The waste of bread within the food chain is huge. In the chain from bakery (1-2%; sometimes up to 12%), to retail (4-8%), to consumers (15-20%), almost a quarter is lost. This represents an economic loss of over 400 million euros. A previous study showed the feasibility of fermenting bread waste of bakeries successfully into sourdough for reprocessing in bread.
However, reprocessing bread waste from stores (approx. 70 million kg) encounters a number of important issues, including food security and logistics. During this feasibility project, industrial Bakery Bouman / Pater (Geldermalsen) will together with several Jumbo retailers, European Bakery Innovation Centre (Papendrecht) and Wageningen UR (Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research and Wageningen University Social Sciences Group) investigate the feasibility in order to solve these issues.
The project objective is to maximize profits and sustainability based on exergy analyses* through two routes:
• Reducing the amount of bread waste of supermarkets by aligning the offer by using multi-criteria decision models.
• Reducing bread waste in the food chain, which remains necessarily, in a food-safe and cost-efficient way, without letting it drop in value by the use in animal feed.
*Conservation of resources - energy, labor, raw materials - in production
