Toast Ale - The best thing since sliced...
21 August 2017
Tesco team-up with Toast Ale, who use left-over bread to make craft beer and help reduce food waste.
Toast’s mission is to prove that the alternative to food waste is delicious. We brew award-winning beer with surplus fresh bread and pour all profits into the charity Feedback to fight waste at every stage of the food cycle.
Food waste globally
Food production is humanity’s biggest impact on the environment. It’s responsible for 80% of deforestation, 70% of freshwater consumption and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. Yet one-third of all food is wasted. It’s a huge problem, but one with a simple solution – we just need to eat the food we produce.
Knead for a new approach
We started Toast because we wanted to start a conversation about our food system and give people an easy and delicious way of doing their bit. Targeting bread was intentional - it’s the UK’s most wasted food item, with 44% wasted across the whole food chain. For our very first brew, I contacted local bakeries to ask if we could take their day old bread for brew day. We were overwhelmed by the amount of loaves donated and the tasty, high quality beer that resulted from it. A single sandwich factory discards 13,000 slices of loaf-ends every day. Beer, a 4,000-year-old way of preserving the calories in bread, has a far longer shelf-life. It also connects people in a celebratory way and, as we say, to change the world, you have to throw a better party than those destroying it.
Toast at Tesco
Since we launched in January 2016, we’ve saved 10 tonnes of bread, but our ambition is to rescue 100 tonnes in the next 3 years. To do this, we need to reach more people with our beer. Being stocked by Tesco is a huge achievement for us. As well as being the UK’s largest supermarket, we see Tesco as also leading the other supermarkets on tackling food waste. Its CEO Dave Lewis chairs a coalition of government and business leaders dedicated to reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Target of halving global food waste by 2030. It is the only supermarket to publish third party assured food waste data, has not sent food to landfill since 2009, and has committed that no food that’s safe for human consumption will go to waste from UK retail operations by the end of 2017, so we’re very excited to be working together so closely.
We’re proud that our Bloomin’ Lovely Session IPA and Much Kneaded Craft Lager are now available at Tesco. We hope customers will #RaiseAToast to a pint-sized fight against food waste.
No time for waste
This activity is part of Tesco’s ongoing work to tackle food waste wherever it occurs – from farm to fork. Tesco believes that no food that could be eaten should be wasted. For more information on food waste at Tesco please visit www.tesco.com/foodwaste . For more information on Toast please visit www.toastale.com