Translator: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Food waste is one of the biggest issues of our time,
and one of the largest single contributors towards greenhouse gas emissions
and climate change.
So, what if I could tell you that one of the solutions to food waste
is actually pint-sized and truly delicious.
(Laughter)
I'm Rob Wilson, and I'm Chief Toaster at Toast Ale, where we brew our craft beer
with fresh surplus bread that would otherwise go to waste.
With the equivalent to a slice of bread in every bottle
and all our profits poured into charity to fight food waste,
we think toast is the best thing...
(Laughter)
since you know what.
(Laughter)
For the last few years, I've been the UK country director
for an international organisation called Ashoka.
We look to identify and scale
some of the most innovative and exciting solutions
to social and environmental problems.
I must have seen thousands of ideas over the years,
and I've done my best to help wherever I can,
and I've even started some organisations of my own.
Then 18 months ago, I got chatting to one of the change makers
within the network called Tristram Stuart.
Tristram is an international best-selling author;
he's a campaigner; he's a social entrepreneur.
He's pioneered the fight against food waste.
Since he made it his life's mission, food waste has hit the global headlines.
Even the Daily Mail are talking about food waste,
so you know things are getting serious -
(Laughter)
and quite right too.
One third of the food that we produce in the world
is going to waste.
That's over a billion tons of food every year.
The worst culprit of them all is bread.
44 per cent of the bread that we bake, we never eat.
That's a million tons of bread.
Charities feeding the hungry turn bread away
because there's just too much of it.
So, Tristram and I were chatting,
and he had what I thought was a simply genius idea:
What if we could get wasted on waste?
(Laughter)
What if we could turn all that unused bread into beer?
You see, he'd just returned from a trip to Brussels,
where he tried a beer called Babylon, brewed with bread.
Called Babylon because the first ever beer recipe that's been discovered
from 4,000 years ago has bread as one of the key ingredients.
Of all the social enterprise ideas I'd ever heard,
this was, by far and away, the most awesome.
(Laughter)
To be honest, he had me at beer.
(Laughter)
So, let me quickly explain how you would make a typical beer.
You mix hot water and malt in something called a mash tun.
Just imagine a big saucepan.
This creates a sugary liquid
that you move over to a second container called a kettle.
Called a kettle because you're going to boil that liquid
with hops to give aroma and flavour.
You move that liquid over to a third container
called a fermenting tank; imagine a third saucepan.
You add yeast, you let the yeast work its magic,
it ferments over the next couple of weeks, and you have beer.
To create our bread beer, it's exactly the same process,
but we replace about a third of the malt in that original tank, the mash tun,
with surplus fresh bread that would otherwise go to waste.
So, a team of us over the last 18 months, we've been using our loaf,
and we - sorry -
(Laughter)
we've founded the Toast business on four core founding principles.
First and foremost,
we want to create a beer that tastes fantastic.
We've been lucky enough to get the thumbs up
from people like Jamie Oliver, when it comes to taste.
Second, we want to tackle bread waste head-on.
We want to brew as much of that bread
that would otherwise go to waste as possible.
We source our bread from sandwich manufacturers,
where the heel of a loaf of bread, the crust of a loaf goes in the bin;
it's surplus to requirements
that won't end up on your sandwich in the shops.
The third thing that we do is that we communicate about food waste.
Some of the facts and stats that I'm talking about today,
we put those on our bottle.
The final thing that we do:
we're super proud to pour 100 per cent of our profits
into the food waste charity Feedback,
which is ending food waste at a systemic level.
Tristram founded Feedback,
and Feedback has changed government policy,
they've launched consumer awareness raising campaigns
such as eating wonky or ugly fruits and vegetables,
and many other campaigns.
Underpinning these four principles is our mission statement.
We believe that if you're going to change the world,
you have to throw a better party
than the people and the corporations that are destroying it.
(Applause)
For us, there's no better way to get a party started
than with great tasting craft beer.
We're lucky our party has got off to a good start.
So far, we've brewed and sold 100,000 beers,
we've created a lager and an IPA to sit alongside our flagship Pale Ale,
and we're stocked all over the country.
But we're not done yet.
Food waste is a global issue.
With bread beer, we believe we have a scalable international solution.
We've open sourced our recipe,
so that people can tackle bread waste at a local level and home brew.
We've collaborated with breweries all over the country
to create new bread beers
and tackle bread waste at a regional level.
We've even started brewing our own toast beer
as far away as New York, Cape Town, and Reykjavik.
So, before too long,
we hope we can put ourselves out of business.
You see, for us, our mission is to cut off our own supply chain.
The day that there's no more waste bread to be brewed
is the day that we can shut up shop and say, 'Mission accomplished.'
So, let me conclude as Chief Toaster, and invite everybody to raise a glass.
Let's raise a toast to hope.
Let's raise a toast to ending food waste.
Cheers to that.
(Applause)