FAQS

Yes. The bread we use does not contain any animal products, and we use vegan finings to filter and stabilise our beer (many beers use Isinglass, a product made from the gall bladders of fish).

Our core operations are based in the South-East and we sell UK-wide via our webshop and retailers, pubs, bars and restaurants. We do not export our beers for environmental reasons. 

We regularly brew collaboration beers with breweries all over the world. Those limited edition beer releasess use local sources of surplus bread and support local charities, and are sold within local markets.

Absolutely! You'll just need to confirm that the recipient is over 18 years old.

When you check out, there is an option to add a gift card and include a personalised message.

You can also download a PDF postcard.

If you're not sure which beer to gift, you can purchase gift vouchers.

if you would like to place an order for more than 2 different addresses and we can help. Get in touch with us at onlinesales@toastbrewing.com 

If you're purchasing as team gifts, we can also visit your workplace (or meet on Zoom) to run a beer tasting masterclass for you. Contact wholesale@toastbrewing.com for more information.

100% of our distributable profits (or 1% of revenue, whichever is greater) go to charities fixing the food system to magnify our impact. This means we don't pay dividends to our shareholders but to our charitable partners.

We have supported Feedback (www.feedbackglobal.org) who work with governments, businesses and civil society to catalyse change in social attitudes and demonstrate innovative solutions to tackle food waste and wider food industry issues. We've also worked with Rainforest Trust UK, Soil Heroes Foundation and various food redistribution groups such as Food For All and Alchemic Kitchen.

We collaborate with breweries all over the world and support local charities with a proportion of revenue from each beer. Check out our collaboration beer posts in the blog for more info on the charity beneficiary of each.

Our full lifecycle carbon footprint for 2023 was 250 tCO2e. You can read more in our latest impact report:

2023 Impact Report

2022 Impact Report

2021 Impact Report

2020 Impact Report

2019 Impact Report

The biggest source of emissions are packaging.

We want more people to enjoy a cheeky pint! Our draught beer has no single-use packaging as we only pack into reusable steel kegs (many breweries use Key Kegs which are made of single-use plastic and rarely recycled). We're building up the number of places you can buy beer on draught. Including launching our own taproom cafe in 2023! We collaborated with Change Please to open Good Company and introduced a growler scheme on World Refill Day. 

However, like many breweries we are mostly reliant on single-use, fully recyclable aluminium cans and glass bottles. In 2021 we looked at the carbon footprint of bottles v cans and found that bottles have more than double to associated emissions. So choosing cans significantly reduces the impact of the beer you enjoy and that's why we no longer sell them on our webshop. 

What action is Toast taking to reduce its footprint?

We have committed to Net Zero by 2030. Our emissions (scope 1 & 2) are only a small amount of the total emissions associated with our business - brewing, packing and distributing our beer (our Scope 3 emissions) represent most of our footprint. So we're working with partners to measure and reduce emissions.

Read our environmental policy.

Our office is based at our taproom: Good Company. It's part of a British Land complex and is 100% renewable energy (through purchase contracts).

We produce our beer under contract with established brewery partners, SEB Brewing in Broadstairs, Kent. SEB's landlord is in the process of getting planning approval to install solar across all the units on the industrial estate.

We now use printed cans so have eliminated labels.

For bottles, the labels are made with Polypropylene (PP) plastic. This is typical in the drinks industry because paper labels are easily damaged in wet bottling and canning lines, and by condensation caused by moving between ambient and chilled environments.

If the labels are removed, they can be recycled if your local council will recycle PP.

If they're not removed from the bottles, they're extracted at the waste processing site when the bottle is crushed, though some shards of the broken glass may be lost if label remains stuck to it.

We work in partnership with exceptional breweries, using their brewery but under our own license and using our own ingredients and recipes, and brewed by our in-house brewer, Stuart.

In the UK, our beers are brewed at Curious in Ashford, Kent.

We've previously worked with SEB in Kent, Hepworth Brewery in Sussex, Wold Top Brewery and Hambleton Ales in Yorkshire, and with Hackney Brewery in London. Each time we've moved, it's been to allow us to scale up production.

We work in collaboration with other breweries all over the world, including regular collabs in the US and the Netherlands. These collaborations often result in limited edition beer releases.

We use surplus fresh bread to replace 25% of the malted barley in our grain bill. Bread is packed with starches, which are broken down to simple sugars by enzymes (Amylase) in the malted barley.

We still use some malt because it contains trace minerals that balance the pH in the process and micro nutrients which are important for the yeast, and its physical attributes such as the husk also help to prevent a stuck mash. It also has a unique flavour profile which is important for the finished beer.

Hops are added for aroma and bitterness, and to help preserve the beer, then yeast converts the sugars to alcohol during fermentation.

All bread must:

- Be genuine surplus and within life
- Be sliced, dried and crumbed 
- Have known ingredients and allergens
- Have no seeds, nuts, fruits or veg. These would affect flavour, and the fats would diminish the head of the beer.
- Be delivered in sealed containers.
- Be fully traceable. Brewers donate spent grain to livestock and we need documentation to prove the bread has been segregated from meat and dairy.

We monitor the amount of bread we have rescued - check out the impact metrics under 'Our Story'.

We use fresh sandwich bread because there is so much readily available and the sugars are easily accessible for fermentation. Most breads will work though, just avoid anything oily such as focaccia or anything that contains fruit or other ingredients like olives (unless you want to incorporate into the taste of the beer).

We pay for the surplus, though at a lower cost than the finished bread. For the bakery it avoids a waste cost but there are still costs for them in complying with our traceability and food safety requirements.

Bread is a hugely popular staple, but also tops the list of most wasted food items in the UK with up to 44% never eaten. We waste lots in our homes – 20 million slices of bread every day – because we buy too much. But huge amounts are wasted in the supply chain before it even reaches our bread bins. 

