As far as food staples go, bread might well be the number one. Versatile as it is, you can just as well eat it for breakfast as for dinner, for lunch as for an in-between snack, with savoury goods on top or with a chocolate spread. Therefore, it doesn’t come as a surprise that it is quite popular. In the United Kingdom, just to take an example, the average person consumes 502 grams of bread per week, or just over 26 kilos a year. With such numbers in mind, making the bread industry more sustainable could make a real change.
Organic bread has been around for quite some time now and even though we’re big fans of the genre, we could take things even further by looking at the ecological impact of our bread in a broader way. That means: looking at the amount of water and effort that goes into cultivating the wheat but also taking into account the nutritional value of the bread we consume. Belgian bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien, which has 54 stores in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom, may have found the solution to that challenge.
Sustainable bread
That solution comes in the form of cannabis bread. Yes, you read that right. Instead of smoking the plant, we could also use it as an environmental-friendly alternative for some of the most popular ingredients used in food today, wheat.
“Our cannabis bread is the result of our quest to take small steps towards a better world by being mindful of the planet,” CEO Annick Van Overstraeten told RetailDetail.
Bread is Le Pain Quotidien’s main product, which is why we were looking for innovations that improve the impact of bread on the planet.
Annick Van Overstraeten, CEO of Le Pain Quotidien
According to Van Overstraeten, the cannabis bread is Le Pain Quotidien’s most ecological bread ever. The bread is made of peeled and unpeeled cannabis seeds, ground cannabis flour, sourdough and organic wholemeal flour. Founder Alain Coumont and Belgian cannabis grower Canbe Farm developed the recipe in close collaboration with each other, to make sure it was as ecological and at the same time good-tasting as possible. The sustainable part of the quotation is met through the fact that the hemp plant stores up to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare annually. And thanks to the seed’s high concentrations of vitamins B and E, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc and phosphorus, omega-3 and omega-6 essential fatty acids, your gut will be pleased too.
The cannabis bread is already for sale as we speak in all Le Pain Quotidien stores.
