Toy Executive Takes on Cooking Grease

Left: Laura Lady, Owner of Fry Away. Right: Fry Away pan fry packaging.(Courtesy photo)

Laura Lady has worked as an executive for some of the biggest toy companies in the world, including Fisher Price, Mattel (where she helped launch Disney’s line of dolls from the movie Frozen), and most recently managing Lego’s Friends line for girls in Denmark.

However, a dinner conversation with a friend and a pandemic changed the course of her career, setting her on a path of entrepreneurship and a mission to reduce “fatbergs.”

“When I was living in Denmark, I would spend every weekend cooking with friends and we would sit around the table and recap the week’s events. During one of these dinners, a friend brought up the massive fatberg discovered in London’s sewers. I had never heard the term before,” Lady says.

Fatbergs, as she learned, are massive blockages in sewer systems created by people flushing non-biodegradable solids, such as wet wipes, and fat, oil and grease.

When her family moved to Boston, Lady resumed her career in the toy industry even though the conversation about fatbergs niggled at her.

She began experimenting with ways to turn cooking oil into something easier to clean up and dispose of without it going down a drain or put into a container that could otherwise be recycled. “How can I convert this into a material that is sustainable?” she asked.

When the pandemic hit and her family relocated again to Webster, she resumed her quest to develop a product to address cooking oil waste and, after four months, she’d invented Fry Away, which uses a plant-based, non-toxic powder that reacts with vegetable oil to solidify it.

Fry Away is sprinkled into a deep fry pot, top, and the solidified oil is discarded, bottom. (Courtesy photo)

Lady says she knew she had something when she found the right balance of the compound that allowed her to both easily remove solidified vegetable oil from a pan and dispose of it in the trash. “It not only solidified the oil but it trapped all the debris and left the pan clean. I said ‘this is magical. I think I have something here’,” Lady says, adding Fry Away keeps oil solid for a “significant” amount of time while also trapping odors.  

Fry Away comes in pre-proportioned  single-use packages as well as a large size with a measuring cup and it’s available on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, as well as in independent stores in the United States and Canada.

Lady says the business is growing quickly and consistently ranks first on Amazon Launchpad and Amazon Greener Living.

Fry Away has also been featured in Food and Wine magazine, Southern Living and Wired. “Within our first full year, we’re going to be hitting seven figures in revenue,” Lady says. “Within the next year you will see Fry Away in a grocery store near you.”

For more information, visit fryaway.co.