Reasons To Be Cheerful · 12 hours ago

Smashing Yesterday's Croissants for a Better Tomorrow

At a Paris bakery called Demain - the French word for "tomorrow" - yesterday's unsold croissants and sourdough loaves don't go to waste; they go on sale for half price, rescued from partner bakeries across the city and given a second chance to nourish someone. "All of this would have ended up in the trashcan," says co-founder Martin Herbelin, gesturing at counters piled with almond croissants and lemon meringue tarts, about 50,000 of which Demain saves from the trash every single month. What the bakery has quietly discovered is that the gap between waste and value is often just a matter of logistics and imagination - stale croissants get flattened and caramelized into "smash croissants," old pain au chocolat gets rebaked into a "Chocobread," and customers who once bought cheap supermarket baguettes now find themselves eating artisanal sourdough for the same price. "Food waste, it's a moral problem," observes Professor Béatrice Siadou Martin - and Demain's growing success suggests that when a solution is concrete, local, and delicious, people are more than ready to be part of it. The bakery is a small operation, but it points toward something larger: that changing how we treat what we've already made might matter just as much as anything we create anew.