Waste-free bread chain

Waste-free bread chain

Harvesting, baking, packaging and transporting; we put a lot of energy in our bread. But in the Netherlands, we produce a surplus of about 700,000 loaves of bread each day. We can make the biggest gains in consumer households, but we can also organise the rest of the bread chain more intelligently. For example, 8% of daily fresh bread in Dutch supermarkets isn’t sold. Instead, it is used for animal feed. A cluster of companies, knowledge institutions, social organizations and governments wants to do something about this. Within the Circular Food Center, they are going to work on efficiency in the bread supply chain, by preventing return flows.

Voor meer informatie, download hier het Position Paper van Samen Tegen Voedselverspilling
‘Het onverkochte saucijzenbroodje terug de voedselketen in. Op naar een circulaire eiwitketen.’

Preventing and valorizing return flows in the bread industry

Toine Timmermans, director of the Food Waste Free United foundation: “There are already many solutions for a waste-free bread chain: from the use of data to bake exactly enough to the sale of fresh frozen bread. To make even more of an impact, we want to change the rules of the game, with the focus on preventing return flows. From making other agreements in the supply chain to redesigning the store shelf. The collaborating parties in the cluster want to make existing solutions scalable, with a good business model.”

Participants

Participants at the start of the cluster are Amarant Bakkers, Bakkerij Fuite, Sonneveld’s European Bakery Innovation Centre (EBIC) and the Dutch Bakery Association (NVB). The cluster is initiated by the foundation Food Waste Free United.