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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Gaeastar is Now Cranking Out 3D Printed Clay Coffee Cups as It Launches a Pilot With Verve Coffee

Gaeastar, a startup that makes compostable drinking cups out of clay, is officially launching its U.S. pilot with Verve Coffee on April 22nd. Verve, a Santa Cruz-based coffee chain with locations across California, will begin using Gaeastar’s coffee cups in three locations and will expand to other locations over time. The pilot launch comes after the two companies have worked over the past year to refine the prototype and integrate the cups into Verve’s business. 

For those unfamiliar with Gaeastar, the company has developed a proprietary 3D printing process that makes cups out of clay. The idea behind the company came to company CEO Sanjeev Mankotia after walking around New Delhi in the mid-2000s with his cousin. According to Mankotia, after his cousin finished a chai ordered from a street vendor, she threw the cup on the ground, breaking it into pieces. Mankotia, who was born in India but spent most of his life in the U.S., pointed out that she was littering and asked her why she had done so.

“She said, ‘It’s made out of dirt, why do you care?’” Mankotia told The Spoon last year. “And I didn’t have a response to that.”

Mankotia began to think about whether these types of cups could be used as a replacement for single-use plastics. Typically, the containers in India were handcrafted by local artisans, who sourced clay from riverbeds and made hundreds of them per day to dry in the sun, but he knew this approach would need to be adapted for the Western market.

He realized it would take a 3D printer to produce these containers at scale. However, no printers on the market were designed for the high-volume output needed to make thousands of cups daily. Over time, he and a team of engineers developed a 3D printer and built the company’s first micro-factory in Berlin in 2022. Today, the company supplies a Zurich-based coffee roaster named V-Cafe.

For its launch in the US, Gaeastar built a micro-factory in the Dogpatch industrial district of San Fransisco. The micro-factory is roughly 7500 square feet and has four of the company’s 3D printers working to make cups.

To supply the California micro-factory, the company is sourcing the clay from Sacramento, which is slightly different from the clay they are sourcing in Germany, which leads to slight differences in the finished product. For example, the California clay has a much higher iron content, which results in a finished cup with a much deeper red than those made in Germany.

While he initially thought the company would want to standardize the process and the finished product, Mankotia says that he eventually realized that slight differences in the finished product resulting from hyper-local sourcing are one of the things that their customers would celebrate.

“That’s the uniqueness of it,” Mankotia said. “Each cup comes out slightly different and has its own fingerprint in some way, which we have been delighted to see the customers love.”

Today, Gaeastar prints the cups during the day and fires them in a kiln overnight, but is exploring ways to make the process quicker. One idea the company is exploring is to integrate automation to produce cups more quickly. They are also examining using pulsed energy to finish printed cups faster than traditional fire-heat kilns.

During this initial rollout to Verve customers, the roaster will offer Gaestar cups as an upgrade option for $2. In the long term, Mankotia believes that his cups could become the primary choice for a drinking vessel as single-use falls increasingly out of favor.

“This single-use concept will go away, whether it happens two or ten years from now,” he said. “What we have created is really a new category. It’s not your $40 Stanley mug. It’s not your single-use, disposable paper plastic cup.”

“We’re refining it, not only the product but also the business model. That’s why we wanted these pilot partners with us at the start of the journey. We want to develop this product for the customer, not to sit in the lab and try to sell somebody a commodity.”

Google Announces Winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge

This week, Google announced the winners of the Single-Use Plastics Challenge, an open-invitation challenge where the company invited startups to present solutions that help reduce plastic waste. The challenge, which launched this past spring, had Google testing out those products that met state and federal requirements and Google’s Food program standards in the company’s U.S.-based cafes and MicroKitchens.

The twelve winners featured several different approaches to the massive problem of plastic waste, from edible cutlery to candy made of upcycled ingredients to biodegradable cups made out of clay. Below is a list of each winner and their product:

Climate Candy: Climate Candy a company that makes candy out of imperfect, unharvested produce. The company reduces plastic by using plant fibers in its packaging.

Eco Refill Systems: The company provides cooking oils in refillable stainless steel containers. The company’s containers can “be refilled and never thrown away.”

