A Sustainable Business from the Start
It was September, 2019 and over a coffee, Carla explained the problem with bakery waste. 'We need to do something!' she said. 'It's outrageous!'. Tonnes of perfectly good bread and bakery products go to landfill across Aotearoa every day and each loaf or bakery product costs roughly its own weight in carbon to produce.
Based on research into supermarket waste by Francesca Goodman-Smith and colleagues at Otago University and using a back-of-an-envelope per capita extrapolation, we estimated around 70-80 tonnes of bakery goods ends up in Dunedin landfill annually. Talking to friends at KiwiHarvest and local supermarkets made it clear that the worldwide phenomenon of bakery waste existed on our own doorstep. There was a ready supply of surplus bakery product in Dunedin. The question was, what to do with it?
Somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that alcohol could be made from bread. Bread is largely carbohydrate and starch which can be broken down into sugars. Yeast consumes sugar to make alcohol and carbon dioxide. From there the alcohol can be distilled and flavoured. How hard could it be?
A quick Internet search confirmed that not only can alcohol be made from bread but a small handful of distilleries and a few brewers around the world were already doing just that. So why not here? Could a small scale, sustainable, circular economy distillery work in Dunedin, NZ?
We were about to embark on an adventure to find out!
Following several months of dreaming, scheming, bookwork, and talking to food rescue folk, we finally summoned the courage to approach Distilled Spirits Aotearoa (DSA) for some early advice. Did our idea have legs?
We found the good folk at DSA to be generous and welcoming. We half expected to be brushed off as daft old bats but the reality couldn't have been more different. Without a shred of judgement, we felt encouraged to test out our ideas. At the same time, potential issues, roadblocks and caveats were carefully explained and enumerated and we were pointed to sources for detailed information and specific advice.
Encouraged, we attended a social enterprise event hosted by Startup Dunedin, just before the first COVID lockdown in 2020, Deborah Manning, CEO of KiwiHarvest cut to the chase, 'Have you produced a bottle of Gin yet?'
The answer was no and our next step came into sharp focus.
Lockdown provided an opportunity for many to put ideas into practice and we were no different. From our kitchen experiments and infusions we began to develop the two processes required to turn bread into spirits. First, we make a distiller's beer from bread and refine the resulting alcohol through distillation and filtering. Second, we infuse and distill the alcohol produced to create gin, vodka or other botanical spirits.
It is common for NZ distillers to buy in whey alcohol (lactanol) or import a neutral grain or sugar spirit then focus on redistilling or rectifying to produce gin or other spirits. Only a handful of distillers make their own base alcohol primarily because it is cheaper and easier to buy it in.
Unlike all other NZ distilleries, we were starting from a food waste problem. We were making our own base alcohol with sugars derived from surplus bread and bakery products. To tackle the waste problem, we had to deal with a wide variation in ingredients; bakery surplus is a broad church - from sliced bread, to raspberry buns, ciabatta rolls to sour dough. There was a lot to do and it was clear we needed reinforcements to develop our process. Carla and I were joined by Maia, a botanist, and Sue, a food service manager.
Horror at the scale of the food waste problem had brought us together and a love of good spirits cemented our alliance. Now all we needed was a space to pilot the process.
It was our great good fortune that a mutual friend connected us with Vito Ionnece and Penny Dawson. Penny and Vito run Artisan Pantry in Kaikorai Valley Road and have decades of experience in the food industry and manufacturing. Several Dunedin food and drink businesses have started out life at Artisan - it boasts superb food production facilities, charged on a casual basis, and Vito, Penny, their staff and other startups and producers are close at hand for solid practical advice, story swaps and moral support. Artisan is a fantastic environment to evaluate a new food or beverage enterprise.
After a solid few weeks of brewing, distilling, macerating and infusing we produced the first products that we felt were good enough to share. On the 30th July, 2020 we invited Deb Manning, founder of KiwiHarvest, Steph Haworth, Acting MD of Next Farm and Sue James, the then Chair of Distilled Spirits Aotearoa, to come and sample our first batches of gin and vodka made from scratch using bread.
Several iterations and process tweaks later we had confidence that we had marketable and sustainable products. But did we we have a sustainable business?
Making spirits from surplus bread and bakery goods has sustainable practice at its core but it’s not so simple when you start to consider the carbon costs associated with production, transport, packaging and waste.
No sooner had we celebrated creating our first products than we began to appreciate first-hand the tension between creating an environmentally sustainable business and a commercially sustainable one.
We started with a hiss and roar. We left no stone unturned in our quest for sustainably sourced and ethically produced raw materials and nothing should go to waste.
Our main waste product is the solids left after we have strained sugary syrup, destined for our fermenters, from our bread mash. The mash waste can be a useful food for stock. However, even with small volumes, we found a handful of domestic goats could not consume everything we were mashing. It went mouldy quickly and we needed to store it safely. We spent considerable time and expense exploring options for drying the mash waste but the time and costs were unsustainable. A happy compromise was found with support from Blueskin Nurseries who were happy for us to add the spent mash to their commercial compost.
We had further sustainability adventures cleaning and reusing wine bottles to package our spirits. In the end, the time this took and the health and safety risks were just too great.
In the end, we sourced new, Visy bordeaux bottles manufactured largely from recycled glass instead. Our friends at Forrest Wines, allowed us to piggy-back our small orders onto their commercial supply. This helped to keep down the costs of our early products.
At this point two of the original four founders, Sue and I, took the plunge and decided to press on to build Dunedin Craft Distillers into a business. In September 2020, Dunedin Craft Distillers was incorporated as a limited liability company and by Christmas 2020 we had our license to manufacture alcohol.
For us, sustainability remains a work in progress. We believe the key will be to ensure we give equal weight to indicators of social and environmental impact as much as to financial impact in assessing the sustainability of our business. A key undertaking to our founders, our customers and our staff is to maintain this triple bottom line approach.
By January 2021 we were ramping up production, looking for premises and getting ready for sales.
Taking our first steps with social media, securing our alcohol license and setting up the business website, alongside refining our recipes, ramping up production, starting to sell and taking part in the NZ Spirits Awards had kept us very busy.
We realised that the demands of regular production meant we had to start looking for a permanent home for our small distillery. We were lucky to secure our new premises at 8 Roberts Street, formerly occupied and beautifully renovated by the Hastie Brothers of Bay Road Peanut Butter.
On the 1st of May, 2021 we moved into Roberts Street and our fledgling business brand began to take shape. Our branding is reflected in this website and we’re especially grateful to Bronwen Hurford of December&Co Graphic Design for her thoughtful guidance and beautiful designs.
We’ve had many adventures since our early beginnings. We’ve won medals at NZ and International competitions for our products, commissioned a beautiful 500L Reflux Still, designed and built a bespoke brewhouse behind the Roberts Street shop, brought on additional shareholders and run a successful PledgeMe Rewards campaign. We’ve had many laughs and a few tears along the way.
Above all, we’ve loved creating and building collaborations with other businesses, individuals, organisations, educators and students. We have been overwhelmed by the interest in what we’re doing and the support from customers, whānau and friends, old and new. Thank you!
We hope you’ll come along for the ride as we continue in our mission to raise spirits from bread.
Cheers!
Jenny and Sue