From bread to beer and back, a journey into upcycling food waste
By Andrea Begnini
According to the most recent Waste Watcher international report, by 2024 Italy marks a growth of more than 45 percent in food waste, raising to 683.3 grams of food that each of us, on average, throws away each week. The most frequently thrown foods include fresh fruit and bread. All ingredients at the center of the
A Turin-based corporate project that brings together environmental and social sustainability
Carlo Levi wrote that bread constitutes “the first test of civilization and the most profound of its expressions.” In Piedmont, two entrepreneurs have managed to combine the sacredness of bread with that of beer in an innovative and circular way. Emanuela Barbano and Franco Dipietro have taken the Turin writer literally and made beer out of bread, turning it into a sustainability goal and production tool. It’s called Biova Project, the entrepreneurial project born in November 2019 and dedicated to surplus food management that takes its name from the biova, a typical Piedmontese bread, and that, in the meantime, has turned into a B Corp company. The goal? To produce beer responsibly from unsold bread.
As they explain in Biova Project, for every 2,500 liters of beer, 100 kilograms of unsold bread are used and recovered “which, instead of becoming surplus, become something wonderful again. 100 kilograms that make it possible to decrease raw materials (in this case barley malt) by 30 percent, reducing environmental impact.” . But Biova is not just a beer. It is a circular economy project “that can be many different beers, made from many different types of bread, which all the realities that want to take concrete action against food waste can join.”
Rice, pasta and coffee, the other recovery beers
Today, Biova Project is a winning bet: it has an online shop, nearly 130 outlets spread across 14 regions, is present in large-scale retail and delivery APPs. And the range of circular beers has seven references, four from reclaimed bread, two from broken pasta and one from rice, for gluten-free beer.
Because, for example, Biova Leggera is a gluten-free beer made with recovered rice that replaces up to 16 percent of the barley malt. While Biova Pasta recovers waste and surplus from pasta production and turns it into a product with new value.
The model is, moreover, successfully replicated forbeer flavoring through, for example, recovery from dented coffee capsules from which the powder is extracted. That, once infused and mixed with the other ingredients, helps to form a beer with an intense and aromatic flavor, using raw materials that would otherwise end up in the dustbin.
From lemons to the return of malt in snack form
Even the recovery of lemons, which present some aesthetic problems and are, therefore, often discarded by large retailers, can generate the creation of another special beer proposed by Biova Project. And here is Biova Lemon, the beer made with lemons recovered from food waste.
But even the heart of beer, namely the malt that, after releasing its flavors and sugars is normally used for animal feed or as compost, ending up in most cases directly in landfills, can be recovered and used creatively. Finding the closure of a circularity that started from recycled bread and became beer can eventually become solid food again with RI-Snack.
“Produced by reusing the spent grain from the processing of our beer,” an excellent food “because for a decrease in calories they bring a great source of fiber and protein,” these squares from reclaimed barley malt are sustainable as they use 30 percent less virgin raw materials, healthier as they are not fried and, most importantly, very good.
