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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Sweetgreen Rolls Out Truly Compostable Bowls — Will Other Chains Follow Suit?

If you’ve grabbed lunch at a Sweetgreen before, you likely felt pretty virtuous as you tossed your takeout container, knowing that it’s “100 percent compostable.”

But the truth about those takeaway bowls is a lot less pleasant. According to The Counter (formerly The New Food Economy), all molded fiber bowls contain PFAS; a nasty class of chemicals that do not naturally biodegrade. That means that the compostable food containers you’ve been throwing out are not, in fact, compostable. In fact, they contain hazardous, unhealthy components that never break down.

However, Sweetgreen just took a big step to get rid of PFAS and make their to-go containers truly compostable. The fast-casual chain partnered with Footprint, a company fighting single-use plastic packaging, to develop a new line of biodegradable bowls that are completely devoid of PFAS (h/t FastCompany). Sweetgreen launched the bowls first in San Francisco earlier this year, since new legislation requires that as of January 1, 2020, all single-use food service ware (containers, cups, etc) in SF must be PFAS-free.

The containers are made of fibers from bagasse, an agricultural waste product, which is blended, heated, and covered with a natural coating so it won’t leak. The lids for Sweetgreen’s to-go containers are currently plastic, but the company plans to start selling lids made of the same compostable material soon. Sweetgreen has plans to roll out the compostable bowls at all of its stores nationwide in 2020.

Sweetgreen is one of several restaurant chains with high numbers of to-go orders that is increasing its sustainability efforts. Its competitor, Just Salad, recently announced plans to send zero waste to landfills by 2022. Coffee chain Blue Bottle aims to divert at least 90 percent of its waste from landfills by the end of this year.

On the fast food side, Taco Bell aims to implement PFAS-free sustainable consumer-facing packaging by 2025. Starbucks will switch to reusable packaging by 2030 in a bid to cut its landfill waste by half. And McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Subway, and Burger King have all made their own pledges to reduce single-use and plastic.

In a time when worry over COVID-19 could be making restaurants more hesitant to accept consumer’s reusable containers — Starbucks, for example, has stopped letting customers use their own drinking vessels — better to-go packaging is more needed than ever before. But implementing truly recyclable or compostable packaging is much easier said than done, even as more cities mandate PFAS-free to-go containers.

With its new biodegradable bowls, Sweetgreen shows that it’s taking sustainability seriously. The move should put some pressure on fast-casual competitors like Chipotle, Panera, Chopt, and more, to follow suit and step up their to-go container game.

Initiative Backed by Starbucks, McDonald’s Begins Testing Waste-Free Cups in the Bay Area

As a planet we produce the astounding 264 billion paper cups per year. Some of them are recyclable, some aren’t — but no matter their label, the vast majority end up in landfills because of an inner plastic inner lining which make the cups tricky to actually recycle.

That overwhelming amounts of coffee cup waste is the target of the NextGen Cup Challenge, a global competition to create a scalable zero waste cup solution. It’s the first project from the NextGen Consortium, an initiative aimed at reducing food packaging waste that’s managed by Closed Loop Partners as well as big-name food corporations like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and others (h/t Nation’s Restaurant News).

The 12 winners of the NextGen Cup Challenge were selected last year, and this week they’re beginning to roll out their cup solutions in participating cafés in the Bay Area. In San Francisco and Paolo Alto, coffee shops will be testing out reusable cups tricked out with chips and tracking codes. Once they’re done with their drink, customers can return their smart cup to any participating café or other designated drop off points. After that, NextGen will collect and sanitize the cups, then re-send them back out into circulation. San Francisco shops will use cups designed by Indonesia-based returnable packing service Muuse, and those in Paolo Alto will feature cups made by British startup CupClub.

In March, cafés in Oakland will start piloting their own waste-free cup solution. Instead of reusable cups, participating cafés will use fully recyclable single-use cups — that is, cups that don’t have pesky plastic liners, which sometimes make other “recyclable” cups difficult to actually, well, recycle.

Even though big chains aren’t using sustainable cups yet, this a still big step for the NextGen Cup Challenge. Launching in small, local cafés is an important proof of concept, as well as an opportunity to see which type of waste-free cup is the easiest to implement and most popular with consumers. The end goal is to roll out the most successful solution on a large scale — to national chains like McDonald’s and Starbucks.

NextGen Cup Challenge isn’t the only group out there fighting coffee cup waste. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, Nestle-owned chain Blue Bottle is also testing a zero-single-use-cup program (featuring reusable cups) as part of their initiative to go waste-free by the end of this year.

Back in January, my colleague Jenn Marston predicted that 2020 could well be the year of the waste-free coffee shop. With NextGen Cup Challenge, a project backed by industry giants, finally starting to take off, there’s a chance that might actually happen.