A toast to the planet: Meet the beer brand donating all of its profits to charities
“I could never imagine just running my own business for business’ sake,” Rob Wilson, co-founder and chief executive of Toast Brewing, says.
Instead, he says he’s in it to make an environmental change with his planet-saving brewing company.
Originally founded in 2016 with the idea to create tasty brews out of surplus bread, Toast now offers a range of beers stocked across the nation’s supermarkets.
And, oh, Toast donates 100 per cent of its profits – yes, all of them – to environmental charities in an effort to put an end to global food waste.
Co-founded by Tristram Stuart, Rob Wilson and Louisa Ziane, the trio of entrepreneurs possess a great deal of experience in founding, scaling, and advancing social enterprises.
So how – and why – do they do it?
Wilson sat down with City PM in his buzzing Regent’s Place taproom to discuss what the business and team is all about.
Donating to change
“The food industry causes the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, deforestation… it’s really wasteful,” Wilson said.
“A third of the food we produce in the world is wasted.”
Some 44 per cent of all baked bread is thrown away – “ridiculous!’ says Wilson.
Toast’s recipe is fairly simple: they buy excess bakery bread and use it to replace some of the malted barley in their recipe. The malt turns the starch in the bread into simple sugars, ready for yeast to convert them into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Add hops and you get beer. Tasty beer, as it goes.
Rather than deciding on a small or predetermined sum of donations, the team of three aimed big – committing to donate 100 per cent of profits to charities.
In an “unprofitable” year, Wilson says Toast Brewing is committed to donating at least 1 per cent of revenue – or whichever number is highest.
“We wanted to be a bit more provocative than just saying we’re going to 1 per cent or 10 per cent of our profits. We thought, let’s see if it’s possible to build a fast growing consumer brand where you actually donate all the profits,” Wilson said.
In 2018, Toast’s Equity for Good investment model was introduced – a legally binding pledge made by investors who agree to reinvest a proportion of net capital gains into an organisation with a social or environmental impact.
For Toast Brewing investors, the proportion of net capital gains is set at 100 per cent.
Toast Brewing managed to raise £2m in 2022 from high-end investors, including leading brands such as the National Geographic Society and Heineken International.
“They have signed a pledge to say that when they sell their shares one day and realise a capital gain on their share price, they will commit to investing all those gains into other mission driven businesses to keep advancing business as a force for good,” Wilson said.
So far, Toast Brewing has donated £106,000 to charities and saved over 3m slices of bread along the way.
While their main charity partner is Feedback, the team at Toast Brewing isn’t limited to just one — they have also worked with Rainforest Trust UK, Soil Heroes Foundation and FoodForAll.
“Basically, we were just capturing the calories that were going to go to waste and we discovered that there was this delicious byproduct,” Wilson said.
Team Effort
Running a business like Toast Brewing isn’t a one person job, Wilson says, as it’s always been a “bigger team effort.”
With Wilson and Ziane running the day-to-day business, and Stuart sitting on the board, Wilson says the team is passionate about what they do and what they fight for.
“The three of us I think bring completely different strengths and weaknesses to the table,” Wilson said. “There’s no way any one of us would be able to do what we’ve managed to do collectively.”
Toast Brewing employees are also owners of the business, a “golden share” in protecting its mission.
Internal culture is a large part of the company’s key to success, Wilson believes, so to continually remind the staff of what the founding purpose is, they like to host ‘away days’ out in nature.
It’s not just about “fighting food waste for food waste sake,” Wilson said, it’s about realising that “food is nature, and food waste is killing nature.”
With an aim to focus much more on sales growth in the next year, Wilson believes the future for Toast Brewing is bright.
“Maybe now is our time,” Wilson said. “The world is more and more acutely aware of the need for innovation and products like ours.”