Sandwich factories discard the loaf heels as it isn't used to make sandwiches. Bakeries overproduce to ensure they can meet demand (which is as unpredictable as the weather). Supermarkets want fully stocked shelves and replace edible bread on a daily basis. Bread's also wasted in by the hospitality industry in the from of uneaten bread baskets, hotel breakfast buffets etc. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as baking less bread. We need to change our expectations for abundant supplies of day-fresh bread. 

Food production is the biggest impact that we have on the environment – it uses huge amounts of land, water and energy. But one-third of food is wasted – 1.3 billion tonnes every year.

Meanwhile there is increasing demand for agricultural land to grow more crops for food and animal feed. This is driving changes in the way land is used, from forests that act as carbon sinks to intensively farmed monocultures that pollute soils, water bodies and the air.

Food waste accounts for 3.3Gt CO2e (the 3rd top emitter after USA and China), has a blue water footprint of 250 km3 (3 times the volume of Lake Geneva) and a land use footprint of 1.4bn hectares (28% of worlds agricultural land area). In the UK, we waste about 15 million tons of food, with bread being the worst offender. Nearly half (44%) of bread produced in the UK is thrown away. We’re trashing the planet to produce food that no-one eats.

What can we do?

Reduce surplus. We should produce only what we need and eat everything we produce.  All our profits go to Feedback to fix the reasons that the doesn’t happen. We also support the Real Bread Campaign’s initiative to tackle overproduction in bakeries.

Redistribute surplus. Food should feed people. Many supermarkets have partnerships with charities who get surplus food to those in need. You can support one of these brilliant organisations here. With bread, there is too much surplus for charities. It’s perishable and bulky, so storage is a problem. But it can be a valuable ingredient in the circular economy – it’s a great replacement for the grains typically used to make beer!

Feed surplus to animals. Instead of importing crops grown for animal feed – often from fragile ecosystems subject to deforestation – food that can’t feed people should feed animals. Spent grain from brewing beer makes great animal feed.

Compost. Replenish the soils with waste food to keep them healthy and fertile. Anaerobic digestion is another option, but it’s inefficient to convert the resources used to produce food into soil and energy.
 

Food should never go to landfill. Without oxygen, food can take many years to decompose and releases methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
 

Whether you're wanting to start a journey to zero waste lifestyle or just make a couple of changes to save a few pennies, there are plenty of things you can do. Here's a few of our favourite ideas:

• Check what you've got before you go shopping. Having a list of the stuff you really need will also speed up your shop and reduce impulse buys.
• Trust your senses when it comes to date labels. "Use by" dates are for food safety, though your nose will tell you if milk has soured. "Best before" dates are just an indicator of quality, but your eyes are a better judge of whether the potatoes are past.
• Store foods properly to keep them fresher for longer. Think of salads like cut flowers, putting their stalks in water in the fridge. Don't keep bread in the fridge though - that's a fast route to staling.
• Preserve foods you're not going to enjoy while fresh. Loads of food can be frozen, from soups and stews to chopped herbs in olive oil for cooking later. Or get down with jams, chutneys and pickles.
• If you have unavoidable food waste like egg shells, tea bags or banana skins, use your compost bin so it can be turned into valuable nutrients for the soil. Food in landfill takes years to break down whilst emitting methane.

There are tons of chefs and bloggers sharing tips on social media. Check them out!

Our mission is to brew great beers and spread big ideas that can change the world. We want to lead a brewing movement to eliminate bread waste and fix the food system.

Our vision is a beer with more taste and a world without waste.

The idea behind Toast was sparked in 2015. Toastmaster Tristram Stuart, a campaigner on the environmental and social impacts of food production, met the brewers behind the Brussels Beer Project. They'd used bread in their 'Babylone' beer, a nod to beer's origins of being brewed with bread. With bread wasted at a colossal scale (13,000 slices per day from a single sandwich factory), here was a circular economy solution to reduce waste, engage drinkers and raise funds for charity.

Louisa (our COO) and Tristram set up the company, launched the operations and created the Toast brand. They appointed the founding team - Rob (initially an adviser, but then our first employee and CEO) and David (our Commercial Director).

Our founding principles are:

1. To produce great-tasting beer, that
2. eliminates bread waste directly through brewing and
3. raises awareness of the problem of, and solutions to, food waste whilst
4. creating profits, which all go to charities to change the systemic causes of food waste.

We brewed our first batch with Hackney Brewery using leftover loaves from London bakeries and formally launched in 22 January 2016 (coinciding with featuring on Jamie Oliver and Jimmy Doherty’s Friday Night Feast).

We have partnered with many amazing brewers and bakers, sometimes to create limited editon beer releases. Here's to all our partners so far. Get in touch if you want to help saving the world by brewing a beer with fresh surplus bread!

We want to inspire change by getting more breweries to use surplus fresh bread. Here's to all the breweries who have been inspired to brew their own bread beers.

Update: there are lots now and so this list is not up to date! Here's to a fast growing movement of circular economy brewing!

We're proud of the culture we've built at Toast, and have a strong set of people-centred values that guide our decision making.

As certified B Corp, our commitment to our employees (and other stakeholders) is written into our Articles of Association. We're proud to offer employee share options to all employees (as well as lots of other benefits such as paid days off for volunteering and flexible working arrangements) so that we are as invested in the team as they are in the success of the business.

We're proud to have been a Top 100 Company to Escape to in the Escape the City awards every year for the past 5 years.

You can read reviews about how it is to work at Toast on Glassdoor.

Vacancies

We advertise all Toast Ale vacancies at Smartrecruiters.

We do not have any current vacancies