The owners of the bakery and pastry shop El Horno de Vital Aza, Vanessa and Inés, have been giving away day-old bread to neighbors who need it for eight months in the Madrid municipality of Pueblo Nuevo.
The bakers are two sisters who realized that they had too many loaves of bread left over and did not want to waste food.
Inés, who has been in Spain for 20 years, explains in a telephone interview with La Vanguardia that every day “we give away between 15 and 20 bars of the leftovers.” And he adds: “Every day we make 60 normal bars, the ones called pistols. And that specialty is one of the ones we give away the most; but if we have unsold cereal, rustic or Galician bars, we also offer them to customers so that they can take without paying.”
When asking Inés why they don’t produce less bread every day so as not to have a surplus, she exclaims: “We like to have leftover loaves so we can give them away!”
The baker explains that “initially we put an ad on Facebook in case any animal owner wanted to stop by for stale bread, but since the initiative did not prosper” they gave it a new spin and “we decided to give it away to neighbors who needed it.”
“What we do is freeze it the night before so that it stays fresh and then in the morning we give it a blast of heat and it looks like it was freshly made. And mid-morning we place it on a tray and take it out to the door so that the neighbors can If they need it, they can take it,” emphasizes Inés. On the tray they warn that it is bread from the previous day and it says “take it if you need it, may God bless you.” “Many people congratulate us and even a man came into the store and offered us money so that we could put more loaves of bread,” says Inés.
“This is an initiative that we both like because we know what it’s like to be hungry and the neighbors have welcomed it,” explains Vanessa, who has been in Spain for 14 years. Among the neighbors who take most advantage of this initiative of taking free bars, “retirees and young people” stand out.
The sisters transferred the premises they run a year ago and although there are 2 or 3 other bakeries in the town, their initiative has been very well received by the residents of the Madrid municipality. The name of the place was already there “and we have kept it,” says Inés.
