From the outside, Demain looks like any other bakery in Paris. The bright blue storefront, featuring huge glass vitrines, frames a bready feast for the eyes.
Behind it lie glorious piles of almond croissants, pistachio pastries, lemon meringue tarts, pecan-speckled brownies and such a great quantity of bread that the sight of it alone could probably induce gluten intolerance among innocent passersby.
Yet there is one crucial difference with this boulangerie: Its alluring goods are slightly older than usual — from yesterday, not baked fresh this morning. And in turn, Demain and its customers are helping, mouthful by buttery mouthful, to end food waste in the French city.
“All of this would have ended up in the trashcan,” says Martin Herbelin, the 35-year-old co-founder of the company, shaking his head. Behind him a steady flow of clients zip in and out of one of Demain’s three stores in Paris.
Herein lies the anti-waste concept behind Demain, the French word for “tomorrow.” The company, launched in 2023, collects the day’s unsold bread and pastries from a network of more than 20 partner artisan bakeries in the French capital and resells them the next day with huge reductions, often half of the initial price. That means there are delicious artisanal croissants on sale for just €0.50; a thick loaf of pain de campagne sourdough priced at just €4, down from €8; traditional baguettes for less than a euro. About 50,000 of these eminently edible goods are saved from the trash every month.
They could perhaps be described as Schrödinger’s pastries, simultaneously from the past — yesterday — and a zero-waste future that Demain is helping to pioneer in Paris.
“There’s so much value in what we are throwing away,” adds Herbelin. “We need to change people’s mindsets. Once you do, it could have a huge impact.”
Globally, approximately a third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. In Europe, mountains of food are wasted every year — 58 million metric tons, the equivalent of 129 kilograms per person. Similarly, Americans throw away nearly 60 million tons of food every year, almost 40 percent of the entire U.S. food supply.
“Food waste, it’s a moral problem,” says Béatrice Siadou Martin, a professor at the University of Montpellier, France, who has studied consumer habits in relation to anti-food waste initiatives. “Everyone says they don’t want to waste. There’s places in the world with famine, malnutrition. Yet studies show that we still waste a lot.”
Bakeries, a veritable French institution, are no exception.
About 10 percent of their produce is left unsold every day, according to research in 2016 by the French ecological transition agency. That adds up to 345,000 metric tons per year, with an equivalent value of more than one billion euros.
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Those breads and pastries are often thrown away due to a number of complicating factors: It’s impractical and costly for bakers to redistribute or even donate them; the quantity of leftovers can vary dramatically from day to day, making it difficult to create a reliable system; and the products are too fragile to be easily stored or transported.
Enter Demain, whose redistributive reuse model is helping everyone along the food chain.
Herbelin, who previously worked in food tourism, launched the venture with his childhood friend Adrien de Dumast after working with bakers in Paris, and quickly realizing how much waste was being made by bakeries — with no system in place to deal with it. They took inspiration from the Swiss bakery Äss-Bar (a play on words that in Swiss-German means “edible”), which also sells day-old, discounted goods.
Demain prioritizes longer-lasting breads, such as sourdough, which can still be good to consume for several days, and it repurposes more delicate products like croissants, which can become a little stale the next day. Instead of throwing them out, the bakery flattens them and caramelizes them into “smash croissants.” Similarly, it combines old pains au chocolat into a huge rebaked “Chocobread,” and uses slices of old bread for “toastie” sandwiches with fresh ingredients inside.
The first Demain branch opened in 2023, a second was added in 2025 and a third in June 2026, underlining the growing appetite for anti-waste eating. More than two dozen staff now cover its seven-days-a-week operation, which sources from renowned French bakeries including Land&Monkeys, Terroirs d’Avenir and BO&MIE, picking up the produce through the night for an 8 a.m. opening time.
On average, Demain itself sells 95 percent of the produce it brings in, according to Herbelin, with the remainder either composted, or, where possible, turned into croutons or breadcrumbs that are incorporated into fresh bread made on site.
“Those loaves over there each contain half a reused baguette,” says Herbelin, pointing to a row of impressive breads assembled along the back wall of the bakery.
In fact, Demain’s remit has gradually expanded in a number of ways. It is no longer only a reseller, but has begun to produce its own original goods, usually made with butter, cream, or other products that for one reason or another could not be used as usual while still being perfectly edible. It also now sells cut-price coffee from Lomi, an award-winning Parisian roaster, which provides beans that are imperfect but still good quality. And it works with a local charity to sell jams made by homeless people.
“Even our coffee machine is second-hand,” adds Herbelin with a grin.
Demain’s efforts are part of a wave of initiatives in France that are attempting to address food waste through “food upcycling,” according to Professor Martin. She cites examples like Hubcycled, which produces flour from soy milk or strawberry seed-based flavoring, and the Ouro biscuit factory, which uses spent grain to make savory biscuits.
“Food upcycling, it’s an interesting way to address this problem of waste,” she says.
And to an extent, such upcycling has already been done for a long time, argues Martin.
“La vache qui rit (the laughing cow cheese) is not necessarily high quality cheese, it can be made of lots of different kinds, but everyone in France eats it,” says Martin. “And my grandmother used to make pain perdu (pan-fried toast made with old bread).”
The challenge of more innovative forms of upcycling, however, lies in the messaging. Martin, a specialist in marketing, carried out a survey with 941 consumers in 2024 looking at how open they were to trying upcycled food, and found that the clearer the link between individual action and impact, the more successful a product was likely to be.
“Croissants are one thing, products made of carrot peel are another,” she says. “The marketing message needs to be clear. It should not be abstract but specific.”
That’s perhaps why Demain, which sources and resells locally, is thriving.
Others have taken a different tack when it comes to redistributing surplus food. The Danish startup Too Good To Go, present in several European countries including France, connects residents with businesses to sell cut-price leftovers via its app.
The French charity HopHopFood, meanwhile, distributes food supplied by about 800 businesses to hundreds of thousands of people in need across the country.
“It’s very important to make a link between food waste and food insecurity,” says Michel Montagu, co-founder and spokesperson of HopHopFood, which also provides food waste awareness-raising workshops to businesses, schools and members of the public.
Montagu, therefore, is unhappy that TooGoodToGo now charges for use of its app.
That’s not the case with Demain’s model, which is making artisanal produce accessible to residents with smaller budgets. Some are primarily coming to save money.
“Some of our clients, before they would get industrial-made baguettes from the supermarket, because it’s cheap,” says Herbelin. “Now they are eating artisanal sourdough for the same price, and they love it.”
But Herbelin believes that the responsibility of individuals should not be overstated, noting that business and industrial waste represent a huge part of the problem.
In France, government policy has played an important role in addressing this.
In 2020, the government passed the anti-waste law for a circular economy (Agec), introducing a number of policies and targets such as halving waste across the entire food chain by 2030, phasing out single-use plastics by 2040, as well as incentivizing businesses to donate unsold food products to charities by offering a tax reduction.
“France has the best policy in the world, others have weaker incentives,” says Montagu.
Nonetheless, small-scale initiatives like Demain are helping to change people’s behavior on the ground. Herbelin says that the team has been contacted by parties in Montreal, Brussels and London, with an interest in deploying a similar system, one that shows food destined for the trash can easily find its way to our plates.
“Everyone brings their own stone, every actor can mobilize,” says Montagu. “It’s the multiplicity of all these initiatives that will bring change.”
The post Smashing Yesterday’s Croissants for a Better Tomorrow appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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