GaeaStar: GaeaStar, which The Spoon first wrote about in April of this year, makes clay cups that disintegrate into dust. The company’s founder got the idea while visiting India, where dissolvable, biodegradable clay cups have a long history. The company has developed a proprietary 3D printer that makes each cup in less than 30 seconds.

Homefree: Homefree makes baked goods for food service that use reusable, recyclable packaging. The company’s founder was inspired to create its packaging approach to help reduce plastic waste in the form of the standard large plastic tray and delivers both large and small cookies in formats that reduce plastic waste for food service.

Incredible Eats: Incredible Eats, a Smart Kitchen Summit finalist in 2019 (then known as Planeteer), makes edible cutlery. The company’s founder, Dinesh Tadepalli first came up with the idea for edible cutlery when he was getting his children an ice cream treat. Nowadays, the company is working with large national brands like Dippin Dots, offers both savory and sweet options, and has expanded its options into straws and sporks.

Loliware: Loliware makes biodegradable, compostable cutlery and straws out of seaweed. According to the company, its seaweed-derived resins can be made using standard plastic processing production equipment.

Pulp Pantry: Pulp Pantry makes upcycled snack chips provided in bulk packaging targeted towards food service.

Sun & Swell: Sun & Swell provides healthy snacks such as fruit and nut mixes in various compostable and reusable packaging. The company transitioned to compostable packaging in 2019 for its single-serve SKUs and recently launched a pilot program to offer bulk offerings in reusable packaging.

The Aggressive Good (TAG): TAG makes a bulk-food management system. The system includes a smart bulk dispenser that communicates inventory status and consumption trends, and the company’s reusable cartridge system enables direct shipments of bulk goods from manufacturer to retail.

PlasticFri: PlasticFri provides film-based and fiber-based packaging products using agricultural waste, wild plants, non-edible plants, and wood fibers. Their packaging formats include straws, cups, food mailers, and fruit bags.

Asarasi: Asarasi aims to make a dent in the plastic bottled water market by selling maple water (water derived from maple trees while extracting syrup) served in recyclable aluminum cans.

SOFi: SOFi creates what they describe as “plastic straws that don’t suck.” The company says its straws and cups are made with 100% paper materials, without the plastic or PFA chemicals that make straws and cups unrecyclable.

According to Google, the winners can pitch their products to large food service brands and test their products out in Google’s cafeterias and kitchens. Many of them are already being used to various degrees in various Google locations, and I had a chance to try many of these products earlier this month when I visited Google for its Food Lab.

You can watch a YouTube shorts pitch reel below that includes a description of the challenge and a company pitch from each winner.

GaeaStar Wants to Solve The Single-Use Plastic Problem With an Ancient Indian Solution: Clay Cups

One of the biggest problems of the food and beverage industry is the waste produced by single-use plastics. Because of this, there’s been a movement in the container industry over the past decade to create biodegradable plastics made with plant-based inputs, which suppliers claim can be put into the compost bin or recycled. While many of these approaches promise to reduce the amount of plastic in the waste stream, some experts still consider them problematic.

This is why a new company named GaeaStar is attempting something entirely different, aiming to end single-use plastics not by creating more eco-friendly plastics, but by employing a centuries-old Indian tradition: clay cups that disintegrate into dust.

The idea behind the company first emerged when Sanjeev Mankotia was walking around New Delhi in the mid-2000s. His cousin ordered a chai from a street vendor, and upon finishing her drink, she threw the cup on the ground, breaking it into pieces. Mankotia, who was born in India but spent most of his life in the U.S., pointed out that she was littering and asked her why she had done so.

“She said, ‘It’s made out of dirt, why do you care?'” Mankotia recalled in an interview with The Spoon. “And I didn’t have a response to that.”

He realized that these clay vessels and their disposal method were long-standing traditions in India, and he wondered if this could work elsewhere.

“I thought, ‘Why can’t we do this in the West instead of having these paper cups with plastic inside?'” Mankotia said. “And in reality, it’s actually a better user experience.”

At the time, Mankotia, an engineer by training, was a consultant in the finance industry. For the next decade and a half, he continued his consulting career while contemplating how to turn this container idea into a viable business. He eventually decided to pursue the idea after feeling he had achieved all he could in his consulting career.

