One hundred per cent circular, The Good Shit Company won't do it for less. With their Sh*t vodka and gin from overbaked bread, the Nijmegen-based company won this year's Startup Circle Award.
Together with two partners, the owners went exploring for this idea. They started a pilot production - funded from their own pockets - for distilling from bread. The trial was successful and now it is time for the next step. We spoke to Joris Leferink, one of the partners in The Good Shit Company.
If we do something circular, it really is 100%. Our alcohol comes 100% from bread.
Leferink has been working for years in the food industry, on innovation in the broadest sense of the word. Strategy, concept, product development, scale-up, route market, everything from the beginning of an idea - it's always about new ideas, he stresses - to the market. Since January 2024, he runs the company The Food Foundry together with Arjan Siemerink.
Reusing food waste without scaling down
This project started about three and a half years ago. Leferink says: "We are convinced that food waste is Sh*t and we wanted to give it a new purpose where we could keep the waste at the level it was produced for. So not scaling down to bioenergy or animal feed. The idea for a first product was already there, including the brand name: Sh*t vodka. Giving what people see as waste (bad shit) a new fun destination (good shit) and making people aware, that was the idea.
Leferink thought it didn't necessarily have to be difficult. Bread is one of the largest types of waste, at least in the Netherlands, he knew, due to his work experience in the food industry. "I was told that every industrial bakery supplying supermarkets has a return flow of between 20 and 30 tonnes of bread per week. So I thought raw materials we have enough. I first approached bakeries for cooperation for our raw material, to which the answer was very quickly: yes."
Pilot production
Then Leferink had to look for a party that could help ferment bread first and then distil it. So he visited a lot of distilleries in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Each time, the answer was no. Until he came across a distillery that had done something similar before and was willing to do a trial production.
Thus, the four partners decided to put money together to pay for that pilot production. "We had no idea if it could be done, theoretically I knew it should be possible, but you've never done it before, so you have to test that. Then we also had no idea what the result would be in taste and in yield and what it would cost. Can you market such a product for a marketable price and does it have potential in that?"
After the trial, things looked good. The resulting six hundred bottles of drinks were given a nice design and used to see what consumers thought of them. "From the moment I had the product in a bottle, it suddenly became clear to a lot of people what we were doing. That's when we applied for the Circle Award."
Even more circularity
Incidentally, it is not the initiators' ambition to become a beverage company. They want to create a platform to show that you can also turn food waste into interesting new products that fit a consumer market.
And this product is not yet circular enough either, according to Leferink. "From this one production, we have already learned a lot. The mash that ferments into a liquid with alcohol in it, which we distil into the vodka and gin, now just goes away when it comes out of the still. In the future, we want to add even more circularity to this product step by step, our processes and everything has to become circular."
To do that, you first have to gain experience, he explains, experiencing how a production process goes to see where you can improve. So the team submitted a project application to Interreg to investigate what else could be done with that residual flow from the distillation process.
It also plans to look at other circular ingredients to add a special flavour to gin. "For example, there is a company that collects orange peels throughout the Netherlands. They, in turn, extract various ingredients from them, including flavourings. If we use those to flavour our gin, our gin also becomes even more circular than it already is."
Scaling up
"There is interest from all kinds of countries and parties, I can start talking to people, but of course I want to know first whether I can produce on a larger scale." Therefore, talks are now ongoing with a large distillery to see if it can start larger production.
The Good Shit Company has a partner that exports drinks all over the world. Together, they have already been at an international trade fair with the circular products and there was definitely interest from several countries.
"So this is going to be quite an exciting time, with the scaling up and part two of the research."
