Two entrepreneurs are repurposing ‘undesirable’ mangoes to create a new line of skin care products.
University students Jannelle Sullivan and Mary Bocarro are extracting mango oil from edible fruit that has been discarded because of blemishes and creating products they say are good for the skin.
Called The Mango Project , the pair use fruit from Ms Sullivan’s trees in Carnarvon.
The pair set about extracting mango oil from the seeds of the mangoes which contain skin loving A, C and E vitamins using an old fashioned screw press.
“Up to 60 per cent of the 70,000 mangoes grown in Australia don’t make it to supermarket shelves,” says Ms Sullivan.
The problem in some of the fruit comes from the sun leaving black spots.
In Australia, 40 per cent of all the food produced is wasted, according to the Food Futures Institute. The institute says The Mango Project’s use of previously waste mangoes as “a good example of improvement.”
When the leftover crops from Ms Sullivan’s family farm run dry, they began sourcing their mango oil from sustainable farms in India, while they build their oil extraction facility here in Australia.
The young entrepreneurs are now tossing up between locations here in WA and the Northern Territory, the nation’s largest growers of mangoes, for their first mango oil extraction facility.
(Murdoch University, Professor of land management Professor Richard Bell)
Murdoch University, Professor of land management Richard Bell believes that “finding ways to minimise waste and add value to agricultural products is part of the way forward to make agriculture more sustainable” and wishes to see more “creativity” from the private sector to address these food waste issues.
More people are finding ways to make use of the delicious and also versatile fruit. In December 2020, Jessica Collins, a Queensland teenager, went viral after creating a dress out of 1,400 mangoes that would have gone to waste.