At Arda, we’re changing that. We transform these spent grains into high-value materials—the first being New Grain™, a revolutionary, high-quality, leather-like material that bypasses the need for animal leather and its plastic-derived counterparts.
Whether for fashion, automotive, furniture upholstery, or any other uses, New Grain™ is being developed to adapt to diverse applications, offering a high-performance material that can thrive in its scalability, style, and functionality.
Like leather New Grain™ is made of protein—it just comes from plants instead.
One of the key advantages of New Grain™ is its versatility. Our process is highly customisable, enabling various textures, thicknesses, and tailored performance properties to meet application needs.
While New Grain™ is not yet commercially available, we’ve entered the early stages of product development through in-house prototyping and select design collaborations.
Our first release was in partnership with BEEN London, where we created a custom snake texture using our proprietary New Grain™ formulation and applied it to their bestselling Millais bag in 2024. Earlier this year, we debuted our second product made with New Grain™—the Calvert XL tote—marking another important step toward real-world integration of our material.
These launches represent the early stages of a broader pipeline. New Grain™ is designed to displace traditional leather at scale—minimising dependency on both conventional livestock sources and exotic hides, while matching the performance and aesthetic standards of luxury materials.
More collaborations are underway, and we’re just getting started.
Next up, a collaboration we did in 2024 with Beavertown—a Heineken-owned brewery in London.
We transformed Beavertown’s spent grains into a series of unique cardholders customised with Beavertown’s signature skull and bones branding laser-engraved onto the material.
While the cardholders are not for sale yet, they mark a unique selling point where Arda can craft materials and products for breweries, whisky distilleries, and their customers.
Our team of scientists conduct rigorous tests, both in-house and with external partners, to ensure that our material meets the demands of different industries and the varied properties each requires.
To ensure we create high-performing and versatile materials, we are constantly working on improving our material so it reaches better characteristics across tensile strength, tear strength, elongation, drape, abrasion resistance, hand feel, colour, smell, and more.