“I felt that I had climbed that mountain in consulting, having C-suite positions,” Mankotia explained. “And I felt I was at the point where I had this idea, and I wanted to really start working on something for the next generation.”

He knew the containers in India were handcrafted by local artisans, who sourced clay from riverbeds and made hundreds of them per day to dry in the sun. However, Mankotia knew this approach would need to be adapted for the Western market, where he envisioned a company supplying restaurants and coffee shops with these containers.

Drawing on his experience as a consultant, where he had encountered additive manufacturing, Mankotia knew that a 3D printer capable of producing these containers at scale would provide a solution. However, no printers on the market were designed for the high-volume output needed to make thousands of cups daily.

So Mankotia decided to build his own.

“We developed a printer that could print one in less than 30 seconds,” Mankotia said. “And we want to try and get it to less than 10 seconds and closer and closer to the point of use.”

After Mankotia and some engineers developed the first printer, they realized they would need a system to produce the cups near the customer. So they began designing a micro-factory where they would print the cups and dry and cure them within a day using an oven.

The company’s first micro-factory launched in Berlin in 2022, and it was in the same city where they held their first pop-up and quickly sold out of the 3500 cups they made. After that, they officially launched in Berlin and are now making tens of thousands of containers per month, including ice cream cups for a German ice cream shop called Rosa Canina.

With a fresh infusion of capital from a $6.5M seed funding round, the company has its sites set on the U.S. market. Mankotia says the first market they will open is in San Francisco, where they will build a 200 square-meter micro-factory that will eventually feature up to 4 printers. He believes that once the micro factory is up and running at full efficiency, the company should be able to produce up to 4 million cups annually per location.

As for the cups themselves, one obvious concern is whether they can withstand the handling of a consumer because no one wants their drink container to break when they set it down or squeeze too hard. But, according to Mankotia, the containers have ten times the strength of a paper cup and are strong enough to be put in the dishwasher. The company believes some will keep and reuse the cups when they take them home. The point of it all, said Mankotia, is they now have a guilt-free choice.

In the future, Mankotia wants to continue to build printers that could eventually manufacture the cups on premise, where an operator could make cups with the push of a button. To do that, he said the company is working on eventually incorporating the technology into the printer that can cure the vessels quickly. The technology involves energy pulses similar to those used in microwaves, and the company is currently working with some German research institutes with expertise in the technology.

The company’s first partner in the U.S. is Verve Coffee Roasters. The coffee roaster will give its customers at select cafes an option to have a GaeaStar container when ordering particular food and beverages. GaeaStar says they will use this collaboration to fine-tune its original container prototype “to meet the needs of Verve and other U.S. businesses.”

The Auum Dishwasher Takes Aim at Single-Use Waste By Cleaning & Disinfecting a Glass Cup in 10 Seconds

Every year, the average office worker uses 500 single-use paper coffee cups, most of which end up in landfills. Plastic cup and bottle waste is even worse.

One obvious answer to reducing or eliminating all this waste is to replace single-use beverage containers with washable, reusable cups or glasses. The problem with this is many offices don’t have a kitchen, and even in those that do, most workers are either too busy (read lazy) to load or unload a dishwasher.

Enter the auum-S, a small countertop dishwasher that washes and dries a single glass cup in 10 seconds. The machine, which uses less than one ounce of water per wash, also disinfects the glass cups using high-temperature dry steam heated to 140°c (284 °F).

You can watch how the system works in the video below:

Unlike other small form-factor countertop dishwashers, the auum-S is targeted at offices, and because the system is for the professional market, the company uses an as-a-service pricing model. The standard setup price is €150 per month for the machine and one hundred 8 ounce glasses. The glasses, designed by Swiss company Bodum, are double-walled and can be customized for the customer with logos or names printed on the glass.

According to company spokesperson Léo Calvet, auum started selling the auum-S four months ago in its home market of France and has already shipped 1500 machines. Many customers are based in Paris and include such names as L’Oréal and Yves Saint Laurent. The company, which has raised one round of funding and is looking to raise more funds this year, plans to sell the auum-S into additional European markets this year and is eyeing a US market entry in 2023.

