Scrappie’s Pizzeria

Photos by Linda Campos

Fact: Everyone likes pizza, and everyone has opinions about it.

Opinion: Scrappie’s Pizzeria is great. The crust is both crisp and chewy. It has a good balance of cheese to sauce. But its magic is tucked within its dough, which gives the pizza its distinctive flavor profile: This dough is made from restaurant bread scraps.

Andrew Blau is the one-man band behind Scrappie’s. Its story begins with Blau doing procurement work for Boston Beer Co., where he was involved in their sustainability efforts. He was responsible for selling the spent yeast and grain from beer production, which would otherwise just have been food waste, to local farmers who turned it into things like dog treats and animal feed. It was this work that led him to the initial spark of an idea that would become Scrappie’s Pizzeria.

While researching food waste sustainability mechanisms, he came across a pasta company in Copenhagen called Eat Wasted that turned bread scraps into pasta. He was inspired, and the potential to make use of what others were throwing away stayed with him as he took a job at the then pop-up iteration of Brick Street Bagels.

3am wake-ups to bake bagels became his normal working hours, and Blau remembers one morning coming face to face with the city’s restaurant trash, and how much bread he was seeing amidst the refuse. “It was devastating,” he said, “I thought, ‘There has got to be something I can do to help.’”

He decided to talk to some restaurants on Charles Street in his neighborhood of Beacon Hill to see if they would donate their scraps to him instead of throwing them away, and they said yes.

At home he processed the bread scraps into flour and began experimenting to make pizza dough. “I understand why no one had really done it before, because it took me six months just to figure out a dough that was fine…‘bread scrap flour,’ as I call it, is such an interesting variable.” But he managed to make a dough he was happy with and wanted to share it.

At his first pop-up for Scrappie’s in April 2025, he sold 25 pies. By week two he jumped to 50. Currently Blau makes over 65 pizzas a week, selling them in the Southie and South End locations of Brick Street Bagels on Wednesdays and Thursdays respectively, with six rotating varieties for people to choose from. They sell out in the blink of an eye when online ordering opens midday on Mondays.

“For me, pizza is 70% dough, 30% what you put on top of it,” Blau says, but his toppings are as interesting as the dough itself. The dough has notes of sourdough that come from the scraps in its composition that marry well with Blau’s well-balanced tomato sauce, or with his personal favorite, the agrodolce sauce—that is at once spicy, sweet and acidic—that comes covered in prosciutto and “all the parm in the world.”

In the near term, Blau’s goal is just to be able to make more pizza each week. He does, however, daydream about a future where Scrappie’s can have a more permanent home: “I’d love just the one shop where the quality is perfect every single time.”

Scrappie’s magic trick is that it is good enough to make you forget its foundation is sustainability. “I am very proud of the fact that it’s just turned out to be good pizza, and you don’t even really remember that it’s scraps.”

If one man’s trash is another’s treasure, then Boston is lucky to have Blau sharing his abundance of riches in the form of Scrappie’s Pizzeria.

IG: @scrappies.pizzeria
Wednesdays: Brick Street Bagels, 312 Shawmut Ave., South End
Thursdays: Brick Street Bagels, 371 West Broadway, South Boston

This story appeared in the Spring 2026 issue.