5 batches of pressings (almost 60.000 bottles) through the crowdfunding campaign on our Let’s Get Local-platform, and continued the campaigns in 2020, 2021 and 2022.
With this proven concept, we also introduced the Amsterdam version, ‘Mokums Supersap’, in cooperation with other organic fruit growers in Flevoland who were facing the same challenges.
These campaigns showed that through simple collaboration there’s an abundance of opportunities to flip the coin in the market and strengthen the position of organic farming. To note: the same supermarket chain that had initially rejected the organic apples and pears from William, quickly moved to buy many pallets of Utregs Supersap to sell it as a premium local product.
Buzzed honey beer for biodiversity
Amped matched Local2Local-producers HNYB and Jos Eberson of Hommeles Brewery with student Eline Holtes of HKU Design to help create their own honey beer. Eline got help from her peers to develop the Buzzed branding and product design. Besides being super tasty, the beer also supports the growth of the bee population and biodiversity. This special beer could be tasted and ordered for the first time during our 2016 Food-y-Fort festival at Fort Rijnauwen.
Get Wasted – organic pear vodka
With this delicious, sustainable and affordable pear vodka, you’ll never have to justify your beverage choices again.
Local2Local (subsidiary company of Amped) aims to make local products as transparent and appealing as possible and strives to create a sustainable local food market by reducing the distance between producer and consumer. Local2Local involves students in this sustainable food network and residual streams form just one of the many challenges.
We connected Utrecht University students with Local2Local-farmer William Pouw in Schalkwijk, Utrecht, to give organic, residual stream pears (rejected by supermarkets, based on size and shape) a new purpose, by turning them into juice and creating a special alcoholic beverage.
The result: 100% organic vodka made from residual streams of pear juice, ‘Get Wasted’.
Food-y-Bag: food bag for students
Students Diede Koppenol, Arne Wolven, Cato Pierau and Maryse Kipping from the Food Innovation program at HAS Den Bosch helped Local2Local improve its Food-y-Bag offering.
The group of students took another look at the Local2Local website and Food-y-Bags. Their contribution helped us tremendously in making its offerings more appealing. “We empower a new generation!”
HNYB: honey and biodiversity
HNYB keeps bees in a caring and natural way, putting the welfare of the honey bees first. As a result, they are able to harvest honey in a unique way, and all of the HNYB honeys are additive-free, cold swirled and therefore rich in enzymes, minerals and vitamins.
HNYB focuses on restoring, strengthening, but above all vitalising the bee population in the Netherlands with the HNYB adoption program. To that end, HNYB offers companies, organisations and individuals the opportunity to adopt a colony of bees. The HNYB Adoption Program is an initiative of the Wageningen Beekeeper, in cooperation with Amped & Local2Local.
