02/09/2026
How much bread is wasted everyday, that could still be recovered to give life to new products?
🍞 This is the business of Biova Project, a small Italian company, that recovers and transforms surplus recovered from the supply chain into valuable new and healthy food products, such as beer, drinks and snacks, combining environmental and social sustainability goals.
✌ With support from the Up2Circ project, Biova validated a new business model for the industrial to internally recover its own surplus streams, to transform bread crusts and off-cuts into a functional food-grade (Ri-Flour). This flour is then reintroduced directly into the production lines as a raw material.
The project implemented a “Closing the Loop” strategy by enabling a supply chain where waste from one production phase becomes the raw material for the next.
🥪 Industrial bakery lines generate massive amounts of surplus bread, such as sandwich bread crusts and off-cuts, which are currently under-valorised or discarded despite their consistent quality. This creates significant food and forces manufacturers to rely entirely on virgin wheat flour, leading to high raw material costs and a large environmental footprint.
The primary challenge of the project was validating whether these surplus streams could be safely and economically reintegrated into the human food chain at an industrial scale.
The feasibility study, conducted in collaboration with primary Italian Corporate, demonstrated significant impact across environmental and economic dimensions:
🌍 Carbon Footprint: An estimated reduction of CO2emissions by 30% to 50% compared to conventional wheat flour.
♻️ Waste Prevention: Avoidance of approximately 18,000 tons of food waste per year by repurposing industrial bakery surplus.
💲 Economic Efficiency: Direct savings on raw material procurement
💰 Financial Viability: Validation of a circular business model with a projected return on investment (ROI) within five years,
🤝 Market Readiness: Strong interest from major players confirms that the solution is scalable and aligns with the demand for resilient, circular ingredients in the European food industry.
👍 Seeing our beneficiaries succeed is the most rewarding part of what we do. Thank you Emanuela Barbano and Franco Dipietro for trusting us to be part of your journey. We're excited to see what comes next.
🔗 Watch the video 👉 https://lnkd.in/ePGh-n7n
👀 Read more inspiring stories from sustainable SMEs on Up2circ website https://lnkd.in/eRfEretV
