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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Waste-Free Grocery Stores & Bags Made From Skinny Jeans: Ideas From the Beyond the Bag Challenge

Ed note: This post originally had IDEO as the sole creator of the challenge. It has been updated to reflect that Closed Loop Partners launched the challenge with IDEO as their innovation partner.

It’s no secret that despite efforts by grocery stores and retailers to reduce the amount of plastic they pack into the waste stream, shoppers still use a massive amount of the stuff every single day.

Because of this, Closed Loop Partners in partnership with design agency IDEO recently put out a call for innovative ideas around generating less retail waste with its Beyond the Bag challenge. The ideas range from new plastic-free reusable bags to entire grocery store concepts that use bulk dispensing systems.

Here are some of the concepts I thought were pretty interesting:

Repurposing Bags for 3D Printed Crates

A company called re:3D has proposed a system that would take plastic waste produced at retail and repurpose it at retail for 3D-printed crates. The systems would use the company’s Gigabot X 3D printer, which can print from plastic waste that has been ground up into pellets. Their proposed system would put printers at the retail point of presence.

Gigabot X: Creating a pellet printer to 3D print using recycled plastic

A Wallet That Turns Into a Shopping Bag

Moved by Tomorrow has proposed a wallet that converts into a reusable shopping bag. According to the company, the bag would hold up to 150 pounds of total goods.

Reusing Back of House Boxes for Take Home

Already in use by some warehouse stores like Costco and some more sustainably minded grocery stores, Nathan Lee proposes a system that could be used by any grocery store: replace plastic bags with the cardboard boxes which were used to ship products to the store . While it seems simple, it’s always been surprising to me that more grocery stores don’t use this concept.

Denimcle: Turn Those Unfashionable Jeans Into a Shopping Bag

If you’re like me, you probably have lots of jeans that either don’t fit any more, are worn out, or aren’t in style anymore. Sure, you could give them to your local Goodwill (also a good thing), but another idea is to take those skinny jeans and turn them into a shopping bag.

The concept would involve a “Denimcle” kiosk at retail that would allow the user to turn in their old jeans and order a bag made of denim. While the processing of the demim to bag will be done off site, I still think there are number of people who would both donate their old jeans and those that would be open to using a bag made of denim.

The Filole Bulk-Food Waste Free Grocery Store

Smartbins, a maker of bulk bin dispensing systems, has created a proof of concept for an entire grocery store utilizes bulk dispensing and resuable take-home systems. Called Filole, the idea would utilize a system that automatically dispenses measured amounts of food then prints out a label with a price and product info the shopper can then use on reusable containers. Called the S1 system, which is modeled after the IKEA flatpack concept, Smartbins says its concept can be implemented as a whole-store system or one that can be used in an existing grocery store.

This is only a small sample of the ideas submitted to the Beyond the Bag challenge. I’d suggest you look at the submission page if you want to see more of the interesting concepts for reducing plastic waste in our local grocery store.

As We Redesign the Food System Post-COVID, We Need To Build It To Look More Like the Internet

If you’ve ever talked to a computer network engineer about their job, there’s a good chance the topic of conversation will eventually turn to redundancy and resilience.

There’s a good reason for that: computer networks like the Internet need to be adaptable in order to withstand shocks to the system.

Compared with our modern food system, where interruptions have become the norm during our recent pandemic, the contrast is stark. But what if we could build a food system designed to look more like the Internet, where redundancy and resiliency are features built into its core?

That was one of the topics discussed yesterday during The Spoon’s virtual event where two members of IDEO‘s Design for Food team -— Holly Bybee and Rebecca Chesney — joined me to discuss how we could rethink our food system in a post-COVID world.

Much of the conversation focused on how so much of today’s food system is designed for efficiency rather than resilience. According to Chesney, the roots of this focus on efficiency took hold after World War II when “a lot of our focus went to producing as much food as we could as cheaply as possible because people were hungry. “

However, if the pandemic has shown us anything, systems optimized for speed and efficiency often don’t adjust well to changes in the operating environment. In other words, our modern food system is brittle and the stresses of COVID-19 caused it to crack.

So what would a food system with redundancy and resiliency built in look like? According to Chesney, that means thinking of the supply chain as a network rather than one linear line, where efficiency and redundancy are embraced rather than designed out.

One example Chesney gave is moving away from highly centralized meat processing plants that supply meat to an entire region. Instead, we would rely on a network of smaller players that do the same thing.

Now might be just the right time for a rethink of the food system. As Chesney pointed out, the last big redesign for our current system took place during the second World War. Today, with so many of us revisiting and reevaluating how we do business, maybe it’s time to think big and design a system built for the next 100 years.

You can watch our entire conversation below. If you’d like to join us for future virtual events (including next week’s workshop on becoming a food futurist), head over to our Crowdcast page and sign up.

Designing a Resilient Food System For A Post-COVID World