Toast Brewing, a small-size business based in the U.K., started brewing beer in 2016 using surplus bread from neighboring bakeries and sandwich shops. Co-founder and COO Louisa Ziana shares how the team focuses the business on sustainability through their products.
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00:00 (gentle music)
00:01 Bread is the most wasted food in the UK.
00:05 About 44% of all bread baked in the UK is wasted
00:08 and about a third in the US.
00:11 If you want to change the world,
00:12 you have to throw a better party than those destroying it.
00:15 (gentle music)
00:18 Our big, hairy, audacious goal
00:25 is to upcycle one billion slices of surplus bread.
00:28 We are at about 3.5 million,
00:30 so we still have a long way to go.
00:32 (gentle music)
00:35 We've estimated that if all of the beer
00:42 that was produced in the UK
00:44 was brewed with just 10% surplus bread
00:47 and replacing 10% of the malt,
00:50 then we would halve bread waste in the UK.
00:53 So it's really significant,
00:54 but obviously it involves a lot of breweries
00:57 getting involved with this way of working.
01:00 So the bread essentially is replacing barley.
01:05 So if you look at the typical carbon footprint
01:09 of a pint of beer,
01:10 you will find about 30% of it is probably malted barley.
01:14 So a lot of energy is used in that process.
01:16 And then if we don't have to do that at all,
01:19 because we can use something
01:20 that would otherwise have just gone to waste,
01:22 then we immediately reduce the carbon footprint
01:25 of the product.
01:26 (gentle music)
01:27 We used to have this industrial symbiosis
01:29 of businesses being co-located
01:33 where you would have a local bakery
01:34 and a local brewery fairly close together,
01:37 and they would use each other's surplus.
01:39 And then of course, as everything has become bigger,
01:42 the industrialization of the food system,
01:44 we've kind of lost touch with that.
01:46 And we've also devalued food.
01:49 So it's often just the cost of waste
01:53 is not significant enough to incentivize measures
01:57 to prevent waste.
02:00 So we work with bakeries that are producing
02:03 at a mass level,
02:05 a lot of the prepackaged loaves
02:07 that you would buy on a supermarket shelf,
02:10 or with the sandwich industry,
02:12 who usually discard the heel end,
02:15 the crusty end of the loaf
02:16 when they're making packaged sandwiches.
02:18 So it's very much a partnership
02:21 rather than a seller-buyer type relationship
02:26 so that we both end up with the solution
02:29 that we're looking for.
02:30 (gentle music)
02:33 So we designed this model to require investors
02:43 to pledge that they will reinvest any net capital gains
02:47 in environmentally-led businesses,
02:50 more purpose-led businesses,
02:52 or they can donate them to charities.
02:55 So the idea of having our investors
02:58 is that the value that we create
03:00 through growing toast as a business,
03:03 that can then be used by our investors
03:05 to support other businesses,
03:06 to support a much bigger economy of business for good.
03:10 (gentle music)
03:19 I think that devolving solutions
03:22 to smaller communities is really important.
03:26 At the moment, we are wasting industrial levels
03:30 of bread and industrial levels of all foods.
03:34 And so the solutions to it also need to be at that scale.
03:39 But I think there is definitely a role for both.
03:41 You know, we need these big solutions,
03:43 but also smaller community initiatives.
03:48 Our food is nature,
03:50 and if we can prevent food going to waste,
03:52 we can help to save nature.
03:54 So a lot of our work for this next year
03:57 will be about joining the dots back
03:59 between people and nature
04:01 so that people will deeply care and love it.
04:04 And then having that solution of tackling food waste
04:08 becomes something nice that everybody can be part of doing.
04:11 (gentle music)
04:14 (gentle music)
04:16 (gentle music)
04:19 (upbeat music)