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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Coca-Cola Unveils a Prototype for Paper Bottles

Beverage giant Coca-Cola recently unveiled a prototype for its first-ever paper bottle, the first step in the company’s goal to create a bottle that can be recycled like any other type of paper product (h/t Food Navigator).

This first-generation prototype, for which Coca-Cola partnered with paper bottle company Paboco, still contains some plastic. Coca-Cola explained in a blog post that the prototype is made up of a paper shell with a plastic closure and plastic liner. Though the liner and closure are made from “100% recycled plastic that can be recycled again after use,” the company says its next step is to create a bottle that does not need the plastic liner.

The world’s plastic problem is now considered one of the biggest environmental threats out there, with an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the oceans alone. Big Food (and Bev) is under pressure to come up with more sustainable packaging options for their products.

Even so, any bottle containing a CPG beverage has to adhere to certain standards around safety and storage capabilities of packaging, hence the reason Coca-Cola can’t immediately switch to using just any paper bottle. The company says it is currently “putting the bottle through comprehensive testing in the lab to see how it performs in the refrigerator, how strong it is, and how well it protects the drink inside.”

The paper bottles won’t be available on grocery store shelves any time soon, but Coca-Cola’s prototype is another step in that direction. It follows efforts from Coke competitor PepsiCo and spirits brand Diageo, both companies that plan to release paper bottles in 2021.

 

Pepsi and Diageo Will Launch Paper Bottles in 2021

Spirits company Diageo, best known for the Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Smirnoff brands, announced this week that it’s created the world’s first plastic-free, paper-based bottle. Along with Monday’s announcement, Diageo also said it has partnered with venture management firm Pilot Lite to launch a sustainable packaging tech company called Puplex Limited.

First, the bottle. Puplex Limited designed and developed a bottle made from what the press release calls “sustainably sourced pulp” that is 100 percent free of plastic and also food safe and recyclable. The bottle will debut in 2021 with Johnnie Walker scotch whiskey.  

Scotch won’t be the only beverage available via these new bottles. Puplex Limited created a consortium of companies that includes PepsiCo and Unilever to further develop these bottles and launch their own branded versions in 2021, based on Puplex’s designs and tech.

More than 1 million plastic bottles are sold globally every single minute, and each of of those takes about 450 years to completely degrade. When it comes to recycling said bottles, the U.S., certainly wouldn’t win any prizes, unless they’re for not recycling: in 2017, just 8 percent of plastics were recycled, according to data from the EPA.

Given our broken recycling system, major beverage companies (among others) are now under pressure to reduce their overall reliance on plastic. For example, in 2019, PepsiCo teamed up with Coca-Cola and Keurig-Dr. Pepper for the Every Bottle Back program, which aims to reduce plastic use as well as invest in the improvement of the recycling of plastic bottles. 

So far, developing alt-packaging for the plastic bottles has proved challenging. It seems Diageo has made something of a breakthrough with its product announced this week. How scalable that breakthrough is across the entire beverage industry remains to be seen. 

For Celebrities, Owning a Food Business Is the New Endorsement Deal

“I needed people to understand that when they’re doing business with me, you’re doing business with a businessman, not doing business with an athlete,” Shaquille O’Neal famously told the NCAA convention in 2013. No one would doubt it, either. His investments and entrepreneurial activities run the gamut, but owning 155 locations of Five Guys hamburgers is one of his most successful ventures.

He’s not alone when it comes to investing his time and money into the business of food. Celebrities have long associated their names with different snacks, beverages, and other eatable goods. The trend of late, though, is quite a bit different from the usual old endorsement, where a famous person simply licensed their name and collected a fee.

Now we’re seeing celebrities enter the food world as proper business owners, whether it’s by operating franchises, partnering with a known third-party brand or chef, or owning a food brand and remaining a key driving force behind it.

This shift towards entrepreneurship makes sense. One of the biggest is that consumers trust celebrity endorsements far less than they used to. “Authenticity” and “transparency” are two of the biggest buzzwords in marketing right now; celebrity endorsements tend to be neither.

It’s also a legitimate business that can last much longer than the primary careers of lots of these people. Gwyneth Paltrow, controversial though she may be, started Goop as a weekly email newsletter. It’s now a full-fledged wellness brand and e-commerce site that sells, among other things, supplements, protein bars, and something called “longevity food.”

There are tons of other celebrities turning their side gigs into legitimate entrepreneurial ventures.

Real Housewives star Bethenny Frankel sold her low-calorie cocktail company SkinnyGirl to Beam Global in 2011. In a wise business move, she opted to receive ongoing payments contingent on high sales instead of taking a lump sum at the time of the deal. Clearly, the bet is paying off. She also negotiated the rights to the brand name “SkinnyGirl” and now has an entire source of revenue from popcorn, juices, lunchmeats, and a host of other products wearing the label. She keeps a corresponding lifestyle blog to round out the brand.

George Clooney’s Casamigos Tequila started as an accident. As the story goes, Clooney and two friends came up with the idea for a tequila they could “drink all day without getting a hangover.” They sold the company to Diageo this year, for $1 billion, though fans are assured the three will still be heavily involved in production.

Drake peddles luxury liquor, too. In 2016, he, ex-financier Brent Hocking, and Proximo Spirits launched Virginia Black Whiskey. And while Hocking might be CEO, he assured the world this past summer that Drank wasn’t just lending his face to the brand. “I understand what you see out there and what is the reality and celebrities getting an endorsement fee, but he is an actual partner,” he told Business Insider. Drake also recently invested in MatchaBar, the uber-trendy NYC cafe that makes a tasty matcha beverage. As the fifth-richest rapper in the world right now, he’s clearly not in it for the money, which is a refreshing detail to learn.

Ayesha Curry, meanwhile, is getting involved in the meal-kit business, with Homemade. Her company targets families with young eaters, promoting the idea that eating dinner together is just as important for health as the food itself. Traditional-but-nutritious food comes easy-to-prepare and “saves the family chef from feeling like an underappreciated short-order cook.” There’s also a corresponding TV channel and community where people can share stories.

Back to Gwyneth. Along with Serena Williams, she’s invested in Daily Harvest, a subscription service that delivers frozen smoothies and parfaits loaded with superfoods to your door. Their mission is to show you that frozen fruits and veggies can be just as healthy, if not more, than the “fresh” versions. It carries a high price tag (almost $200 for a monthly subscription), but then, so does top-shelf liquor.

With all the successes, though, there are still plenty of flops. The nature of business doesn’t change just because it’s a famous person running the show. That also means that celebrities going down the entrepreneurship and business ownership path bear more responsibility for problems when they do arise.

Largely speaking, though, the majority of celebrities involved owning or investing heavily in brands seem to be behind to their products for more than monetary reasons. That, along with savvy business decisions, can help make any one of these celebrities business moguls in their own right. Just ask Shaq.