This Plant

FryAway, a plant-based, non-toxic oil solidifier, aims to make disposing of used cooking oil easier for consumers and easier on the environment.

Greg Dupree / Food Styling by Ali Ramee / Prop Styling by Christina Daley

Well-fried foods are a delicious luxury worth making at home, but dealing with the oil afterward puts many cooks off. As a deep-frying fiend, I’ve put countless bottles of spent oil in my trash with extreme guilt, knowing that they’ll sit in a landfill for eons. It's a messy and unsustainable

process. Looking for an easier and more environmentally friendly option for oil disposal led me to cooking-oil solidifiers—powders and flakes that harden hot oil into a mass that's easy to throw out. Such products have been common in Japan for decades. For mainstream America, however, they are new and wondrous.

READ MORE: 15 Game Changers Who Are Impacting the Way We Eat and Drink in 2023

Among the oil-solidifier options, FryAway is the most convenient, accessible, and sustainable option. Its plant-based, patent-pending formula was developed by Laura Lady, a second-generation Honduran American, former toy industry executive, and food-loving entrepreneur. In 2017, both grossed out and intrigued by a 130-ton fatberg that had choked the London sewer system, she investigated. "I went down a rabbit hole looking at what fatbergs were, what caused them, and realized that at the end of the day, what causes them is us," she says.

During the pandemic, after making a big batch of chicken karaage and feeling frustrated by the lack of cooking-oil-recycling options, Lady recalled hearing about Japanese oil hardeners. She researched how to chemically make a less saturated fat more saturated so it solidified (there's atom-swapping involved, she says) and created FryAway, launching it from her home in 2021. In 2023, Lady successfully pitched the company on Shark Tank (Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner invested) and secured distribution.

Sold in post-consumer recycled packaging, FryAway comes pre-measured for ease (Pan Fry and Deep Fry both have packets to deal with 2 or 4 cups of oil at a time) or in a scoopable quantity. (Super Fry lets you gel up to 20 cups of oil.) It's available online and at supermarkets such as Kroger, Walmart, and Hy-Vee.

After I’d stocked up on FryAway, the next time I craved a fried snack, I took out my wok and poured about 11/3 cups of oil into it for a batch of onion rings. When done, I stirred in a heaping scoop of the flakes to dissolve them and then let the hot oil cool and congeal into a slightly greasy, firm gel. I easily scraped it into my food scraps pail. Later that week, it was fried potato tacos; I let the FryAway’d oil cool outdoors. Now that cleaning up was a breeze, I just had one question left—what should I deep-fry next?

De La Calle Tepache | Dia Simms | Fry Away | Great Wrap | Heilala Vanilla | Induction Cooking | Joanne Lee Molinaro | Katie Jackson | Lisa Cheng Smith | Maui Nui Venison | Meherwan Irani | Reem Assil | Rockefeller Center | S.A.L.T. | Theaster Gates

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