Laying Waste To A Food Problem
With food waste becoming a hot eco topic, Fiona Kelleher and Kieran Coffey’s egg-shaped MyGug device has attracted €750,000 investment to convert the waste into fuel and fertiliser, writes
As pivots go, from professional musician and composer to boss of a sustainable energy company, Fiona Kelleher has effected quite the change. When music work dried up during the Covid pandemic, she channelled her creativity into building a sustainability-focused startup. “I saw it as an opportunity to do something impactful,” she says.
Her muse is MyGug, a micro-scale anaerobic digestor, the invention of her husband Kieran Coffey (55), a mechanical engineer. After a career in the design of water and wastewater treatment plants, Coffey had been tinkering away at home creating a small-scale anaerobic digester which — in the west Cork manner — the couple were using to fuel a gas stove and supply natural fertiliser to their polytunnel.
The couple’s first company, Grian Water Ltd, was established in 2007, and the MyGug business name was added in 2018. Grian Water has minimal activity and MyGug Ltd was incorporated in March 2021. This company now handles the business of the MyGug device.
MyGug is so-called because of its egg-shape. Simply put, it takes in food waste and produces natural gas and a liquid plant fertiliser, thereby displacing fossil fuel use and diverting food waste from landfill, as well as providing a nutrient-rich plant fertiliser.
Food waste decomposing in landfill produces massive amounts of methane and is second only to carbon dioxide emissions in its effect on global warming. According to atmospheric chemists, molecule for molecule, adding methane to the earth’s atmosphere is disproportionally more potent than CO2 in terms of global warming.
“Kieran used to do a lot of work in landfill, and he was always so appalled by the amount of damage we were doing,” Kelleher says. “We just
put our food in the bin, and that’s the end of our journey with it. Food waste causes a huge amount of damage, from unsightly bins, vermin, mess, transport emissions and finally methane emissions.”
Ireland’s National Food Waste Prevention Roadmap aims to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 770,000 tonnes of food waste was generated in 2020, with households accounting for 31% of that total, followed by the food and beverage manufacturing and processing sector (29%) and restaurants and food service (23%). “As a consumer myself, I didn’t really know what this was until I delved into, but a little amount of knowledge goes a long way with this process,” says Kelleher.
MyGug can deal with food wastes that aren’t suitable for home composting, such as yeasts, fats, greases, and dairy. The technology uses dried bacteria to start the process of breakdown. Food waste is macerated and then flows into the egg-shaped container, which was chosen on the principle of biomimicry and the fact that there are no corners or crevices.
The gas is exported into a balloonshaped container which, depending on how sheltered the location is, some users fence or crate to protect it. This is then hooked up to a gas cooker. An input of 1.5kg of food waste produces roughly 1.5 litres of bio fertiliser, and one to two hours of cooking time.
Once Kelleher decided to get serious about building the business, she took advantage of every opportunity to learn and upskill. She joined a Plato programme to begin her reskilling journey and last year took part in the AgTech accelerator at Nova UCD. This led to a €10,000 start-up prize.
“That was a really good boost and put us into that investment area where we had to go in order to further the technology and become market ready. We needed to reach out and bring people on board into the company to accelerate development,” says Kelleher.
After initially bootstrapping, the founders received some investment and mentoring from an angel investor, before engaging with the Local Enterprise Office for a priming grant, and developing a relationship with Enterprise Ireland. The venture won an Irish Times Innovation Award last year in the sustainability category, which helped with profile and credibility.
Rebecca’s Kitchen and Farm Shop in Kilbrittain, near the couple’s Clonakilty base, was the first food business to install a MyGug digester. At the time, the retailer wasn’t on a bin route and was struggling to deal with its waste. Nearby boarding school Bandon Grammar is another early adopter. Kelleher says that even schools that don’t provide meals are seeing the benefits of the MyGug to power their Home Economics kitchens and bring to life the concepts of greenhouse gases, sustainability, and the circular economy.
“The students are able to learn about the digester, and they work it themselves. They draw off the fertiliser, they’ve got a polytunnel, they grow the food. Then in the kitchen, they’re doing the cooking. There’s a whole circularity there,” says Kelleher.
Building relationships with suppliers was crucial to getting the company off the ground, to create the moulds and produce the fibreglass and polyethylene parts for the ‘plug and play’ version they are commercialising. The refined product is a great leap forward from what Kelleher jokingly refers to as the “chicken wire and chewing gum” version Coffey first produced in their back yard.
The MyGug egg is produced in a range of bright colours, and Kelleher sees potential for custom branded eggs for clients who want a version in their company logo colours to make a feature of their sustainability efforts.
In the year to March 2023, MyGug Ltd booked a loss of €50,000 after the two directors shared €60,000 in pay.
In December 2023, MyGug embarked on the path of transitioning to a proper business by raising €750,000 investment. Enterprise Ireland invested €150,000 and BVP, a fund manager for EIIS investments, bought preference shares to the value of €600,000.
Kieran Coffey first encountered BVP at an angel investment event in Cork several years ago. BVP investment manager Rhagav Bhola said they were interested in the concept and the potential but needed to see MyGug refine the product and acquire some commercial customers before making a commitment.
BVP executive director Stephen Burdock sees MyGug “at the forefront of introducing new-age technology to solve growing food waste challenges for micro and medium-scale commercial establishments”. Burdock adds that the solution is simple to install and has been proven to work, thereby providing a large unmet market opportunity for solving waste and energy challenges simultaneously for businesses across different sectors.
MyGug’s primary target market is small food businesses and educational settings, with home use to follow. “I’m trying to hone the message and identify where our market is, because we are creating the market really,” Kelleher says.
Growing pains are evident on the MyGug website, which could do with a reboot. Scaling the business from their remote location at Clonlea will be a challenge for the couple, though the substantial seed funding will help a lot.
R&D is an ongoing commitment too. “As the product evolves, we are looking at using materials that are more ecofriendly and ultimately recoverable,” says Kelleher. “There is no point in making a product that’s trying to do the job of reducing greenhouse gases but then creating pollutants itself in terms of its end of life.
“The MyGug as it stands is a particular iteration. We see it becoming even more refined, more plug and play, and the life cycle analysis and materials will be better and easier on the planet. That’s the journey.”
‘MyGug is at the forefront of introducing new-age technology’