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Chomp’s engineering team in front of one of their anaerobic digestion devices, clockwise from top left: John Missey, CEO Tim Tiscornia, founder Jan Allen, Andrew Moss, Taylor Knoblock and Tim Murphy. (Chomp Photo / Julie Whaley)
Chomp, a company building devices that turn food waste into fuel and liquid fertilizer, today announced its acquisition by Martin Energy Group.
With the merger, Chomp can tap into the bigger company’s resources, ramping up the manufacturing, sales and tech capabilities of its compact digesters — dubbed “mechanical cows” by company leaders.
Chomp launched 11 years ago as Impact Bioenergy, aiming to solve the problem of food waste rotting in landfills and emitting methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
The Auburn, Wash., company received $4 million from investors and its customers include a tofu factory on an island near Seattle; the University of California, San Diego; California State University, Sacramento; and two Seattle food banks.
The anaerobic, or oxygen-free, digesters use naturally occurring microbes to consume the food and feature stringent odor controls that make the devices suitable for urban and suburban settings.
The units are modular and range from a small version that can process 25 tons of organic waste per year, fits in a 20-foot-long recycled shipping container and costs $250,000, to larger models that manage 4,500 tons of waste annually and are priced at $5 million.
Tim Tiscornia, Chomp CEO. (LinkedIn Photo)
Demand for food waste solutions is growing, said Chomp CEO Tim Tiscornia, as regulators crack down on landfill disposal and the associated climate emissions.
“We’re at the front end of what’s going to happen with waste management,” Tiscornia said.
Customers are also interested in the Chomp digesters as a way to cut waste disposal costs and to reduce their carbon footprints. They’re using the fuel that’s produced in a variety of ways. The tofu plant on Vashon Island refines the biogas into methane that helps power the factory’s boilers. The University District Food Bank in Seattle plans to use the gas to produce hydrogen that will go into the fuel cells of its delivery trucks. The food bank will use the fertilizer for its rooftop garden.
Martin Energy is a nearly 50-year-old company based in Tipton, Mo., that has global sales. It produces and deploys large-scale anaerobic digesters for food and animal waste such as cow manure, biogas production devices, heat recovery systems, microgrids and other energy technologies.
The two parties did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.
Chomp and its 12 employees will remain in Auburn, Tiscornia said. The team includes Chomp founder Jan Allen. Allen began studying anaerobic digestion decades ago as an environmental engineering student at Purdue University, and has since designed dozens of organic waste recycling facilities.
“His whole life has been in organics management,” Tiscornia said. “He came up with the idea of these containerized anaerobic digestion systems.”
Chomp’s main competition is the status quo use of landfills for food waste disposal, Tiscornia said. Others in the sector include Massachusetts-based Divert, which provides anaerobic waste disposal but on a larger scale for centralized waste management. Additional potential competitors include European companies Qube and Seab Energy.
