Student entrepreneurs reduce food waste with beer brewed from surplus bread

Students from the University of Southampton are collecting leftover food from supermarkets to brew a bread-based beer and re-distribute produce in the community.

Future Brew , a social enterprise founded by MEng Aeronautics and Astronautics student Dimitris-Marios Stoidis, is generating commercial and community value out of fruit, vegetables, pastries, bread and ready meals that would otherwise go to landfill.

The student team distributes fresh food between a homeless shelter and community shops, before taking bread to a local brewery where it is transformed into a pale ale.

The business’s first beer, Stag, sold out at University pubs within two days having saved 160 grams of carbon dioxide from being emitted to the atmosphere with every pint.

“If food waste was considered as its own country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world,” Dimitris-Marios says. “According to Fareshare, 1.9 million tonnes of food is wasted in the UK every year and bread alone makes up 900,000 tonnes of this. This is enough to lift 26 million people out of hunger.

“Our vision is to empower individuals to become changemakers by reducing food waste. Future Brew’s business model is environmentally sustainable from start to finish, from the ingredients of our delicious beer to its transportation.”

To date, the team has provided more than 500 meals to a local homeless shelter, saved more than 1,000kg of CO2 emissions and redistributed over 200kg of surplus food.

Dimitris-Marios is advancing the start-up company as co-president of the ENACTUS Southampton, a student society which creates social enterprises focused on environmental, social and economic sustainability. His wider team are working on the business on top of Engineering, Medicine, Psychology and Marketing degrees at Southampton.

The student business has recently been shortlisted for a Dragons’ Den style pitching competition , run by the University’s Future Worlds startup accelerator, that has offered £320,000 of investment to founders over the past two years.

Future Brew is running its own competition this spring to celebrate, encourage and inspire the next generation of design engineers.

The Future Engineer contest challenges current and recent design engineering students to create a low-cost system that can track in real-time how much beer is being poured and connect the data to an app. Registration is open until Friday 1 May.

The team are also looking for coders for the development of their application. If you are interested, send an email to thefuturebrew@gmail.com .