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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Fancy Countertop Water Machines Are Not the Solution to the Bottled Water Crisis

Single-use plastics are a threat to the world, and a large contributor of that waste is bottled water. The segment, led by food conglomerates including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestle, is a huge business, pulling in $16 billion in 2016 in the U.S.

It makes sense then that startups and other companies are now introducing alternatives to bottled water to prevent more plastics from entering landfills and oceans. These alternatives take the form of countertop water filters, and there’s no shortage of them. Coming soon to the market are Lang’s All-in-One Drinks System, the Rocean One and Mitte.

All offer similar features: they filter water, of course, but also carbonate or mineralize it. Lang and Rocean also offer flavoring packs. All the machines are smart, reminding users when to replace the filters, carbon and mineral cartridges and flavoring packs. They also come at a high price, with Lang costing about $555, Mitte coming in at $529 and Rocean $349. Amazingly, there are waitlists for all three devices (the later two were successfully crowdfunded).

While these companies’ goals are laudable — Rocean’s plan is “to remove 1 billion single-use bottles from circulation within five years” — it’s built on the faulty premise that Americans even need to buy bottled water in the first place. Essentially, buying an expensive machine to filter water so you don’t buy bottled water cures a problem that is entirely avoidable in the first place.

For most people in the U.S., tap water is generally safe to drink. If you want to be extra cautious, you can buy a relatively inexpensive filter such as ones made by Brita or Pur. There is also always the option of boiling water to kill potential microorganisms.

But perhaps the main reason to stop buying bottled water is that it’s not even safer to drink than most tap water (and it has more microplastics). This is due to the fact that in the U.S. and Europe, more rigorous standards are applied to tap water than bottled, according to a study commissioned by The World Wildlife Fund. So really, people are paying corporations to put water that’s of equal or lesser quality to tap water in a plastic bottle that will live on for hundreds of years.

So spare yourself from opening your wallet for what Fast Company has dubbed “the Juicero of water,” and pour yourself a nice glass or reusable bottle of tap water. Not only will you prevent another plastic bottle from entering a landfill or the ocean, you’ll save money too.

Planeteer Is Cutting Down on Plastic Waste with Cutlery You Can Eat

We all know that single-use plastics — like disposable cutlery, straws, and cups — often end up hanging out in landfills and clogging up the oceans. Some companies opt for biodegradable options, but those can also take a long time to break down.

Planeteer LLC is trying to solve the problem of single-use cutlery waste by making single-use spoons that are meant not to be thrown away or composted, but eaten. The company will be pitching live onstage at the Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS} for our first ever Future Food competition this October! Read a short Q&A with co-founder Dinesh Tadepalli below and grab your tickets to see (and taste) his innovative cutlery for yourself.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity.

First thing’s first: give us your 15-second elevator pitch.
Did you eat your spoon today? It’s time to ditch the single-use disposable plastic — which, though only used for a few minutes of comfort, hurts nature for hundreds of years. Let us be more creative and innovative in helping the planet be a better place for future generations by eating your spoon! Our edible cutlery revolution starts with spoons that are all-natural, vegan, protein-rich and compost in just days! They come in two shapes and fun flavors, and will stay firm up to 25 minutes in a hot soup and 50 minutes in a cold dessert.

What inspired you to start your company?
We owe our future generations the same planet we enjoy. Our mission started after our kids were born. We felt responsible not just to secure their education but also to provide them clean oceans and environment. This started our path to exploring and innovating the way to make edible cutlery. Every spoon eaten is one less plastic one in the ocean!

What’s the most challenging part of getting a food startup off the ground?
Being a new concept and more expensive than a plastic spoon, our most challenging part is convincing customers that they can eat the spoon, literally! Our flavors and win-win pricing strategy helped all the sections of the business from manufacturing to the end customer. Now, we have about 20 shops selling these spoons for a minimal add-on cost, where the customer can leave the shop with gratitude and empowerment that they have not wasted another plastic spoon today.

How will your company change the day-to-day life of consumers and the food space as a whole?
We strive to replace all the single-use plastic spoons with a spoon you can eat. Edible Coffee stirrers are next. Take-out food is a huge market in US, so just imagine how many plastic spoons can be saved from oceans and landfills if we make a conscious switch.

