Anna Ponomarenko Turned Brewery Waste Into Belgium’s Most Unexpected Snack
Anna Ponomarenko ran the 20km de Bruxelles with crackers to hand out along the way. Between kilometre markers, she pressed her product into strangers’ hands and talked about spent grain and beer pairings, mid-race. That habit of creating opportunity from whatever is in front of her runs through everything she does.
BeerCrackers, her Brussels-based startup, only began selling in February 2026. Less than a year in, she has placed the product in venues including Delirium Village, taken a finalist spot at the Belgium Startup Awards 2026, won the Visa Everywhere Pioneer 2025 award, and pitched at the Brussels Parliament. These are the early days of BeerCrackers, yet there is some serious momentum behind them.
A life that had to be rebuilt
Before any of this, Anna had built a life in Kyiv. A law degree, then a master’s in law, then several years rising to deputy director of a fitness club. Later, she was responsible for marketing and partnerships at a Ukrainian mineral water company. Alongside that, she ran her own knitting business, and saved enough to buy an apartment. It was a life assembled piece by piece, with hard work behind every part of it.
When the war began in 2022, she packed what she could and moved first to Lviv, hoping that would be enough. Within weeks it was clear it was not. A former classmate living in Belgium reached out, and Anna made the decision quickly: she took her four-year-old daughter and left. Belgium had never featured in any plan she had made for herself. It was simply where safety was.
Her first months in Brussels were spent in a host family’s home. Her English was limited, her French nonexistent, and her professional network in Ukraine meant nothing here. She was starting again, in a country she had not chosen, as a single mother responsible for a small child. That is a genuinely hard position to be in, and she is honest about it. But it is not where she stays in the telling.
“It’s not that scary to begin from zero. It’s scarier to stay at zero.”
That instinct did not go quiet when everything else did. It pushed her forward.
Learning the market the hard way
Her first job in Belgium was at Neuhaus, packing chocolates on a production line for six months. It gave her a window inside a well-run Belgian company, conversations with people across the organisation, and a clearer sense of her own limits in that kind of environment. When she was told that without stronger language skills, moving up would take a long time, she heard it less as discouragement and more as confirmation. She has always been more comfortable building something than waiting for a path to open.
Her first ventures were built on almost no capital. She began making sugar-free hard candies and importing dried apple chips from Ukraine, testing both at the same time. A local chocolatier offered her free space in his atelier to produce the candies, a gesture of generosity she still mentions when she talks about that period. She sold at the European School, knocked on shop doors, and looked for any foothold she could find.
Neither venture found its footing in the Belgian market. The apple chips sat awkwardly against local snacking habits, and the handmade candies had no realistic path to the kind of scale that would make them a proper business. She is honest about both of those outcomes, and equally honest about what the whole period was worth: it taught her how Belgian consumers actually think, and it kept her moving at a time when standing still would have been the easier choice.
BeerCrackers: born from beer, made for beer
The idea took shape when she came across NextGrain, a Belgian company that takes the spent grain left over from the brewing process and converts it into flour. What caught her attention was the combination of its nutritional profile and the underlying logic: spent grain is a by-product that breweries pay to get rid of, and turning it into food made both environmental and commercial sense.
But the ingredient was only half of it. The more interesting move was the cultural frame she built around it. Previous products made from spent grain had mostly sold themselves as sustainability stories, leaning on circular economy credentials and premium pricing to justify their place on the shelf. The audience for that proposition turned out to be narrow, and a couple of those early players either went bankrupt or quietly pivoted away from the concept. Anna looked at Belgium, a country where beer is genuinely embedded in daily life, and saw a different entry point entirely. If the crackers came from brewery grain, the most natural thing was to position them as a beer snack, something made for the ritual that already existed rather than a new habit people would need to be convinced to adopt.
The recipe itself drew on a seeded cracker she used to make at home in Ukraine, adapted and refined for the Belgian market. For positioning, she reaches for a reference that lands immediately: “It’s not Louis Vuitton, and it’s not Primark.” Accessible quality, good enough to put on a bar table without a second thought, at a price most people would not hesitate over.
The work behind the idea
A good idea and a working business are two different things, and Anna is under no illusions about which stage she is at. Production is outsourced, which keeps quality consistent but leaves almost no margin. Distribution runs entirely through her: she approaches bars directly, handles deliveries herself, and often does the late runs after her daughter is asleep. Sales, client conversations, promotion, and logistics all sit with one person, and she describes the rhythm of her week as “a lot of mess” — less a complaint than an accurate description of what early-stage solo founding actually looks like.
She has been building visibility in parallel. She enrolled in Start it Accelerate, the KBC-backed Belgian startup accelerator, and has pitched at the Brussels Parliament and at a Rotary Club event alongside other Brussels-based founders. Recognition has followed: a finalist spot at the Belgium Startup Awards 2026 and the Visa Everywhere Pioneer 2025 award. The profile is growing, even as the operational infrastructure is still being built around it.
The path forward is clear in her mind, even if the steps are hard. More volume makes the production economics viable. Viable economics justify a production line. A production line returns time that is currently swallowed by logistics, and that time goes into promotion and market expansion. Further out, she sees custom recipes for individual breweries as a real opportunity: a cracker designed to pair with a specific beer, branded for a specific venue, so the product becomes part of the brewery’s own offer rather than something sitting alongside it.
Starting from zero
When Anna was asked what she most wants people to take from her story, she answered quickly. “You should never, never give up and not be afraid to begin from zero.” Then she added the part that matters more: “You just need to try, try, and try — not only in your head, but in reality to do it.”
There is something worth sitting with in the gap between those two ideas. The first is the kind of thing anyone can say, and many do. The second is harder, because it points to something specific: the six months packing chocolates at Neuhaus, the apple chips that never found their market, the deliveries made at midnight after her daughter was asleep, the race run with crackers to hand out along the way. Resilience, for Anna, is less a quality she claims and more a method she keeps returning to, one small concrete action after another.
It is scarier, she says, to stay at zero.
Anna is part of the Forward·Inc community and pitching at Forward Festival this year as part of the Investor Readiness programme. Curious about what BeerCrackers is building? View her investor proposition here.
Learn more about BeerCrackers and their spent grain snacks at beercrackers.com or connect with Anna on LinkedIn.
Curious about how Forward·Inc supports newcomer entrepreneurs? Learn more at newcomersforward.com.
