ALL food waste.

Yes, even meat, dairy, citrus, processed foods and bones.

The beneficial microbes of bokashi method fight off microbes that lead to problems (smell, pest attraction, toxicity) with composting meat/dairy.

We recommend about 2 tablespoons per cup of food waste. This is a good starting point.

Our Upcycled Bokashi has amazing coverage, so you can expect it to go farther use for use.

As you get more confident and familiar with your Bokashi Buddy, you may find a sprinkle here or there is enough.

Adding meat or bone? Use a little extra Upcycled Bokashi. Adding something especially moist or wet? Use a little more.

You can never use too much bokashi bran, but too little can lead to an imbalanced bucket.

White fuzz or white-looking molds are a sign of normal fermentation. These are beneficial fungi and bacteria and are a sign of a healthy, active Bokashi Buddy (effective microorganisms happily digesting food).

Click here to read more about white fuzz in your bin.

Other color molds? Don’t panic.

If you want, you can try to remove the green, blue, red, or black mold from the bin OR you can add extra bokashi bran, and let it sit undisturbed for a few days (squash everything together, leave the lid sealed).

Learn more about moldy food and bokashi here.

If your bin is healthy and active, you can even add moldy food in limited quantities, just add extra bokashi bran. If you’re new to bokashi, we recommend avoiding adding moldy food scraps to your bin.

Smaller pieces allow for faster digestion by the bokashi microbes in your bucket.

For us, it’s about speed of fermentation: smaller food pieces work faster with beneficial microbes in the bucket, have less mass to work through, and ferment faster.

Larger pieces aren’t a deal breaker — they will eventually become fully fermented and breakdown. It just takes slightly longer.

Experiment and give it a shot!

You could also chop up the food waste after your bucket is fully fermented and mixed into soil or the earth for full decomposition. Use a tub or wheelbarrow, mix your bokashi precompost with dirt, and give it a rough-mixing.

Sorta pickly smelling? Like vinegar or sour beer? That’s a normal smell with bokashi, since your food waste is being fermented for predigestion.

If your Bokashi Buddy or DIY Bokashi Bucket smells rancid, like rotting food or putrid, you need to add more bran.

If your Bokashi Buddy or DIY Bokashi Bucket smells like vomit (think intense stomach acid), you need to add more bran and reduce moisture. Adding some shredded cardboard or paper could help (make sure they’re compostable).

This is because there’s likely excess moisture and the food is “sweating.”

Rest assured, your bucket is fine to use as pre-compost in various applications, it may just be a little more odiferous in the process.

When in doubt, most bokashi challenges can be solved by adding more bokashi bran to help boost the beneficial microorganisms in your bucket.

If you think your bucket is beyond salvaging, you could add it to an outdoor compost pile (at your discretion) or as a last resort throw it away.

If you find you accidentally left your bin open for a while, compress the contents well, add more bran and seal it back up. Make sure you squeeze out all extra air using a cardboard tamper or potato masher. Don’t hesitate to get creative with your tampers.

Bokashi effective microbes thrive in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment.

Your bucket will not be impacted by opening it once (or even twice) a day to add scraps and bran, but leaving it open for long periods of time will greatly slow the process down and could lead to your bokashi effective microbes going dormant.

Nope! But it helps.

You can divert your food waste using bokashi without a garden. Use your fermented food scraps to make your own soil factory, donate to a school or community garden, or share with a friend or neighbor.

We also recommend checking out ShareWaste.com or MakeSoil.org for local composting drop sites in your community.

Have a plan for what you will do with your bokashi biopulp before you start.

Once your bucket is full, letting it sit unopened for two weeks allows your food scraps to fully ferment (allowing the top half to catch up to the bottom half) and predigest before harvesting your bokashi food scraps (precompost or biopulp).

The best part? You don’t have to open it at 2 weeks. Thanks to the anaerobic environment, you can use your bucket scraps when you’re ready.

Let it sit until you’re ready for it, or collect LOTS of fermented food waste to use for a bigger project.