A few minutes of eating ice cream with a plastic spoon leaves 500 years of impact on the planet. Our only goal is to help customers provide better alternatives to single-use plastic.

Get your tickets to SKS 2019 now to meet all the Future Food companies and give their products a taste!

TIPA Raises $25M for Its Plastic-Like Compostable Packaging

Reuters published a depressing animated graphic last week that showed how big the world’s addiction to plastic bottles is (picture a mountain next Manhattan). Three hundred and eighty million metric tons of plastic was created in 2015, with more than 80 percent of that plastic was discarded or incinerated.

The good news is that as the world wakes up to this synthetic nightmare, startups around the globe are tackling the issue. One of them, Israeli company TIPA, announced this week that it has raised $25 million in funding for its plastic-like, fully compostable packaging. Blue Horizon Ventures, Triodos Organic Growth Fund participated in the round with existing investors Chestnut and GreenSoil Investments on board as well. This brings the total amount raised by TIPA to $49 million.

TIPA makes a number of different packaging products including produce bags, whole bean coffee bags, snack pouches, baked good bags, and more. The TIPA website is pretty vague about the properties of its plastic-like materials, saying only that its material will break down within 180 days at an industrial composting facility. In an interview with CTech in June, TIPA said, “Depending on the type of packaging and shape, the compostable plastic is made up of anywhere from 20-60% plant-based ingredients, such as non-genetically modified corn.”

TIPA is a B2B company and doesn’t sell consumer storage products. It doesn’t relay specifics about price and any sort of parity with traditional plastic, with the FAQ providing just that “The pricing of our products is contingent on various parameters such as quantity, the product inside the package, the thickness of the material, printing options, shelf life needed and more.”

As noted, lots of startups are looking to reinvent our food packaging with more eco-friendly materials. CuanTec makes packaging out of shellfish waste, Decomer makes plant-based water-soluble packaging, and Zume Inc acquired Pivot Packaging to make its own line of compostable molded fiber pizza containers.

The plastic we’ve already made may last pretty much forever, but hopefully these up-and-coming technologies can scale up fast enough to make traditional plastic a thing of the past.

Reuse, Exchange, Recycle: How Companies are Tackling Rampant Coffee Cup Waste

When you start digging into the numbers around coffee cup waste, things can start to look very bleak very quickly. Exact figures vary, but some estimate that up to 600 billion coffee cups per year end up in landfills around the globe. Even recycling doesn’t help. In fact, according to the BBC over 99 percent of coffee cups actually can’t be recycled since they contain both paper and plastic.

Thankfully, groups large and small are coming up with creative ways to cut down on our coffee cup consumption. Here are a few trends we’re seeing to put a lid on cup waste:

Photo: rCup

The new reusable cup

One very obvious way to cut down on disposable coffee cups is to replace them with ones that have a much longer shelf life.

Hit up your local coffee shop (or Starbuck’s) and you’ll have a myriad of reusable mugs — in every possible color — to choose from. But there are a couple of companies coming up with some very creative ways to make reusable drinking vessels.

  • Huskee Cups makes biodegradable mugs containing 50 percent coffee husks, a by-product of coffee production.
  • Ashortalk’s rCup is made of old single-use coffee cups. Each of their mugs contains at least 6 upcycled paper cups.
  • Ecoffee has a line up of mugs made from eco-friendly bamboo fiber.
  • Stojo’s recyclable mugs collapse down to easily fit in your pocket, backpack, etc.
Cup Club

Cup Club

Just a rental: cup exchanges

Reusable mugs are great in theory, but in reality, they’re all too easy to accidentally forget on your countertop or gym bag. That’s why some groups are letting consumers “check out” and return reusable cups in a library-like program.

CupClub is one such company. Based in the U.K., CupClub members can get a drink from participating coffee retailers served in one of the company’s plant-based plastic mugs. when they’re finished, they can return it to any CupClub locations. Each cup is RFID tagged and registered to the individual’s account, so the company can charge anyone who doesn’t return a cup.

In Colorado, Vessel Works is doing something very similar. Consumers can download a free app to rent a stainless steel Vessel mug and use it to grab their coffee. They then have five days to drop it off at a participating café or Vessel drop-off kiosk, after which the cup is cleaned and restocked.

