More than 150,000 metric tons of bread are thrown in France, every single year, which counts for about nine loaves for every citizen. But a machine called ‘crumbler’ claims to grind those stale baguettes into breadcrumbs that are fine enough to replace flour! But can this idea reduce the amount of food waste produced across the country?
Bakery Pomponette is one of 100 bakeries in France that use Le Crumbler. The unsold baguettes here are sliced and dropped into the crumbler’s silver chimney. “It’s my normal baguette recipe, but I remove 20% of the flour and replace it with breadcrumbs”, says Guillaume Devinat, baker and manager at Pomponette.
Staff measure flour, yeast, salt, and water and weigh the exact amount of crumbs needed for the recipe. They add the breadcrumbs and give everything a delightful blend to form a dough, which will rest for the night. “The dough is brown, which is normal because we’ve added the breadcrumbs inside. It isn’t a white dough-like we’re used to in France. Here we have something a little darker and more crusty”, says Devinat.
Doughs are rolled one more time before receiving the finishing touches, which prepares them for baking. Its been about 3 years since Devinat’s flour supplier told him about the crumbler and its inventor Franck Wallet. “I am not at all a baker. I’m an urban planner by training, but I wanted to fight against food waste because it’s an environmental, economic, and social problem all at once”, says Franck, founder of Expliceat.
He found the solution to this food waste problem in crumbs, which, if dried properly, can be stored for months. He quit his city planner in 2015 and worked with a team of engineers to create a prototype of the crumbler. The crumbler has a grate with little holes for fine crumbs and bigger ones for something a bit thicker.
Bread is a staple to every French kitchen and the consumers here expect it to be fresh and with no preservatives. This leaves the country’s over 30,000 bakeries with a lot of unsold pieces of bread. Many donate their bread at the end of the day. And according to a 2016 French government policy, supermarkets are forbidden from throwing away their leftover food. But even with these policies, there is way more bread left. Wallet estimates that about 10% of the total production at every bakery goes to waste.
The primary advantage of the crumbler is that it can be used with any type of bread. “We still have a long road ahead of us. It’s just the beginning. We have about 10 machines around the world”, says adds.
Devinat says they can save a lot of unsold bread that would have been thrown away otherwise and has already created a variety of recipes based on the crumbs. And according to the customers, the toasted flavour, which comes from the less usage of water, and which conserves it for a longer period, is what makes it everybody’s favourite.
Tazeen Fatma