Toast Ale brews beer from bread that would've been binned, and gives its profits to fight food waste

the problem

Nearly half of all bread baked goes uneaten, and bakeries had no economic reason to bake less

background

the move

Toast Ale replaces roughly a third of the malted barley in each brew with surplus bread — heel ends and unsold loaves unfit for sandwiches — sourced directly from bakeries and sandwich factories, and commits at least 1% of revenue (in practice, 100% of profit) to Feedback, the food-waste charity Stuart founded. The recipe itself was published for anyone to brew.

the payoff

By 2019, Toast Ale had used nearly 2 million slices of surplus bread and its open recipe had been downloaded over 80,000 times, taken up by 3,200 home brewers and 27 commercial brewers that year alone — cutting an estimated 11 tons of carbon and 108 cubic meters of water use versus conventional brewing.

what came after

Toast Ale didn't invent brewing with bread — Brussels Beer Project's Babylone came first — but by open-sourcing the recipe rather than guarding it, it turned a single brand's trick into a technique other brewers keep re-adopting; Toast has since expanded from the UK into the US, South Africa, Brazil, Iceland and Sweden and donated over £30,000 to food-system charities.

references

1. [1]EAT Forum — Turning Food Waste Into BeerEAT Forum, 2020eatforum.org
2. [2]Causeartist — Toast Ale Brews Beer From Leftover Bread to Tackle Food WasteCauseartist, 2020causeartist.com

was it genius?

same kind of clever

• 1953 · Norman Borlaug / Rockefeller Foundation Mexican Agricultural ProgramThe more fertilizer his wheat could take, the more of it fell over — so Borlaug bred in a trait nobody had connected to yield at all
• 1989 · City of CuritibaCuritiba bought garbage with bus tokens — the favelas trucks couldn't enter cleaned themselves
• 1968 · Sea-Land ServiceSea-Land's ships came back from Vietnam empty, so it filled them with Japanese TVs and helped launch trans-Pacific container trade