How We Started

First page of our research scrapbook

It was September, 2019 and over a coffee, Carla explained to me the problem with bakery waste. 'We need to do something!' she said. 'It's outrageous!'. Tonnes of perfectly good bread and bakery products go to landfill across Aotearoa every day and each loaf or bakery product costs roughly its own weight in carbon to produce.

Based on research into supermarket waste by Francesca Goodman-Smith and colleagues at Otago Uni and using a back-of-an-envelope per capita extrapolation, we estimated around 76 tonnes of bakery goods ends up in Dunedin landfill annually. Talking to friends at Kiwiharvest and local supermarkets made it clear that the worldwide phenomenon of bakery waste existed on our own doorstep. There was a ready supply of surplus bakery product in Dunedin. The question was, what to do with it?

Somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that alcohol could be made from bread. Bread is largely carbohydrate which can be broken down into sugar. Yeast consumes sugar to make alcohol and carbon dioxide. From there the alcohol can be distilled and flavoured. How hard could it be?

A quick net search confirmed that not only can alcohol be made from bread but a small handful of distilleries and a few brewers around the world were already doing just that. So why not here? Could a small scale, sustainable, circular economy distillery work in Dunedin, NZ?

We were about to embark on an adventure to find out!