Webster Woman Hopes Her Cooking Oil Solidifier Will Limit Landfill Waste, Clogged Drains

CONCORD, NH — A newly transplanted Granite Stater believes her product can solve several problems in the kitchen and the environment — including landfill waste, clogged drains, and sewer pipes.

Laura Lady is the founder and CEO of FryAway, a cooking oil solidifier that turns used oil into solid organic waste that breaks down naturally in landfills.

Lady came up with the idea after many years of working in the toy industry, including for LEGO, while also embracing a love of cooking personally. Not only does she love to cook, she likes to eat, too. Meals, as they should be sometimes, became chatty with her and her family about things going on in the world, Lady said.

During one conversation, discussion began to circulate about the huge fatberg in London years before.

“I had never heard that term,” she said. “We started talking and joking about it … a blog of fat in the sewer? I was intrigued, horrified, and fascinated, too.”

That allure became an obsession of sorts and started Lady down a rabbit hole. And while doing research, she learned a lot, too.

“Human beings are the main cause of this,” she said. “(Some items) discarded down drains and waste down toilets can be OK. But cooking oil down the drain acts as the glue for these monsters.”

While living in Massachusetts, she researched what she could do with the leftover oil from cooking. Some have turned it into fuel; some make candles; others came up with products to try and break down the oil. The more she researched, the more she tried to figure out the formula that might work for ordinary households.

Then, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and she, like many others, was “far removed from everything.” After schools in Brookline, MA, shut down, Lady and her family struggled like many others — two working parents, remote learning, ensuring the kids had a stable environment, helping them so they would not fall behind, and other issues.

Even though she was not much of a hiker, the family escaped to New Hampshire. And many weekends visiting the Granite State led them to move out of the Bay State.

“It’s a different place in Massachusetts,” she said. “It has a bit more space, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was probably a good idea for us, at that point, to move. It was something that was a little bit spontaneous.”

Lady and her family moved to Webster — close enough to Downtown Concord but woodsy enough to enjoy the outdoors, too.

“We fell in love with this area and haven’t looked back,” she said.

The move, however, was a shock. Having globetrotted all around the world for work — including Denmark, France, and South Korea, they were not quite ready for the super rural lifestyle. The community, she said, was great, “very welcoming,” but there was an adaptation to get used to, too. Most of them were conveniences — not a lot of takeout or delivery. But, there were other benefits.

“There are so many other wonderful things that we do appreciate,” she said, “like amazing farmstands, quality produce, beautiful breads … those are the things that really make me appreciate being out here.”

During the first six months of being in New Hampshire, Lady began experimenting and refining the concept that would later become FryAway. She realized quickly, “OK, I think I’ve got something here,” and the rest came a lot more naturally — figuring out what the product name would be and the packaging, company ethos, and other issues.

Even though it was her first foray into entrepreneurship, she knew what the product meant to her and what she wanted to achieve. And with FryAway, she accomplished that — limiting waste that ends up in the trash, landfills, down the drain, and septic tanks, too. There was no longer a need to pour the used oil into plastic or glass containers to throw away in the trash that took hundreds of years to decompose, if at all. And, she said, a much easier process to repurpose or refine than turning it into biofuels.

“There were fits and starts,” she said. “I’m in the middle of trying to build the product, I moved, but the next six months, it all came together.”

FryAway offers three products with different ways of tackling variations of oils — regular fry, deep fry, and super fry, ranging in cost from $10 to $16. The product comes in individual portion packs for different levels of use, too, for cooks who do not use a lot of oil and others who do, she said.

Right now, FryAway can be ordered direct-to-consumer (online, linked here) and on Amazon. The company just launched on the Walmart marketplace and is working with independent specialty retailers, too. She hoped to soon expand into Canada while also striving to access gourmet grocery stores and cooking outlets, too.

“Things are going extraordinarily well,” Lady said.

Right now, some of the manufacturing is done in Webster while half of the production was outsourced, mainly for Amazon, she said. Lady has been trying to “keep costs in check and reducing complexity.” She added, “It’s still largely a one-woman show, so there are only so many things I can do ... If a machine breaks, I have to fix it.”

Lady said even though the company was in its first year and growing quickly in the United States and Canada, there was a lot still to be done. She would like to launch in Europe during the next year while also scaling the brand to get as much awareness as possible out there.

“Those are the biggest priorities,” she said. “While also making the product as sustainable as possible … the packaging industry has a long way to go.”

Learn more about the product below in this video.

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