Tons of Bread Wasted Each Year: Danish Company ‘Eat Wasted’ Recycles Loaves into Pasta
Around the world, bread is a beloved staple of billions of people’s diets, with an estimated 100 million tons produced each year. Many millions of people prayerfully give thanks for their “daily bread” while others use it as a way of describing the money in their pockets.
Yet, an astonishing amount of bread is thrown away every year—around 1.2 million tons a year in the UK, according to a 2013 study. “Bread has been one of the highest food waste categories,” said a 2022 study in Molecules journal.
Efforts to reuse or recycle bread products are underway, but much of the moldy, inedible excess still ends up in landfills or is otherwise discarded.
Enter a Danish company called Eat Wasted, which is turning stale bread into pasta. Since 2022, the company founded by Leif Friedmann and Jorge Aguilar has reused 50,000 slices of stale bread (1400 kg or about 1.5 tons) to produce 100 kg (220 lbs.) of pasta every week. Demand by local restaurants and cafes in the Copenhagen area is so great that the company could sell more, but their small pasta factory is already at capacity.
Bread Demand and Waste
The idea of recycling bread into another food comes at a time when countries are struggling with food waste.
A report published in 2023 found for every five loaves of bread bought in the United Kingdom, one was thrown away unopened. A more recent report found British consumers put £620 million ($785 million) worth of uneaten bread into the garbage every year simply because it hadn’t been used in time. And UK shoppers are not alone in being so wasteful: In Sweden, a 2021 study calculated that bread waste made up the largest part of all of that country’s total food waste, with each person annually discarding 8 kg (17.6 lbs.) of their daily bread.
Discarded bread is part of a bigger picture. The United Nations Environment Programme reports that more than 1 billion tons of food was wasted in 2022, with more than half being generated by households (632 million tons). Incredibly, every year, each person throws away the average body weight of an adult human in food.
The UN agency believes food waste to be a failure of the market, with more than $1 trillion lost every year. It is also an environmental failure, generating an estimated 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions while filling up the equivalent of nearly 30% of the world’s agricultural land. And yet, as bread is thrown away, people go hungry.
[L]andfills remain the most common destination for bread waste—in the US, around 800 million bread loaves are thrown in the trash, according to a 2024 study.
Obviously, stale, moldy bread cannot be sent to anyone in need, but better management of bread products could lead to lower grain prices. Africa is reliant on wheat imports, as it spends up to $75 billion annually importing 100 million tons of cereals. Wheat, instead of being processed into bread products that are often wasted, could instead be transported to a part of the world where it would not be wasted.
Converting Bread Waste into Pasta
Others are looking at what to do with all of that uneaten bread. Some excess bread is converted into substances such as fuels, chemicals, and enzymes through fermentation. Some is converted to animal feed, as has been done for centuries, the Molecules study noted. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of bread also go to food banks and pantries, where it has a short shelf life. But landfills remain the most common destination for bread waste—in the US, around 800 million bread loaves are thrown in the trash, according to a 2024 study “Breaking bread: Assessment of household bread waste incidence and behavioural drivers” in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
Eat Wasted project manager Evalotta Spangenberg said that their business of recycling bread is not a new concept.
“This is an old technique used by Italian grandmas. Making something out of waste is not something our generation came up with,” said Spangenberg.
“This is an old technique used by Italian grandmas. Making something out of waste is not something our generation came up with.”
But what is new is that the company has upscaled from grandmother’s kitchen. Rather than using household crumbs, they gather old bread from an industrial bakery and freeze it. It is then converted into breadcrumbs and then flour before being used in the pasta recipe making up 25% of the whole ingredients.
It took a lot of experimenting to produce the perfect product, Spangenberg said, adding that some earlier versions were “horrible.” “We have now created a recipe where the taste and texture is very close to normal pasta. I think it has a great texture and a nice bite. People say it is super-close to normal pasta.”
Eat Wasted plans to expand its product beyond the wholesaler directly to Danish consumers and then deliver it around the world. “We would like to be a staple on the supermarket shelves to allow people to buy a more sustainable, mission-driven product. That’s the overall mission, but it will take a lot of small steps to achieve,” she said.
The Danish start-up further wants to use its products to bridge the gap between food waste and food-insecure people. Spangenberg explained how over the first two years of the company’s existence they have been feeding people pasta dinners.
“We started hosting weekly community dinners, which started with 10 people showing up, and it grew until we had a 100 every week. The community became like a little restaurant where people could exchange different ideas about ways of living in a more sustainable way,” she said.
The company has expanded by introducing their pasta to tables all over the world at special events and now wants to expand by creating a bread pasta factory in Italy to make casarecce pasta, a Sicilian pasta with short, edged noodles. She added: “Our core vision is donating food to the local community and to the people who are food insecure a proportion of everything we sell.”
However, people don’t need to buy Eat Wasted’s pasta to cut down on bread waste—they can actually make it in their own kitchen without too much difficulty. A recipe from the Nolla restaurant in Helsinki, mixes 100 grams of stale sourdough bread with the same amount of pasta flour and two eggs, making enough pasta for two.
[T]here are plenty of other alternative dishes made from out-of-date bread that have been part of classic cuisine from countries across the world [including] … gazpacho, … croutons to have with onion soup, … [and] bread pudding dessert.
And there are plenty of other alternative dishes made from out-of-date bread that have been part of classic cuisine from countries across the world. Spanish cold soup gazpacho uses stale white bread to thicken a mixture of tomatoes, cucumber, olive oil, and peppers. The French turn their old baguettes into croutons to have with onion soup, while in England, bread pudding dessert is made from slices of day-old bread.
Buying Less Equals Less Bread Waste
The simplest method for not wasting bread is not to let it become stale in the first place, which apart from reducing food waste will also save money. Surely, many people come home from the bakery with fresh bread only to find there is still half a loaf sitting in the kitchen; yet checking what food is in the cupboard before grocery shopping shouldn’t take long.
When leaving a loaf of bread at home, store it in paper rather than plastic, as this will delay the development of mold. Unsurprisingly, storing bread in a bread bin will also keep it fresh for longer, but perhaps less obvious is the importance of where it is kept. While putting the bin within easy reach on top of the fridge can be handy, this will cause the bread to dry out due to the heat from the appliance. Instead, keep it in a cool dark corner.
When bread does go stale though, there are many recipes to choose from to transform that bread into something delicious. Choose a recipe and try it at home!
*Gordon Cairns is a freelance journalist and teacher of English and Forest Schools based in Scotland.
Comments