In this special episode hosted by our Head of Impact, Steve Watters, he and Louisa Ziane explore what it really looks like to build a commercially credible business around a genuine environmental problem, and what responsible leadership means when the easy answers keep turning out to be wrong.
Louisa Ziane is the co-founder and COO of Toast Brewing, the UK’s first B Corp brewery, known for making beer from surplus bread that would otherwise go to waste. She trained as a management accountant, started her career at the Financial Conduct Authority, and then spent several years at the Carbon Trust working on carbon measurement and climate change mitigation with corporates and governments including the Mexican government. That background shapes everything about how Toast approaches sustainability: with rigour, honesty about trade-offs, and a clear-eyed view of where the impact actually sits.
In this conversation, you’ll hear about:
- How a skip full of crusts outside a sandwich factory and a meeting with a Brussels brewer gave birth to Toast, and why bread made sense as both a symbol of food waste and a genuinely valuable brewing ingredient
- What Louisa learned at the Carbon Trust that most CSR teams were still struggling to act on in 2008, and why the business case for emissions reduction was harder to make than it should have been
- Where the carbon footprint of beer actually sits, and why the answer is not the boiler, it is the barley and the packaging, with Toast’s own measurements showing glass bottles running almost double the footprint of a can of the same beer
- The ownership structure Toast designed from day one, including 100% of distributable profits going to charity, the Equity for Good model they built to bring in investors without compromising that, and what Heineken’s strategic involvement actually means for scaling the model
- Why Toast tried carbon offsetting, what made them stop, and how to think about the difference between genuine nature investment and buying a stamp for the pack
- The trade-off between bicycle couriers and operational reality, and why a combination of complexity, logistics failures, and the pressure COVID placed on a reduced team finally ended it
- What net zero actually requires versus what carbon neutral allows, and why the legislation on environmental claims has driven a wave of green hushing that Louisa thinks is misreading the public mood
- The Companion ingredients business still in R&D, the Jason Sourdough collaboration currently in Waitrose, and what it would mean if the work with Heineken reaches the scale it is aiming for
- Why over 80% of people care about climate and nature issues but most of them think they are in the minority, and what that means for businesses deciding how loudly to speak
Key takeaway
Toast was set up out of a charity, not as an act of generosity. That distinction matters. The ownership structure, the profit commitment, the offsetting decision, the switch from bottles to cans: every one of those choices was shaped by founding principles established before the business scaled. Louisa’s argument is that sustainability done well is about designing the system, not retrofitting the story. If you want to change the world, she says, you have to throw a better party than those destroying it. Toast has been trying to do exactly that since the beginning.
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