Toast Brewing

Toast Brewing was established in 2015 around a simple idea: use beer to tackle the enormous amount of bread that goes to waste. Bread requires land, water and energy to produce, yet a significant proportion is never eaten. Toast saw an opportunity to take those surplus loaves and return them to a process with very old roots, using baked grain as an ingredient in fermentation and turning food that might otherwise be wasted into beer.

Surplus bread is not simply a symbolic addition to Toast's recipes. The company buys excess bread from bakeries and uses it to replace 25% of the malted barley in every beer it produces. During brewing, enzymes from the remaining malt break down starches from the bread into fermentable sugars, which yeast then converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Hops provide aroma and bitterness, allowing the rescued bread to become a practical part of the brewing process rather than simply an environmental message.

Reducing bread waste forms part of a broader environmental mission. Toast describes its purpose as fighting food waste, advocating for nature and using the business to support organisations protecting the natural world. Rather than distributing its profits in the conventional way, Toast commits 100% of them to environmental charities, connecting the sale of its beer directly with funding for wider conservation and restoration work.

The scale of Toast's bread-saving programme has grown considerably since its early years. The company records its impact from 2016 and says the slices of surplus bread it has rescued, if stacked together, would reach several times the height of Mount Everest. Its beers have also moved well beyond a small sustainability project, reaching pubs and national retailers while retaining surplus bread as a fundamental ingredient across the range.

Toast's physical brewing arrangements have evolved as the company has grown. In 2024 it moved to new premises at Unity Place in Milton Keynes, where the supplied brewery information describes a small three-barrel brewing operation. Much of the company's larger-scale production continues to be contract-brewed elsewhere, allowing Toast to combine its own small brewing facility with the additional capacity needed for wider distribution.

Through that growth, Toast has kept the same relationship between beer and environmental purpose at the centre of the business. Every beer provides another use for surplus bakery bread, while profits generated from the business support charities working on behalf of nature. The result is a brewing model intended not only to reduce waste within beer production itself, but to use beer as a way of funding wider environmental action.