The Auum Dishwasher Aims to Eliminate Single Use Cups at Work

Researchers Use Bacteria To Transform Plastic Into Edible Protein

In 2018, the equivalent of about 3.5 million dumpster trucks’ worth of plastic waste was produced in the U.S. alone, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded the problem, driving increased demand for single-use plastic packaging and personal protective equipment.

Advances in microbiology suggest that bacteria and fungi could someday help us to tackle the problem of plastic waste. A 2020 review of this science identified some microorganisms capable of degrading different plastics (like a bacteria strain—found in the stomach of a waxworm—that can break down polyethylene, the most commonly used plastic polymer).

Two U.S.-based researchers have taken the idea of biological plastic recycling a step further. Not only are they using microorganisms to break down plastics; they’ve created a bio-based process that turns plastic waste into edible protein powder.

Ting Lu and Stephen Techtmann—professors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Michigan Technological University, respectively—collaborated on the process. The researchers are using both naturally occurring and engineered microorganisms to metabolize plastic waste and turn it into food.

This summer, Lu and Techtmann received Merck KGaA’s Future Insight Prize, which recognizes groundbreaking science and tech solutions to humanity’s greatest health, nutrition, and energy problems. The researchers were awarded €1 million for their work. According to a press release from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, they plan to use the funding to make their process entirely bio-based; to boost the nutritional profile of the resulting protein powder; and to adapt the technology to work on a wider range of plastic polymers and other non-edible waste.

“When I first started my own lab at Illinois, I wanted to work on something that’s both intellectually challenging and societally impactful. Food generation is such a topic,” said Lu in the university’s press release. “As bioengineers, we are called to use science and technology in service of humanity by improving human health and nutrition. It’s a real privilege to use my knowledge and to partner with other researchers to tackle harrowing issues.”

Lu and Techtmann’s process brings together the worlds of microorganism-based plastic recycling and food industry precision fermentation. The big question is how the resulting protein powder compares to the products on the shelf today, and whether consumers would opt for a food product derived from plastic.

Heineken UK Beer Packs Ditch Plastic Rings in Favor of Cardboard

Heineken UK is now tackling the problem presented by all those plastic rings connecting their bottles of beer by ditching them for a more environmentally friendly cardboard topper to hold those cans together.

Heineken UK today announced the Green Grip, its new cardboard packaging that is 100 percent plastic free. It will first be used by brewer on Heineken, Foster’s and Kronenbourg 1664 multi-packs before being rolled out across the company’s entire line of beverages.

Heineken says that between the Green Grip and the removal of shrink wrapping on consumer packs, the company will eliminate more than 517 tons of plastic annually.

Plastic waste has been a big problem for us and our planet, with more than 8 million metric tons entering our oceans every year. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated our plastic problem as people go through millions disposable gloves, and, more relevant to Spoon readers, single-use restaurant takeout containers.

Heineken UK isn’t the only beer company looking to get rid of the plastic rings on its multi-packs. A couple years back, Carlsberg started gluing cans of its brew together into a Snap Pack instead of using the plastic rings. And last year Coca-Cola and AB InBev announced plans to use the KeelClip paper-based multi-pack topper to be rolled out across Europe this year.

Admittedly, these are small changes, but if enough companies can follow suit, these small changes to the way we carry a six-pack into our next party (whenever those are allowed again), could make a really big impact on our planet.

Researchers Upcycle McDonald’s Waste Oil into 3D Printing Resin

We know that french fries aren’t good for you, but perhaps some good may come from our addiction to them. Researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough recently showed that they could turn waste oil from McDonald’s deep fryers into a high-resolution, biodegradable 3D printing resin (h/t Plastics News).

Professor Andre Simpson led the research after realizing that the molecules in commercial resins were similar to the fats in cooking Oils. Last month, the University of Toronto Scarborough explained the research, writing:

Simpson and his team used a straightforward one-step chemical process in the lab, using about one litre of used cooking oil to make 420ml of resin. The resin was able to print a plastic butterfly that showed features down to 100 micrometres, and was structurally and thermally stable, meaning it wouldn’t crumble or melt above room temperature.