Big corporations are also beginning to experiment with cup exchange programs of their own. For example, in London’s Gatwick airport Starbucks is trialing a reusable cup program — and even charging people who request disposable cups.

Recyclable coffee cups

Speaking of Starbuck’s, back in March the coffee giant announced plans to test out recyclable and compostable cups — effectively doing away with the whole cups-in-the-landfill situation. This initiative grew out of the Next Gen Cup Challenge, a competition backed by Starbuck’s, McDonald’s and Closed Loop Partners to encourage the creation of more sustainable cup solutions. The Seattle-based company stated that it would pilot designs from some of the Next Gen Cup Challenge’s 12 winners at locations in NYC, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and London throughout 2019.

Seeing as Starbuck’s goes through roughly 6 billion cups per year, they’re singlehandedly responsible for a significant chunk of global coffee cup waste. However, if they can successfully install affordable recyclable/compostable cups in a significant portion of their stores, the coffee behemoth could help make future cup waste numbers look a lot less bleak.

New California Law Sets Protocol for Reusable Food and Drink Containers

I love bringing my reusable mug to coffee shops. It helps cut down on disposable cup waste, occasionally gets me a discount, and always makes me feel like I’m getting approximately 10 karma points. But occasionally coffee shops will say they’re not allowed to accept reusable cups for health code reasons.

From this week on, that won’t be a problem — at least in California (h/t Nation’s Restaurant News). On July 12, the California governor signed into law the Assembly Bill 619 to establish best practices for foodservice establishments dealing with reusable food and beverage containers. Previous California law simply stated that restaurant staff could refill reusable containers if “the dispensing system includes a contamination-free transfer process,” but didn’t specify what that process would look like. The new law provides more details.

From the bill:

This bill would instead provide that clean consumer-owned containers provided or returned to the food facility for filling may be filled by either the employee or the owner of the container, and would require the food facility to isolate the consumer-owned containers from the serving surface or sanitize the serving surface after each filling. The bill would require the consumer-owned containers to be designed and constructed for reuse, as specified. The bill would require the food facility to prepare, maintain, and adhere to written procedures to prevent cross-contamination, and to make the written procedures available to the enforcement agency.

Now approved, the new law stipulates that restaurants can’t put consumers’ reusable containers down on the serving surface, or that they must sanitize the surface each time after filling a reusable container. Foodservice spots must also write a policy for the prevention of cross-contamination which they can show to inspectors. Additionally, the law allows the use of reusable containers at “temporary food facilities” like events or outdoor festivals, which were previously required to use disposables, as long as they are cleaned on-site.

Reusable containers could help significantly cut down on packaging waste. Thanks to the rise of on-demand culture, we dispose of an astounding number of single-use cups, utensils, and food containers. According to the EPA, containers and packaging alone contribute over 23 percent of landfill material in the U.S. Compostable containers, while certainly preferable to the pure evil of styrofoam, still release methane when they decompose.

On the foodservice side, establishments large and small are beginning to experiment with reusable containers. The Loop sells brand-name CPG products from Pepsi and Nestlé in reusable vessels made of metal and glass. Yum China is experimenting with reusable fried chicken baskets at KFC’s in China. Starbucks recently trialed a reusable cup program at Gatwick airport, and, on a smaller scale, Vessel Works and Cup Club also have rent-and-return programs for reusable coffee cups.

Bill 619 was just signed into law this week, so it’s too soon to tell if it will actually increase usage of reusable containers and cups. Since California already has a reputation of being pretty eco-friendly, I’m not sure if it will actually inspire much of a change in day-to-day consumer behavior.

Sure, the fact that the law requires companies to sanitize food surfaces touched by reusable containers might assuage fears of germaphobe customers. But it also helps eco-conscious consumers who can point to the bill if a restaurant or coffee shop ever refuses to take their reusable container. However, the extra sanitizing could also end up being a pain in the a$$ for foodservice workers, especially in the middle of a crazy lunch rush. In fact, the success of the bill may well come down to how well restaurants can manage the sanitation rules during busy times, especially if more and more people start bringing in reusable containers.

One thing is for sure: Bill 619 starts a conversation around ways we can cut down on the obscene numbers of single-use containers and cups thrown into oceans and landfills each year. Hopefully soon it’ll become the norm coffee shops to get told off for not bringing your reusable mug.

