24 IN FOCUS Student Entrepreneurship Turning le over bread into beer nsold bread is now being turned into beer in an enterprising food upcycling start-up launched by a School of Engineering undergraduate and her HKUST teammates. Third-year student Anushka PUROHIT, Electronic and Computer Engineering, had noticed long ago how the city’s bakeries and co ee shops were o en le with bread items that had to be thrown away at closing time. A er joining the School of Engineering and learning about the University’s Entrepreneurship Center, the Indian-born, Hong Kong-raised young engineer realized she could at last try to remedy the situation. Enthused by the prospect of contributing to greater sustainability through repurposing a currently wasted product, she teamed up with HKUST School of Business students Deevansh GUPTA, Suyash MOHAN, and Naman TEKRIWAL to pool ideas, marketing and management skills. On further investigation, the group found that bread shared common ingredients with beer, including malted barley, hops, and yeast. With % of an average beer being made from barley, they also realized that bread waste could serve as an alternative source for this ingredient, with the added bene t of reducing production costs. Convinced that the idea could work, the students went ahead to establish Breer, a sustainable cra beer brand. By May , operational arrangements were underway for their rst products – a lager and pale ale – thanks to active support in numerous areas from the Entrepreneurship Center and the help of “Breer-runner” volunteers to collect le over bread from bakeries and restaurants. Anushka also created a Breer App to provide real-time updates on bread waste collection and helper resources. In October , the rst batch of -liter beers began to be sold to local bars and retail outlets. Gaining media attention for the successful enterprise, the team started to anticipate scaling up and seeking support from the venture capitalist community. Instead, Entrepreneurship Center Acting Director Donny SIU advised the students to stay focused on enhancing their business and avoid bringing in a new stakeholder at too early a stage in their business learning journey. Realizing the wisdom behind this suggestion, team members returned their attention to their products. “We felt we should focus on perfecting the brew and that’s how we got back on the right track,” Anushka said. To ne-tune the flavors, the team worked with professional brewers to test di erent recipes. Customer surveys were also conducted. Now Breer is concentrating on sales and promotion, with the company adopting a flexible sales strategy by selling through pop-up stalls as the food and beverage industry as a whole seeks to recover from the fall-out from COVID- pandemic restrictions. Indeed, the most challenging part to date has not been dra ing business proposals or manufacturing the beer but talking to local retailers about their products, according to Anushka. This has led to a personal breakthrough as well. “I can speak Cantonese but I was just too shy,” she said. “But to sell our beers, I needed to step out of my comfort zone and talk retailers into cooperation.” This led on to an interesting discovery. “Once I’m con dent, I speak like a local!” U Cheers! Undergraduate Anushka Purohit, Electronic and Computer Engineering, is one of the founders of Breer, an upcycling start-up that creates craft beer from unsold food. Breer lager and pale ale.
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