Picture this scenario: You emerge from Aman Tokyo’s sleekly sensuous spa, trailing a delicate breath of Japanese camphor as you make your way to your tatami-lined suite and crack open a full-bodied lager — concocted from leftover bread by a Singapore start-up.
Sounds unlikely, but it’s now a fortuitous reality toasted by Travin Singh, the CEO of CRUST Group. The B Corp-certified food technology company now co-produces and -brands lagers and pale ales for the likes of tony hospitality heavyweights including the aforementioned and The Ritz-Carlton, Osaka, parlayed from their food waste. This comes on the back of its pre-Series A round announced late last year.
This success is mirrored locally, where marquee attraction Marina Bay Sands Casino now exclusively serves its draught beer — tapped from personalised kegs kitted out on the premises — to punters. For Singh, it’s a vindication of his ‘food valorisation as a service’ model that has ratcheted up revenue in inclement times.
“In the past quarter alone, we have earned more than half of last year’s revenue, mainly because of our collaboration models. We have teamed up with Cold Storage, Food Panda, Red Mart and Japanese companies,” he shares. Like so many F&B businesses that have emerged from the throes of the pandemic intact, CRUST Group’s nimble manoeuvre towards the B2B segment sprang from necessity, given their untimely inception four months before Covid-19 hit.
“Even if you can upcycle a lot and create a tonne of products, selling it may be a problem and if people don’t buy, your impact on food waste reduction is still small,” explains the 31-year-old.
And the latter is hardly trifling, or middling, for that matter. A tiny nation corpulent with excess, Singapore generated 817,000 tonnes of food waste in 2021, a whopping 23 percent year-on-year increase.
To whittle away at swelling waste as well as a heaving carbon footprint, CRUST uses surplus bread from local partners such as Tiong Bahru Bakery and RedMart to substitute barley and malt, extracting sugars to produce alcohol. In pursuing a hyper local approach, they’ve experimented with botanicals from Edible Garden City and Gardens by the Bay as hops substitutes. Beer is brewed locally, and in the case of Singapore, at Brewerkz and Brewlander.
Though Singh is careful to disassociate from the ‘eco-warrior’ appellation, he reveals that his family has always practised prudent consumption, with his mother incorporating leftovers in subsequent meals. “People have this misconception that you have to be more affluent to be sustainable, which isn’t necessarily the case. We did not come from a very rich household with four kids, and therefore had to maximise our resources.”
The former financial advisor, navy regular and prolific home brewer bootstrapped the business with co-founder Ben Phua as a side hustle. “I wanted to start a value-based company and started dabbling in bread beer when I found out that ancient Egyptians fermented bread to make alcoholic beverages, to ensure they did not waste anything,” he recounts.
Today, his company has apparently salvaged more than 2,500kg of food and is slaking our thirst for viable circular economy products, at a time where Singapore’s zero-waste masterplan is being reiterated ad nauseum.
“Singapore is a highly regulated place so if you can do something well here you get a lot of overseas recognition,” he adds, lending that he’s met representatives from Coca Cola and Philippine consumer food and beverage company Universal Robina Corporation.
But it begs the burning question: just how good is planet-friendly beer? “If I’m not wrong, our Aman Tokyo in-room minibar sales were twice of Yebisu’s, the fourth largest Japanese beer company,” he proudly reports.
Photography: Mun Kong
Styling: Chia Wei Choong
Hair & Makeup: Rick Yang/Artistry, assisted by Nikki Loh, using Shiseido and Keune
