Immersion in the heart of bread valorization

Do you want to know what goes on behind the scenes of bread reclamation? Do you want to know how our delicious cookies are made? Let's go, follow us.

It's 2pm, Alexandre, Gilles, Nourdine, Karine - four disabled workers - and their instructor Sophie have an appointment at the bakery workshop of the Panetière des hameaux located in the north of Nantes within a Biocoop store.

This team of workers are members of the ESAT (Etablissement et Service d'Aide par le Travail) les Ateliers de la Cholière located in Orvault (44). The establishment has been a partner of the project since 2019 and provides the SoliFoodWaste project with a team to revalue unsold bread into cookies.

Upon their arrival at the workshop, they are greeted by Alix in charge of R&D (Research & Development) and quality within the SoliFoodWaste project. She had arrived a few minutes earlier to prepare the production workshop and especially to crush the bread collected the day before into breadcrumbs with the help of a very special machine: the crumbler. This atypical machine allows to reduce the 11,5 kg of bread to be recycled in a few minutes. A good advice, be careful with your fingers. With 11.5 kg of bread, 1800 cookies were made.

Once the production team is complete, everyone goes to their workstation, as a captain would say to his crew. Everyone knows what they have to do.

Nourdine is at the kneading trough mixing all the ingredients into a smooth cookie dough with lots of chocolate chips. The cookies are not yet baked and we already want to taste them.

Once this step is completed, the new arrival comes into play: the extruder! This machine contains a container in which the dough is deposited, then, by a pressure it comes out on a belt in small cylindrical pieces. It's quite a sight, but let's not dwell on it, the rest is just as interesting.

Now Karine, Sophie and Gilles come into play, they collect these pieces of dough and place them on baking sheets with delicacy before being flattened. Then it's Alexandre's turn, he takes care of flattening them and puts the baking sheets in the oven with Alix's help. Once the cookies are cooked, they are taken out of the oven to cool down. After cooling, Nourdine places the cookies under vacuum in boxes. It is not the desire which misses him to taste one of them. The smell of hot cookies fills the room and it's hard not to be tempted by a little taste.

Here is the daily life of our pastry cooks, one thing is sure, the atmosphere is great within this team. The anti-gaspi brigade is proud to participate in the achievement of this project. Don't wait any longer, come and taste these anti-gaspi and solidarity cookies prepared with love by our teams.