Decomer Makes Plant-based Water-soluble Packaging to Fight Plastic Waste

These days, it seems like every time I get food I’m left with a pile of plastic to throw away. Food delivery, meal kits, to-go orders — the ketchup packets alone add up to a staggering amount of plastic. And sadly, the vast majority of it ends up in landfills or clogging up our oceans.

Startup Decomer is trying to cut plastic use by creating a new biodegradable packaging material made from plants. According to founder Mart Salumäe, Decomer’s material is unique in that it’s soluble at a variety of water temperatures. It is also made of cheap and readily available materials, so it costs less than other biodegradable alternatives, which are typically made from petroleum or animal products and can be extremely costly to produce.

Salumäe first looked into edible packaging materials a little over two years ago while working on his masters on material sciences. Though his company started in Estonia and will keep production and R&D operations there, they are now incorporated in the U.S. and just completed famed biotechnology accelerator program at IndieBio.

Decomer’s first product will be water-soluble honey packages. Called “honey drops,” these little balls are meant to be stirred into tea or coffee. The exterior will dissolve tastelessly into the drink along with the honey. Pricing isn’t set in stone, but Salumäe told me over the phone it would probably be about 20 cents per package, with each package containing 30 honey balls. Decomer will sell the packages in retail and also have a special dispenser for use in cafes or restaurants. Salumäe said the company already has requests for the plant-based honey balls in Japan, Europe and the U.S., and plan to start selling them within 12 months.

While Decomer will first head to market with their own branded products, Salumäe, told me they also plan to gradually move towards material sales for large CPG companies. “That way, we can scale production and have a larger impact on the environment,” he explained. The company is also developing blendable packages for smoothies, water-soluble flavor packets (like what you find in ramen), and detergent packs that dissolve in your laundry. Decomer got $250,000 in seed funding from Indiebio and is now in the process of raising $1.2 million.

A wave of companies are thinking outside the box — er, bag — to create new sustainable packaging options. Algotek makes plastic alternatives from algae. Notpla turns seaweed and other plants into biodegradable packaging. Even the big guys are getting in on it: In Japan, 7-Eleven recently unveiled plans to wrap nearly 2.3 billion rice balls in plant-based plastic.

Creating plastic alternatives is becoming more and more critical. Our oceans are filling up with straws, cups, and other single-use plastics; over 8 million metric tons of plastic ends up in oceans every year. At the same time, consumers are demanding more convenient, on-the-go dining options, and that typically means more packaging. Hopefully we’ll see more creative solutions to the packaging problem before our oceans become completely clogged with plastic.

Proposed Hawaii Legislation Would Make it the First State to Ban Polystyrene Containers

One of the best memories I have of growing up in Hawaii is the plate lunches. Chicken, two scoops of rice and a ball of mac salad… it’s so onolicious. Looking back, however, those meal memories are tainted with a side of guilt because the plastic foam containers those childhood plate lunches came in will be sticking around long after I’m gone.

Hawaii, however is making moves to say aloha (the good-bye one) to polystyrene food containers as it considers legislation that: “Prohibits sale of polystyrene foam food service containers and the sale or service of food using polystyrene containers statewide.” As The Associated Press reports, while some cities in the U.S. have enacted similar bans, if this latest bill passes, it would make Hawaii the first state to enforce such restrictions.

But Hawaii isn’t stopping with food containers. The state government has a second bill in the hopper that would, as The AP writes, “prohibit restaurants, stores, wholesalers and government agencies from distributing and using plastic drink bottles, utensils, stirring sticks, bags and straws.”

Hawaii actually has a lot at stake when it comes to plastic and the environment. Nearly 10 million tourists visited Hawaii last year, spending $17.8 billion and generating $2 billion in tax revenue. That’s 10 million people who eat, make their own trash, and then leave it for residents to deal with. But it’s not just the tourists; 8 million metric tons of plastic waste go into the ocean each year, and the Hawaiian Islands are, obvi, surrounded by ocean. If plastic waste destroys the beautiful water and beaches of Hawaii, well that’s bad, but you can also wave aloha (again, the good-bye kind) to all those tourist dollars and the local economy.

Thankfully, Hawaii’s moves to hoʻomaʻemaʻe (clean up) come at a time when the world is re-examining its plastic use. Restaurants like Starbucks and McDonalds are reducing plastic by exploring more sustainable cups, Walmart is cutting plastic packaging waste, Pepsi and Nestlé are trialing reusable containers, and the world, in general is taking note and starting to tackle the plastic problem.

Hawaii’s proposed legislation hasn’t passed yet, and there’s a good chance that only the restaurant ban on polystyrene will stick as critics say the single-use plastic legislation could make selling things like plastic trash liners illegal.

As someone who loves to visit Hawaii (and is therefore also part of the problem), I’m all for whatever keeps Hawaii beautiful. If that means changing what my future plate lunches come in, I’m all for it.

Food Tech News: Ben & Jerry’s Nixes Plastic, TJ’s Halts Delivery, Blockchain for Beer

This weekend’s shaping up to be a chilly one. Kind of seems like a perfect opportunity to stay inside, make pancakes and catch up on the latest food tech news though, right? Here are a few stories from around the web that caught our eye this week, from Starbuck’s going vegan to a blockchain for beer. Enjoy!

Ben & Jerry’s to eliminate single-use plastic spoons and straws
This week Vermont-based ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s announced that they would be eliminating single-use plastics from all of their stores. The Wall Street Journal reports that sometime in “early 2019” Ben & Jerry’s will cease offering plastic straws and spoons in all of their roughly 600 stores. By April 9 — Free Cone Day — the company hopes to be fully transitioned to wooden spoons and paper straws. Ben & Jerry’s isn’t the only giant chain cutting out single-use plastics: a few months ago, Starbucks announced its intention to eliminate all single-use plastic straws from its 28,000 locations by 2020.

Starbucks unveils new vegan options in U.K.
Speaking of Starbucks, the coffee chain recently launched two new vegan options in the U.K.: dairy-free mac ‘n cheese and tofu breakfast burritos. The new plant-based offerings are available at select U.K. Starbucks locations. These are likely the first round of options for the chain’s new plant-based food line, which Starbuck’s COO Rosalind Brewer stated last year was on its way.

Photo: Wikicommons

Trader Joe’s ceases grocery delivery in NYC
Grocery chain Trader Joe’s announced this week that it’s shuttering its grocery delivery service in Manhattan. The seven stores on the island will cease deliveries on March 1st. According to Supermarket News, TJ execs decided to stop delivery because of cost and competition with other delivery services. The grocery chain currently works with third-party services like Postmates to deliver in other states.

Photo: TE-FOOD

New Bock Chain beer uses blockchain to trace its ingredients
You may have heard about ripe.io’s Blockchain for Food — but what about a Blockchain for Beer? This week four Alberta-based brewing/malting companies partnered with German food traceability company TE-FOOD to debut a new beer called “Bock Chain.” According to a Medium article by TE-FOOD, curious drinkers can scan the QR code on the Bock Chain beer can and get a visual timeline on their phone tracing the beer grain’s journey from farm to can. The beer launched on February 1st, but there’s no information as to where it’s available or if/when it will roll out into new regions.

Did we miss anything? Leave us a comment or tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

As Pushback against Bottled Water Grows, Four Companies Offer Flavorful Alternatives

The age of bottled water may soon come to an end — or at least plateau.

Last week the Wall Street Journal published a piece that called the future of the bottled water industry into question. The “why” is obvious: Driven by images of waste-choked ocean life, plus government and corporate initiatives to eliminate single-use plastic straw use, consumers are looking for alternatives to the most popular bottled beverage in the U.S. And the industry is already feeling it: U.S. bottled water sales are expected to grow by only 6.7 percent this year —  the smallest increase this decade.

What wasn’t so clear from the piece, however, is what commercially viable alternatives are out there. To combat the downturn in sales, bottled water companies are scrambling to create a better bottle, either by promoting plans to switch to 100 percent recycled plastic, or leveraging new materials like cardboard containers (à la cafeteria milk) and glass. But boxed water and glass bottles are expensive and delicate, and we’re years away from a 100 percent recycled plastic bottle.

While eco-conscious consumers can certainly fill up a reusable water bottle instead of buying a plastic one, that doesn’t satisfy the growing demand for flavored seltzers and “healthy” mineral waters. It’s hard to find a replacement for bottled options that give options for carbonation and flavor add-ins — but a few disrupters in the market are working on it. Here are four companies trying to shake up how you hydrate, sustainably:

Image credit: Ted Eytan under creative common license

PepsiCo’s Drinkfinity + SodaStream

Back in August PepsiCo announced plans to acquire SodaStream, makers of the popular countertop carbonation system. The initial investment in the device has a relatively high monetary and environmental cost (it is, after all, made of plastic), it pays off in the long run since you theoretically don’t won’t be buying any more single-use plastic bottles.

This move came just a few months after the beverage giant launched DrinkFinity, a system which lets you flavor your water with special pods that go into a PepsiCo reusable drink “vessel.” Chris tested them out and determined that the taste was actually pretty good — and the reusable bottle could help keep plastic out of the waste stream. Bonus: you can recycle the flavor pods by mailing them in.

Of course, PepsiCo also owns bottled water company Aquafina and recently launched Bubly, a flavored seltzer which comes in cans and bottles — both of which put a lot of single-use plastic on shelves. But with SodaStream and Drinkfinity the company is offering (more) sustainable options for bottled water lovers, even ones who like flavor and fizz with their H20.

 

Photo: rOcean.

rOcean’s sleek home device 

On the surface, rOcean’s countertop device sounds a lot like a SodaStream: both appliances flavor and carbonate water. But as Richard Gunther wrote on the Spoon a few months ago, rOcean has two advantages: it hooks up directly to your tap, and also allows consumers to fill the flavor cartridges with their own preferred flavorings (though they’re still reliant on rOcean’s proprietary water filters and CO2 cartridges).

Despite these value-adds, rOcean has yet to prove that they can deliver. The company’s first round of pre-orders is expected to ship this month, so we’ll see if rOcean can follow through on its promise to help you save time, money, and the oceans.

 

Photo: Mitte

Mitte’s mineral water appliance

Flavor and carbonation are all well and good, but what about the distinct minerality that makes bottled water taste like it came straight from a mountain stream? Mitte is breaking mineral water out of the bottle. The Berlin-based company has a countertop device which lets you distill and create your own custom mineralized water at home, using replaceable cartridges.

As with the SodaStream and rOcean, Mitte’s appliance isn’t waste-free: its device is made of plastic, and I couldn’t find details about whether or not its cartridges were recyclable. But it’s a heck of a lot better than grabbing a bottle of Fiji every day on your way to the gym. The company has also reportedly been in conversations with appliance makers like LG and Whirlpool, exploring ways to integrate their product directly into refrigerators or kitchen sinks, which could cut down on the waste and space requirements.

Mitte won the Startup Showcase at our first Smart Kitchen Summit Europe this June and raised $10.6 million in August. Early Kickstarter backers will receive their Mitte units in June 2019.

 

Bevi’s customizeable water machine

Bevi makes a smart beverage device which hooks up to a tap and dispenses purified, sparkling, and flavored H20 with varying levels of sweetness. Designed to be installed in public areas like schools, gyms, cafeterias, and offices, the company’s core mission is to reduce plastic water bottle use.

When covering Bevi’s machine earlier this year, Jenn Marston mused on a future in which Bevi (or Bevi-like) machines were everywhere from fast food joints to Starbucks to gas stations, offering consumers a near-omnipresent alternative to fridges filled with plastic bottles.

 

But will they replace plastic water bottles?

Of course, while these companies are all working to make it easy to skip out on plastic water bottles, there’s one huge hurdle they may never overcome: convenience. It may be easy, even fun, to tap a few buttons and create a custom water blend to fill up your reusable bottle — but it will never be quite as quick or easy as grabbing a bottle of Evian from your fridge or a gas station fridge. Until it is, these solutions will have a hard time getting rid of plastic water bottles for good.

Food Tech News: Bye Bye Plastic Bags, Hello Beer Hotels

This week was a bit of a whirlwind for food and kitchen news. And no, we’re not just talking about Snoop Dogg’s cookbook announcement.

For all the stories we write about on the Spoon, there are a few we don’t cover but still think are worthy of a shoutout. Hence: food tech news roundup. Check out the list of stories that caught our eye this week, from craft beer hotels to President Trump-bound letters about cultured meat:

Kroger is phasing out plastic shopping bags
Grocery giant Kroger is gradually reducing their use of plastic bags. This week they started phasing them out in their Seattle QFC stores, and they plan to eliminate them altogether by the end of 2019. Kroger claims they’ll be completely plastic bag-free in its roughly 2,800 stores by 2025. This is in line with other initiatives to reduce single-use plastics; Seattle has already banned plastic straws and Starbucks is eliminating straws in all of their locations. Plastic bags seem like the next step in the march to prevent more plastic waste getting in our oceans.

 

Opposing sides work together to regulate cultured meat
Lab-grown meat company Memphis Meats and the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) teamed up to pen a letter to President Donald Trump asking his administration to “clarify the regulatory framework for cell-based meat and poultry products.” They asked that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) collaborate to oversee regulation of the new product.

This letter comes almost a month after a band of agricultural groups wrote their own letter to the President, asking for similar regulation to be applied both to traditional meat and “cell-based meat and poultry. It’s also close on the heels of the FDA’s public meeting on cultured meat, in which they examined safety and labeling issues around this emerging food. The fact that these two groups reached across the aisle to ask for the same thing — fair, consistent regulation — is a reality check for those groups who thought that cultured meat was a thing of the distant future.

 

Zippin unveils checkout-free tech to compete with Amazon Go (and others)
This week startup Zippin launched their software platform which lets retail shoppers fill their bag and walk out, without stopping to check out. Their shop, which uses a combination of cameras and smart sensing shelves to track shoppers’ selections, will open in San Francisco sometime next month. The company is trying to compete with Amazon Go, who pioneered their cashierless tech at their Seattle store, as well as rival technology Trigo Vision. Microsoft and All_ebt are purportedly working on cashierless shopping systems of their own.

 

Brewdog opens craft beer hotel in Ohio
Craft beer obsessives, we’ve got your next vacation lined up for you. This coming Monday Scottish craft beer company Brewdog will open what their website calls “the world’s first crowdfunded beer hotel” in Columbus, Ohio, right next door to their U.S. brewery. According to Food & Wine, The Doghouse has beer taps in all of the rooms, beer-stocked minifridges in the showers, and even uses beer-infused products in their spa. Guests can also play beer pong in the lobby and hop (pun intended) over to the brewery for an interactive tour. As the company’s name implies, dogs are welcome.

 

U.S. Army Lab turns plastic water bottles into 3D printed goods
The U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL) are repurposing plastic from sources like yogurt containers and water bottles as 3D printing materials. 3D Printing Industry reported that the ARL is hoping that this tech can be used within Army bases, so service members can quickly create parts for equipment and weapons. This shortens the supply chain, makes use of recyclable materials, and ensures that military members can create necessary plastic parts without having to wait for their next supply truck.

Did we miss any news? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Starbucks to Eliminate Single-Use Plastic Straws

I was just at Disneyland this past weekend, where the temperature hovered around 100 degrees. That is a very fast way to get a very real sense of exactly how wasteful single-use plastic straws are, as you see tens of thousands of people slurp down sodas and iced coffees then toss them in the trash.

To help combat this waste, Starbucks announced today that it is eliminating single-use plastic straws from its more than 28,000 locations by 2020. According to the press announcement, this will remove more than one billion plastic straws per year from Starbucks stores.

Replacing the straws will be a new strawless lid for all iced coffee, tea and espresso beverages. Basically, Starbucks is building an adult sippy cup. These strawless lids are already available in 8,000 stores across the U.S. and Canada. Straws aren’t completely dead, however, as the company will make compostable plastic and paper ones available for people who request them.

This move by Starbucks could push the growing wave of anti-straw sentiment more into the mainstream as our oceans and environment pile up with plastic junk. The European Union has proposed a ban on single-use plastic items including straws, while Scotland and the United Kingdom have each launched plans to ban plastic straws. Here in the U.S., Seattle (home to Starbucks) became the first major American city to ban single-use plastic straws starting the first of this month.

According to the Washington Post, Starbucks is the largest retailer to commit to eliminating straws. And while there, I saw that Disneyland Starbucks locations were already using the new strawless lids. Hopefully other food retailers at the park will make the same commitment to make the “happiest place on Earth” a little less wasteful.

The World is Reducing Plastic Straw Use — Will the U.S. Follow Suit?

