Throw away the bread. An almost blasphemous gesture due to its profound ancestral meaning, but which is unfortunately still done all over the world with a waste of about 30 percent of the total prepared. Bread with its wonderful meaning of universal food should instead be religiously consumed all, down to the last crumb. Fortunately, this could happen at least in Europe because a generous Parisian baker, Franck Wallet, has invented a machine, the Crambler, which reuses all the leftover dry bread, cooks it, transforming it – a wonderful miracle – into excellent food, lighter than the original one. Crambler costs around 2 euros and the operation starts with a mix of 2 kg of old bread flour previously dried in the oven and 2 kg of traditional flour: everything is hydrated and cooked for 50 minutes against 20 minutes for the classic baguette . The result is a product – meaningfully called Fenix – which, containing a cooked yeast, is lighter. Wallet continues in its traditional activity which always involves giving unsold bread to charities at the end of the day, but has had an increase in turnover which has reached 100 thousand euros in the first year of use of the innovation. And which, according to the continuous growing requests that are arriving from France, will certainly have a remarkable development. Most of the bakers who have purchased Crambler have also followed his advice to create light and tasty pastry recipes. In addition to learning the secrets that Wallet has been applying for some time to minimize food waste, a workhorse that has always been at the center of his activity.
It is interesting to know that from a strictly entrepreneurial point of view, the discovery has great advantages as baked flour keeps much longer and better than the traditional one, consequently allowing not indifferent savings as it can also "bear" additions and variations value-added with better results in terms of shelf life, taste and digestibility. Crambler was born from an initial idea that Wallet had in mind since 2016, upon returning from a long trip around the world during which he had enriched his experience aimed at recovering food. The innovation he had studied was developed in 2017 and then developed as part of the start-up Expliceat, which he financed with his own savings and strongly supported by his eco-responsible convictions. In this activity of his as an inventor, in 2018 he found financial aid - around 5 thousand euros - in the support program for participatory projects of the municipality of Paris, which is very sensitive to these initiatives. The contribution was used to make the first three copies given free of charge for six months to three bakers in Paris. The diffusion potential in France is very high thanks to the fact that the country boasts over 30 bakeries-pastry shops (in Italy there are only 3.500).. But this is a potential that could soon also concern other markets, also because the exponential growth of poverty is increasingly making citizens, not only Europeans, aware of food waste. As for Italy, according to the Barilla Center For Food and Nutrition, the waste of bread and pasta accounts for about 28 percent of the total and for bread alone the share is just under 20 percent.