While the research is still early, Simpson points out how this technology could help on a couple of different environmentally friendly fronts. It helps find a use for waste oil, which can cause sewage backups and be expensive for restaurants to dispose of. Current 3D printing plastic resin uses fossil fuel oils and is difficult to make. Because the McResin is made from recyclable materials, it could be much cheaper than the current plastic version.

This McResin is also easily biodegradable because it’s basically just fats. Though Simpson doesn’t point to this specifically, perhaps this resin could create single-use cutlery or takeout packaging. There are obviously thermal issues to be worked out, but we are just at the beginning of this particular slice of 3D printing McResearch, and it will undoubtedly improve as more resources are poured into it.

Simpsons research joins a host of other startups tackling our plastic waste problem. Startups are developing ways to break our addiction to traditional plastic by developing edible cutlery, banana leaf packaging, or creating new types of compostable plastic-like packaging.

What’s cool about this resin is how it uses our addiction to greasy food to potentially help combat our addiction to single-use plastic. So maybe you can feel a little less guilty about ordering that side of fries next time.

Winners of the Next Packaging Movement by Perrier Announced

Sparkling water company Perrier today announced the winning projects of its The Next Packaging Movement at the ChangeNOW summit in Paris, France.

Announced last April, The Next Packaging Movement put out a call for startups and innovators that are creating packaging that isn’t just 100 percent recyclable, but also re-examine packaging entirely from source to end of life. Perrier received roughly 90 submissions and the company partnered with SoScience, European organization focused on responsible research and innovation.

The projects selected by Perrier were:

Biotic, an Africa-based startup that works with biodegradable plastic made from agricultural waste while creating jobs for African women.

Flexikeg, which delivers beverages in re-usable flexible kegs and already has a collaboration with Perrier.

Plastiskul, which creates micro factories for waste collection and transformation in developing countries.

The winners will each receive technical and operational support from Perrier as well as a minimum of €100,000 (~$110,000 USD), and up to a million Euros in total. Each project will also aim to bring their solution to market by 2025.

Of the winners, it looks like only Flexikeg currently has a website up, and it’s entirely in French. But from the looks of it, the flexible keg seems to be following a trend we’re seeing around of bags being employed to ship and store liquids. Bags are lighter and lay flat for easier shipping. The Albicchiere and Edgar connected wine dispensers both use bags of wine for refills, and the Olivery sends olive oil refills in pouches.

Perrier, of course, is contributing to the world’s big plastic packaging problem, but at least this is a small step in helping fix that.

The Rocean Smart Seltzer Maker is Shipping This Spring, After a Stay at the Swanky Conrad New York

If you’re in Vegas right now for CES, there’s a good chance you’re sitting in a hotel room sipping from a hotel-supplied bottle of water as you read this. Sadly, most of us do it, despite knowing the wastefulness of single-use plastic.

But I get it; Vegas’s dry air makes us thirsty, and, let’s face it, hotels aren’t great at providing in-room solutions for filtered water. (And also: have you ever tasted Vegas tap water?)

Here’s the thing though: more and more of us are moving through the day with our own reusable water bottles, and if we just had an in-room solution we’d fill up there before heading out to conquer our day.

Well if you’re staying at the Conrad New York this coming March, you’ll actually have the chance to fill your bottle water up with filtered (not to mention fizzy and flavored) water in-room. That’s because the swanky NYC hotel is going to put a Rocean smart water machine in every one of the hotel’s 463 rooms for a limited time.

The ritzy chain decided to give the water machines a go after a 40 day pilot this past November-December where they installed a Rocean in a single room. According to Rocean’s Chief Commercial Officer Andre Jaquet, guests in the room consumed 1.2 liters of water per day from the Rocean on average, the equivalent of 5-6 hotel-furnished single use plastic water bottles. Hotel management ran the numbers and realized, over the course of a year, they could eliminate about 1 million plastic water bottles from going into the waste stream.

One million plastic water bottles is a lot of water bottles. Extrapolate that across the tens of thousands of hotels in the US that provide single-use plastic water to guests, and you can see how big an impact these types of solutions could make if widely deployed.

