One hundred per cent circular – The Good Shit Company won’t settle for anything less. With their Sh*t vodka and gin made from surplus baked bread, the Nijmegen-based company won this year’s Startup Cirkel Award.
Together with two partners, the owners set out to explore this idea. They launched a trial production run – funded out of their own pockets – to distil from bread. The trial was a success and now it’s time for the next step. We spoke to Joris Leferink, one of the partners at 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 began around three and a half years ago. Leferink explains: “We’re convinced that food waste is Sh*t, and we wanted to find a new use for it that would keep the waste at the level for which it was produced. So not downgrading it to bioenergy or animal feed. The idea for an initial product was already there, including the brand name: Sh*t vodka. The aim was to give what people see as waste (‘bad shit’) a new, fun purpose (‘good shit’) and raise awareness.
Leferink thought it didn’t necessarily have to be difficult. He knew from his work experience in the food industry that bread is one of the biggest sources of waste, at least in the Netherlands. “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, we’ve got plenty of raw materials. I first approached bakeries to ask for their cooperation in supplying our raw materials, and the response was very quick: ‘yes’.”
Pilot production
Leferink then had to find a partner who could help him ferment the bread first and then distil it. So he visited a whole host 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 carry out a trial run.
So the four partners decided to pool their funds to pay for that trial run. “We had no idea if it would work; theoretically, I knew it should be possible, but you’ve never done it before, so you have to test it. We also had no idea what the outcome would be in terms of flavour and yield, or how much it would cost. Could we launch such a product at a competitive price, and did it have potential in the market?”
After the trial, things were looking good. The six hundred bottles of drink produced were given an attractive design and used to gauge consumer reaction. “From the moment I had the product in a bottle, it suddenly became clear to a great many people what we were doing. That’s when we entered the Cirkel Award.”
Even more circularity
Incidentally, it is not the initiators’ ambition to become a drinks company. They want to create a platform to demonstrate that food waste can also be used to make interesting new products that are suitable for the consumer market.
And this product is not yet circular enough, according to Leferink. “We’ve already learnt a great deal from this single production run. The mash that ferments into a liquid containing alcohol – which we distil into vodka and gin – is currently simply discarded once it comes out of the still. In the future, we want to gradually make this product even more circular; our processes and everything else must become circular.”
To do that, you first need to gain experience, he explains – to understand how a production process works so you can identify areas for improvement. That is why the team submitted a project proposal to Interreg to investigate what else can be done with that residual stream from the distillation process.
The plan is also to look into other circular ingredients to give the gin a distinctive flavour. “For example, there’s a company that collects orange peel throughout the Netherlands. They extract various ingredients from it, including flavourings. If we use those to flavour our gin, it will become even more circular than it already is.”
Scaling up
“There’s interest from all sorts of countries and all sorts of parties; I can certainly start discussions with people, but naturally I want to know first whether I can produce on a larger scale.” That is why talks are currently underway with a large distillery to see if it can ramp up production.
The Good Shit Company has a partner that exports drinks all over the world. Together, they have already exhibited their circular products at an international trade fair, and there was certainly interest from various countries.
“So this is set to be quite an exciting time, with the scale-up and the second phase of the research.”
