When Dan Kurzock started brewing his own beer in 2010, his fraternity brothers at the University of California, Los Angeles, were psyched. A frat with its own in-house brewery is about as good as it gets. Kurzrock’s popularity soared even more when he started to use the leftover grain from brewing to bake bread, the perfect hangover cure.

That’s what sparked the idea for ReGrained, a startup Kurzrock co-founded with fellow student Jordan Schwartz in 2013, which uses grain waste from small city breweries to make snack bars.

“Brewers are great environmental stewards,” said Kurzrock. “It’s not a decision to waste, but there’s no way to produce beer without generating a lot of spent grain.”

Grain is a key ingredient in beer. Typically barley, though sometimes rye or oats. To make beer, the grain gets cracked to expose the starches. It is then steeped in warm water, where the starches start to break down into simple sugars, which become alcohol. This process leaves brewers with huge amounts of leftover grain.

More than 80% of craft breweries send their spent grain to local farmers, who use it to feed their animals, according to a 2013 survey from the Brewers Association, a trade group of craft brewers. Around 11% of brewers, typically those in cities, pay to send their grain waste to the landfill, said Chris Swersey, supply chain specialist at the Brewers Association.

“This isn’t preferred since it’s bulky and bypasses an obvious repurposing pathway,” said Swersey. The challenge is to find a way that enables brewers to dispose of the spent grain quickly and reliably without simply shipping it to the garbage dumps, he added.

Greg Kitchen, a co-owner of San Francisco craft brewery Triple Voodoo, knows the challenges facing brewers. Triple Voodoo produces between 3000-4000lbs of grain waste a week. Most of that gets composted while between 20-40lbs of it goes to ReGrained each month.

Kitchen is always looking for alternative ways to get rid of leftover grain since composting can be expensive. Another challenge is to get rid of grain waste quickly because it spoils fast.

“A typical brew for us uses between 500-1200lbs of grain,” he said. “So this needs to be stored for short periods of time and pick up of the grain needs to be timed so that it happens next day.”

Supplying used grain to farmers isn’t so economical for smaller breweries, especially those in the urban areas, because it takes time and money to travel long distances to the closest farm, said Kitchen.

“Most farmers are looking for a lot more grain than we can provide and since we are in the city, pickup is challenging,” he said.

Kurzrock experienced firsthand just how much spent grain can be generated when he made his own beer in college. For each six pack of beer he brewed, he was producing a pound of grain.

Since he loves to eat, he decided to turn the spent grain into bread in the commercial grade kitchen at his fraternity house, Zeta Beta Tau.

“I figured if I can make beer, then I can make bread,” he said.

Kurzrock started selling the bread for around $5 a loaf every Friday to friends, and friends of friends. He quickly realized “beer bread” could make for a good business, but he was put off by the long hours needed to produce enough loaves. Snack bars seemed like a more efficient option, so he and Schwartz teamed up to put the idea into action.

“We wanted a product that we could sell individually and have a longer shelf life,” he said. “Bars can be really hearty, and that would lend really well to the texture of the grain.”

But for the idea to work, Kurzrock needed much more grain.

“Craft beer had started to blow out at the time,” he said. “We got to wondering, if we’re having this issue, what are all these urban craft breweries doing?”

ReGrained sources its grain from three San Francisco craft breweries, including Triple Voodoo. Kurzrock said they pick up about 400lbs of spent grain per month.

Along with turning waste into food, another selling point of the bars is their use of barley, which is high in protein and fiber but low in sugar. Despite its impressive health benefits, it isn’t as widely used as other whole grains like oats or brown rice.

ReGrained currently comes in two flavors – honey almond India pale ale (IPA) and chocolate coffee stout. Along with spent grain, both flavors also contain almonds, oats, puffed quinoa, brown rice and ground flax. Individual bars retail at $2.50, and are available in 75 stores around the country. The bars can also be bought in bulk online via the company’s website and on Amazon.

ReGrained got its start with the money Kurzrock made from selling bread to students, before raising $30k on Barnraiser, a crowdfunding site for sustainable food projects.

The company went on to win a $10k grant from natural products company Burt’s Bees as well as an award from a competition by Target this year.

ReGrained is also currently working with the US Department of Agriculture on a project to turn food waste into healthy, edible food.

While ReGrained presents an option for breweries to divert the spent grain from landfills, the company isn’t large enough to be the chief recycler for them.

“From a brewer perspective, viability depends on ReGrained figuring out how to grow their business to scale, [in a way] that allows removal of a significant quantity of spent grain,” Swersey said.

Making bars is just the beginning, said Kurzrock. ReGrained is working on making a flour for use in baked goods, much like whole wheat, spelt and amaranth flours.

So, does a snack bar or bread made from leftover beer grain taste anything like the brew itself?

“The ‘Eat beer’ [thing] is just a tagline,” said Kurzrock of the slogan that appears on the snack bar’s label. “What we’re after is really trying to bring a new ingredient into our food system.”