In 2020, pubs were forced to remain shut due to the pandemic, meaning owners were stuck with beer they couldn’t sell. 87 million pints had already been poured down the drain.

To save bars and stop more beer from polluting the environment, Heineken completely reversed their business model.

Instead of delivering full kegs to the pub, they bought 333,000 of them back, fully paid for. The Unwasted Beer turned 28 million expired pints into power for 61,687 homes, 4600 tonnes of fertiliser and animal feed. These were part sold to suppliers, part donated to the community.

Food and drink waste is a major environmental issue.

Pre-covid, 1.3 trillion tons of food went to landfills each year. Beyond polluting our planet, it creates 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (Deloitte, 2021; Our World in Data, 2020)

Covid-19 made the situation far worse.

As global supply chains ground to a halt, billions of tons of food goods began to deteriorate, creating a food waste crisis.

A keg of beer has a shelf-life of 120 days. With bars being forced to remain shut, owners were forced to pour 87 millions of pints of beer down the drain in the UK alone - an estimated loss of £331 million in revenue (British Beer & Pub Association, 2021).

Bars were haemorrhaging money at a critical moment and adding to the food waste crisis.

To save bars and the environment, we needed to stop pints from being poured down the drain.

Heineken turned lockdown beer that was going to waste into a global sustainable programme. How? They completely reversed their business model, buying back 15.5 million litres of lockdown beer from closed bars and transforming it into a new range of sustainable solutions that could be served to communities globally.

The Unwasted Beer was transformed into biogas, electricity, animal feed, fertiliser, water and heat.

When we couldn’t serve beer. We served the planet.

How do you repurpose beer?

That was the question we posed to an international panel of environmental experts and Heineken’s sustainability experts.

The answers surprised us.

Even once expired, beer has a multitude of uses.

Biofuel. Fertiliser. Plastics. Animal feed.

Bartenders were throwing their expired beer away because they believed it was worthless.

But with just a few modifications to our production chain, spent beer could easily be transformed into a usable and sustainable resource.

Expired beer is not waste, we realised, it’s a resource we can harness to help communities get on their feet again.

Ideating alongside environmental experts and engineers, we set out to repurpose beer into a tool to help kickstart communities’, bars’ and Heineken’s recovery.

Our experts designed and created a ‘beer saving station’ to convert 15 million pints of expired beer into biogas by fermenting it in a digester.

In Cork, this biogas was used to power 1000 homes a day and heat a care home in the local community.

The process of fermenting beer into biogas also produces a valuable nutrient-rich fertiliser - of which Heineken was able to produce 4,600 tonnes.

This was part donated to the local community, part sold back to our suppliers.

Roughly 13 million pints of beer were transformed into animal feed.

The initiative also inspired our Spain brewery to transform 178,500 tonnes of byproducts into animal feed, which was also sold to suppliers.

This wasn’t just a smart use of a waste product - animals fed with beer grains also emit 13% less greenhouse gases (ILVO, 2020).

The environmental results were astounding.

In total, we bought back over 28 million expired pints (19 million in Ireland, 9 million in England). Using innovative technologies, we generated enough sustainable power to heat 61,687 homes and produce 4,600 tonnes of fertiliser for our suppliers and the local community.

Our efforts did not go unnoticed.

The initiatives had huge PR value for Heineken, with an earned reach of over 67 million. Meanwhile, our media spend was tiny - just enough to cover a series of billboards.

Moreover, Heineken grew to position 16 out of 589 companies within Morning Star’s Sustainalytics rankings.

Heineken also enjoyed a measurable growth in trust from the on-trade.

On average, our bar partners in markets were 4.9% more satisfied with Heineken in 2021 versus 2019 (Madison 2021).

Sustainability and responsibility are at the heart of Heineken’s business. The company has set an aggressive environmental agenda. Moreover, it believes in supporting the on-trade, and has set out to do so with a series of initiatives from the very start of the pandemic.

In 2020, pubs were forced to remain shut due to the pandemic, meaning owners were stuck with beer they couldn’t sell. 87 million pints had already been poured down the drain.

To save bars and stop more beer from polluting the environment, Heineken completely reversed their business model.

Instead of delivering full kegs to the pub, they bought 333,000 of them back, fully paid for. The Unwasted Beer turned 28 million expired pints into power for 61,687 homes, 4600 tonnes of fertiliser and animal feed. These were part sold to suppliers, part donated to the community.