Sadly, there are some business model inhibitors to making this happen, namely that lots of hotels charge guests for water bottles. But Rocean envisions a future where hotels could charge for extras like flavors and other add-ins like caffeine or nutrients that could replace the income from selling single-use plastic.

Friend of The Spoon Richard Gunther, who looked at the Rocean for the Spoon in 2018, told me what he likes most about the machine is it can be plumbed directly into your own water system. “That makes it really easy to use,” he said.

What I like most about the Rocean is the product’s aesthetics. Like many, I’m finding my kitchen countertop increasingly crowded, and if I’m going to put another device in my kitchen, it had better look good.

This one does, in no small part due to a former architect. Unlike so many of the high profile connected consumer products coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays, the product’s design wasn’t the result of some engagement with a high-priced design firm like Frog or IDEO, but instead it was the brainchild of architect-by-training and cofounder Mohini Boparai.

Boparai and husband, CEO Sunjay Guleria, conceived of the concept for the Rocean when living in India and Amsterdam and trying out different seltzer makers and filtration systems. They soon began to think about the impact a good built-in filter and carbonation system could make on reducing plastic, and soon Rocean was born.

If you aren’t traveling to New York soon to stay at the Conrad, you’ll be able to buy a Rocean smart water dispenser for your home soon. The machines, which had originally expected to ship in December of 2018, are now on track for a spring 2020 shipment after a $6 million venture infusion from investment firm Blue and a handful of celebrity angels like John Legend and South African DJ Black Coffee.

The machines will sell for $349, which will come with a starter of a couple flavors and a CO2 canister. Additional flavor add-ins and CO2 refill canisters will be available through the company’s website.

Is Grocery Shopping’s Future Bringing Your Own Containers? Pete and Gerry’s Is Finding Out.

A trip to the grocery store creates a trail of packaging, much of which is plastic, that is mostly destined for a dump, sometimes a recycling center, and sadly, too often, the ocean.

Some supermarket chains are trying to do their part to reduce waste, with the latest being Giant Eagle, which has pledged to phase out single-use plastics by 2025. However, moves like these, while noble, don’t account for the waste produced by the packaged products on store shelves, from cans of beans, pints of ice cream or cartons of eggs. That latter one is getting some attention now from Pete and Gerry’s, the organic egg company.

The company announced in a press release yesterday that it has been trialing a reusable egg carton at co-op food stores in New Hampshire and Vermont. The cartons are made of recycled, durable, BPA-free plastic that can be washed at home and reused repeatedly, according to the release. Once a consumer buys the carton for $2.99, they can fill it up from the Pete and Gerry’s display of loose eggs, which are discounted from a standard dozen. More than 500 of the cartons have been sold, Fast Company reports.

Pete and Gerry’s said that an average American who eats 279 eggs per year would save more than 1,800 cartons from entering the recycling and waste stream by using the reusable carton. On a larger scale, if every one of the 327 million American did so, more than 594 billion cartons would be out of circulation. Pete and Gerry’s said that it’s looking to bring the program to more stores.

One aspect of a reusable anything is that customers must bring it with them whenever they go shopping. At their core, these items inconvenience the customer. And introducing them requires companies to be brave enough to add some friction between them and a transaction. 

One company doing so is Blue Bottle Coffee, which announced last week that “by the end of 2020, all of our US cafes will be zero waste.” The company means it: it asks customers to bring their own reusable cups, or will charge them a deposit to use one of the cafe’s, and will sell whole bean coffee in bulk to customers with their own containers rather single-use bags.

Eventually, our standard should require the use of reusable containers. The tactic taken by many food companies is to switch to materials that are more easily recycled. Clearly, this won’t be good enough. Recycling has proven to be ineffective while the world continues to drown in plastic.

The future of food shopping should be a little more difficult for everyone, especially for those who can afford it, for the sake of the planet. “Zero-waste stores” are already attempting this, demanding that their customers bring their own containers. Larger grocery chains and consumer packaged goods companies need to step up and expand efforts such as the delivery service Loop, which utilizes reusable containers.

The planet has suffered because of our thirst for convenience. It’s time for more companies to step up and demand customers give up some of that convenience.

Startup Says its Spoons and Forks Compost in as Little as 10 Days

No offense to the humble spoon (after all, this site is named after it), but it’s not as necessary for modern American diets than its pointier sibling, the fork.

