Jenny McDonald and Sue Stockwell: Dunedin distillers on turning wasted bread into gin

A pair of Dunedin-based distillers have figured out how to turn bakery waste into gin.

Jenny McDonald and Sue Stockwell have been making gin under the Dunedin Craft Distillers label since 2020, by using surplus bread that would have been thrown out.

The pair have recently launched a Pledge Me campaign in order to fund more tools to save more bread from being sent to the landfills.

According to the duo, they've managed to upcycle at least 10 tons worth of bread for their gin.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks edb Well.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
The gin business is booming, but a couple of Dunedin
distillers are making gin with a difference using leftover bakery products.
Jenny McDonald and Sue Stockwell run Dunedin Craft Distillers and
at the first in the country to take bakery waste
destined for landfill to make their gin. Jenny and Sue
use the food rescue organization KII Harvest. We've spoken about

(00:35):
it here on the show before. It's estimated they've saved
ten thousand tons of bakery waste from heading to landfill,
but are still they're using it to make gin. They
are now running a pledge me campaign to save even
more bread from being wasted, and Sue and Jenny are
with me. Good morning to the turvy.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Good morning, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Now you're the only ones in New Zealand doing this.
Where did the idea come from to use bread to
make gin?

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Well, it started from a discussion where the friend back
in twenty nineteen about the quantity of bread and bakery
waste going to land sill and if I can just
that's comment on a couple of things from your intro
franch CHESCA. Just get the numbers right. So there's about
three thousand tons of bread and bakery waste from supermarkets

(01:26):
alone across New Zealand each year ends up in Landsall
and in terms of what we've saved so far, it's
actually ten thousand kilograms or roughly ten tons.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
So just right to get that's probably it's probably quite
important to get right because there's quite a difference.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
We don't want to overreach the pudding.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I thought it was an impressive amount. What kind of
bakery products can you use for this process?

Speaker 4 (01:56):
We can use any sort of bakery products, So we
use bread, we use ice, buns, Leamington's, anything does it
And it does make a difference to the product.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Does the bread impact the taste of the gin?

Speaker 3 (02:16):
No, No, not at all. And the reason is we
cook up the bread to extract the sugars, and then
the sugars are we add es to that and you
do a fermentation very much like a beerber and then
it's distilled and by the time it comes off the
still it's ninety three and a half percent ethanol, so

(02:37):
almost all the flavor is left. Behind in the processing part.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
Got you? So if you were a normal gender stiller,
what would you be using to do that normally?

Speaker 3 (02:48):
If we were a normal Well, there's lots of different
ways of going about it. But many gender stillers buy
in ethanol. It's been produced elsewhere, So in New Zealand
quite a lot of it comes from Fronterra, who produce
ethanol from as a byproduct of the dairy industry. Starting

(03:10):
from way other people import neutral grain spirit or a
sugar based spirit.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Got you? Is it a complicated or time consuming process
using the bakery goods?

Speaker 4 (03:23):
It's time to assuming and it's taken us a while
to know how to actually deal with the soggy bread
because it's very different from dealing with grain and learning
how to filter. That has been an ongoing problem for
us that we've been gradually solving.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
Good to hear this breed, so all this bread in
the products, they would have ended up in landfill. So
you think you've saved ten tons of bakery waste? Was
that right?

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Yeah, that's great. We're actually up to ten point seven
tons right now, and that we work with Timi Harvest,
so basically we're the last stop before the dump in Dunedin.
So anything that key we have is can't give away
to people for food we take and that's really important

(04:16):
to us because we didn't want to be taking food
out of anyone's mouth.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Are you are you constantly distilling? Like do you end
up just with a whole lot of bakery waste on
your doorstep that you're like, okay, we have to store
this somewhere or can are you constantly using it?

Speaker 4 (04:31):
Well, in general we're to constantly.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Use Okay, you've got to pledge me campaign to try
and make the process easier. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (04:40):
That's correct. It'll not only make it easier, but it
will allows the process more so. In Dneedin each year
is probably about seventy to eighty tons of bread waste
would end up in land Sill. So we've taken a
ten ton bit out of that so far. What we'd
like to be doing is scaling up to take eighteen

(05:02):
to twenty tons out each year.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Brilliant. And how do people find the campaign if they're
interested in having a look?

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Probably well, there's a couple of ways. You can either
go straight to the Pledgem website and you'll find us.
They're listed among the active campaigns, or just go to
our Dnedlcraft Distillers dot n z website and there's a
big button to click on right on the home page.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
Brilliant and look. What's your favorite mix with the gin.

Speaker 4 (05:36):
It depends we I think our general one we like
is a mixture of tonic and soda or just soda
and some like fruit syrup like alder Flan.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
A classic Ginny and Sue, thank you so much for
your time today. Really nice to talk to you. Jenny
and Sue there from the Dunedin Craft Distillers.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudgn, listen
live to news Talks there Be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio