According to Gail’s Bakery, a shocking 24 million slices of bread in the UK are thrown away every day. This amounts to 278 slices of bread being tossed in the bin every second.
As such, Gail’s Bakery is using surplus ingredients that would otherwise be thrown away to create bread and pastries.
One of the most popular items of their Waste Not menu is the Waste-less Sourdough. The bread is created by turning unsold loaves into breadcrumbs. Afterward, it is added to a fresh sourdough dough, resulting in a loaf with recycled ingredients.
They also sell crackers made with leftover cheese rinds and baguettes turned into croutons. On their website, the bakery states, “We keep food waste to a minimum, and obsess about how we manage this”.
Gail’s Bakery was founded in 2005 by Tom Molnar and Ran Avidan. They wished to make world-class artisan bread more widely available beyond London’s finest restaurants. Now, there are 60 branches, spread across London, Oxford, Brighton, and beyond.
Gail’s Bakery new eco-conscious line reflects a positive shift in the food and catering world, in which many other food companies are launching eco-initiatives in the hope to be more sustainable. The bakery chain will be joining Marks and Spencer, who has recently launched a scheme where people are encouraged to bring their own containers, allowing shoppers to refill their own food containers to avoid plastic waste. With the rise of eco-conscious shops, there is hope that other businesses will follow suit.