And although there’s been some innovation in terms of environmentally friendly disposable spoons in the form of Planeteers’ edible spoon, there are few options for plastic fork replacements that don’t destroy the Earth. Startup TwentyFifty aims to change that with its fork, which founder Zack Kong, a bioengineering graduate from the University of California San Diego, said is “the first compostable fork in the world that’s similar in function to plastic and wooden forks.”

The difference between TwentyFifty’s technically edible products — which currently include forks and spoons but will eventually encompass chopsticks, stirrers and straws — is its patent-pending manufacturing process that compresses wheat flour, soy flour, corn flour and water into strong utensils that can withstand higher temperatures. Essentially, TwentyFifty’s spoons won’t melt soaking in a bowl of hot soup for 30 minutes. Due to the nature of the ingredients of the utensils, the company says they will break down in a backyard compost pile in as little as 10 to 30 days, while competing compostable products need to be broken down in industrial plants.

“The other benefit of this product is not just the compostability, but it’s also an organic fertilizer,” said Albert Liu, a TwentyFifty board member and business advisor. “When these utensils compost, they add 2.7 cents worth of fertilizer to the soil. We use grains to make the utensils, then they go back into the earth to help grow more grains.”

The big hurdle for the company now is cost, with retail price per utensil around 50 cents each, wholesale at 25 cents and bulk at 15 cents. That’s hugely expensive compared to plastic, which could be as cheap as pennies per utensil. TwentyFifty anticipates prices to drop to 5 to 10 cents as it scales up and automates its production line, which will allow it to produce 10,000 to 20,000 units a day. 

TwentyFifty’s target market isn’t individual consumers, however, who could just use silverware. Rather, it’s aiming to partner with universities and municipalities. Liu said the company has a vendor agreement with UC San Diego, and has partnerships in place with Malibu, Santa Monica and San Francisco, which have all placed bans on single-use plastics. The utensils can also be found at a number of California cafes and yogurt shops.

Earlier this year, the New Food Economy found that so-called compostable bowls frequently used by Chipotle and Sweetgreen actually contained “forever chemical” PFAs, which as their name suggests, don’t break down. Meanwhile, plastic pollution continues to be a global threat. So if TwentyFifty’s utensils break down like the company claims, and more environmentally friendly alternatives become available, progress can be made toward preventing future waste.

PepsiCo to Make Concentrates of its Sodas for SodaStream

If you love soda, but don’t like all the plastic associated with it, good news! Soon you can make 10 real Pepsi products like Pepsi Cola, 7 Up, Mountain Dew and more from the comfort of your own home with SodaStream (if you live in select European countries).

SodaStream, which was acquired by PepsiCo last year, announced yesterday that it will start making concentrates of popular Pepsi beverages that can be used with SodaStream devices. Calcalist was first to report on the news, saying the new concentrates will be available in Norway and Sweden first, followed by France and Germany starting in March of 2020.

Sustainability seems to be the main pitch for these concentrates as they won’t save consumers a lot of money. Calcalist writes that these homemade sodas will cost $.93 per liter, compared with $.95 for one that already comes in a bottle. But the benefit is that people won’t use as many plastic bottles in the first place.

Reducing single-use plastic bottles is a pretty good reason on its own to launch this type of endeavor, given the abysmal state of plastic recycling and the mounting levels of plastic in our oceans. PepsiCo has been testing out other ways to reduce its plastic use as well, including new flavored seltzer machines for offices, selling its Tropicana orange juice in reusable glass bottles, and using recyclable flavor pods for its Drinkfinity system.

There are two big questions that still hover over this new concentrate system, however. First, will it fare better than the Keurig Kold, which used Coca-Cola branded flavor pods to make sodas at home? That device was short-lived, being pulled after just 10 months on the market for being too expensive and too loud. Since this will use a device that many people already have, there shouldn’t be the same hardware issues.

The next question, of course, will be how closely people at home can recreate the iconic taste of their particular soda. Will the flavors match up? It seems like there’s potential for a real uncanny valley type situation where close enough really doesn’t cut it, even if you’re cutting out plastic bottle.