Maxim’s Group, Hong Kong start-up turning bread into beer, beer into Operation Santa Claus funding
- Dubbed BOB, or Bottle of Bread, the beer is the brainchild of a group of University of Science and Technology students
- Maxim’s locations will give HK$10 for each bottle sold at its locations to OSC, the annual fundraiser co-organised by RTHK and the South China Morning Post
A major Hong Kong restaurant chain has joined hands with university students to make beer out of surplus bread in a bid to help local start-ups and raise funds for charity.
The partnership was formed after a news article about a bread-to-beer start-up called Breer – run by students from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology – caught the eye of Maxim’s Group in early 2020.
Michael Shung Yu-hin, the company’s senior manager of food procurement and supply chain, said executives had been impressed with the students’ “mind-blowing” proposal, which fit well with the group’s ethos of cherishing food.
Breer co-founder and COO Naman Tekriwali said he and his three colleagues came up with the idea to produce BOB – an acronym for Bottle of Bread – while having celebratory drinks in the city’s Lan Kwai Fong nightlife hub two summers ago.
“Beer and bread actually share a lot of similar elements,” Tekriwali said.
“But the first bridge we had to cross was finding a consistent supply of bread. Maxim’s Group is the largest bakery chain in Hong Kong. It was the obvious company we had to reach out to because of its scale and its strong alignment with sustainability.”
Tekriwali said the bread-to-beer concept had been tried and tested in the United States and Britain, but it had not been popularised locally and no company had attempted to commercialise it.
“The fact that Maxim’s is willing to come up with a product like BOB, it’s a victory for upcycling,” he said