Each year, Americans go through 380 billion single-use plastic bags. These bags can’t be recycled in your household bin; instead, you have to take them to special processing facilities, which generally means they just end up getting tossed into landfill or blowing around and getting stuck in tree branches.

Global Wildlife estimates that, if we continue using and disposing of plastic at current rates, by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish (by weight) in the ocean. In 2010 alone we generated 275 million tons of plastic waste globally, with roughly one-third of that ending up in the ocean. In fact, worldwide we only recycle 14% of all plastic waste — though some estimates put that number as low as 9%.

Governments and companies are trying to reduce these staggering stats with plastic use reduction initiatives. As of earlier this month, over 60 countries have introduced levees or bans to reduce single-use plastic consumption.

Consumers have been dutifully toting their reuseable shopping bags to the grocery store for years, but the new “cool” green initiative is saying to no plastic straws. Actor and environmental activist Adrian Grenier even launched a Twitter campaign to get people to #stopsucking.

Globally, several countries are taking big steps on this front. Last month the European Commission proposed a ban on 10 items that make up more than 70% of all litter in EU waters and beaches. Included on that list are single-use plastic items like straws, bags, and cotton buds. Scotland has promised to ban all plastic straws by 2019, the U.K. has announced similar plans, and Taiwan plans to ban all plastic cups and straws by 2030.

Foodservice companies are getting on board, too. In the U.K., major chains Wagamama’s and Pizza Express have already eliminated plastic straws from their restaurants. Coffee chain giant Costa Coffee will also remove plastic straws from its stores this year. As an alternative, most establishments are offering compostable straws made of paper or other biodegradable materials or giving customers the option to do without straws altogether. Some more upscale restaurants are also offering reusable straws made of glass or aluminum. And at Smart Kitchen Summit Europe this year, FoodPairing’s robot-created cocktails featured thick, uncooked pasta noodles as straws.

Soon these might be replaced with biodegradable options.

Stateside, we’re working on the straw issue — we’re just a little slower to the table. It all started here in Seattle, where the Lonely Whale has launched its first city campaign to support Strawless Ocean’s global campaign to eliminate 500 million plastic straws from the waste stream. Which is how many straws we use in the U.S. in one day. Starting July 1st, 10 years after the legislation was introduced, Seattle restaurants who use plastic spoons or cutlery will be fined $250.

Miami Beach, Malibu, and Edmonds, WA have adopted a simliar ban. New York recently proposed legislation to end plastic straw use by 2020, under which violators would have to pay a $100 fine.

In theory, a plastic straw ban is great. No more clogging up the oceans, no more injuring or killing sea turtles, and, thanks to biodegradable and resuable straw options, we don’t even have to give up on the pleasure of smoothie slurping. What’s not to love?

The path to adoption does have some hurdles, however. Paper straws can get soggy quickly. And biodegradable straws made of wheat or bamboo can cost 5-6 times more than straws made of regular plastic. Which means they might fly for fancier coffee shops and cafés, but it might take a while for fast food chains who are ordering millions and millions of straws per week to roll them out in huge numbers.

Though some giant restaurant chains are (at least trying to) switch over from plastic straws. In the U.K., McDonald’s started using paper drinking straws in 1,300 locations this May, and will expand the initiative to all of their locations in the U.K. and Ireland by September. According to U.S.A. Today, the fast food chain will start testing plastic straw alternatives in its U.S. stores later this year.

I have been personally guilted away from having a straw with my iced coffee several times. As have food-related retailers, producers, and distributors. Alaska Airlines halted plastic straw usage in May of this year. Bon Appétit Management, a foodservice company with 1,000 locations in museums, university campuses, and other institutions, promised to eliminate all plastic straws and stirrers by 2019.

Advocates are hoping that straws can become “gateway plastics,” leading to an anti-single use plastic revolution. Food-related companies are already starting to move away from non-recyclable plastic use. Last week investors pressured global corporations Nestlé, Unilever, PepsiCo and others to reduce their plastic packaging. In the U.S. Purple Carrot became the first meal kit service to make all of their plastic packaging home-recyclable, and startup Stasher has developed re-usable silicone bags intended for food storage or sous vide.

Until then, prepare to get some side-eyes if you opt for a plastic straw with your cold brew.