Singapore company turns bread to beer to cut Southeast Asia’s food waste

Why let bread go to waste if you can drink it?

Bakeries toss out a lot of unsold bread that are close to expiry. That’s why Singapore-based Crust Brewing is giving these items a new lease on life and turning leftover croissants and baguettes into beer. In the future, the brewer has aspirations to expand into Vietnam, one of the fastest-growing beer markets in the world. 

“Think about Vietnam and all their leftover baguettes,” Travin Singh, the founder and CEO of Crust Brewing, tells Tech in Asia. “That’ll be a resource that would never run out.” 

Photo credit: Crust Brewing

The company is expanding overseas to tap into the rising demand for beer across Asia Pacific, which Euromonitor crowned as the biggest market for the drink. Case in point, people in the region consumed some 69 billion liters of beer in 2018. 

Crust Brewing entered the Singapore market last April after months of polishing its bread-to-beer process. It has so far received seed funding of S$30,000 (about US$21,000) from Enterprise Singapore, a government agency supporting business development in the city-state. 

In theory, using surplus bread, which technically costs nothing, as one of the main ingredients for a product that retails for S$12 to S$17 (about US$9 to US$13) a pint sounds like the ideal business model. However, Singh reveals that the company’s profits are “small.”

Most of Crust Brewing’s margins go into operational costs, as only 30% of the grains used in the beer-making process is replaced with bread. As the startup doesn’t own any of its equipment, it rents out breweries, which Singh says is “very expensive.” 

The CEO, however, plans to change that soon. 

Crust Brewing is looking to acquire a brewery through funds it will raise from an investor who also owns a distillery. The fresh capital will go into developing new processes and products and finding new ways to keep costs low as well.

“We’re going to keep working on turning bread into viable whisky and gin to export it worldwide but never losing our focus on the usage of surplus products,” Singh says. “We’ll also work toward establishing our own microbrewery that features a full circular ecosystem that’s based on beer and bread.”

Ugly problem

The company is among a growing troupe of startups that are coming up with innovative solutions to tackle the big, ugly problem of food waste in Southeast Asia. Venture capital and private equity firms are beginning to notice the potential of these enterprises, injecting nearly US$20 billion into the nascent industry in 2019 – a 250% increase over five years.

In Southeast Asia, high-profile deals for startups in the space include Malaysia-based Nutrition Technologies’ US$8.5 million series A funding round in 2019. The company uses black soldier fly (BSF) larvae to break down agricultural waste. The insects are also turned into fish and livestock feed, as well as pet food. 

“Food waste is a big problem,” says Bennett Lee, the investment director at Singapore-based Velocity Ventures. “Sustainability is something that has gotten consumers, corporations, and investors thinking. It’s a very real problem, as it will affect people in the current generation and the ones to come.”

Why the focus on Asia?