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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

reusable containers

Deliveroo Is Running a Reusable Container Program in Paris

Deliveroo France and circular-packaging company barePack have started offering customers of the delivery service the option to get their food delivered in reusable containers, according to a report from Green Queen. Around 60 of Deliveroo’s restaurant partners are already participants in the program, which is live in Paris with plans to expand to other areas of France in the future. The program is also available to customers in the London area.

Deliveroo and Singapore-based barePack first partnered in 2020 to bring the reusable container option to customers in that city-state.

The Paris deal is similar. Deliveroo customers wanting their meals in reusable containers must first download the barePack app and sign up for a monthly or yearly subscription, which go for about $2.43 and $23 USD, respectively. The barePack app will provide a passcode users can enter into their Deliveroo account that then allows them to select the barePack option from participating restaurants at no additional charge. 

Customers can return containers to any restaurant participating in the Deliveroo-barePack Paris program. All containers are professionally washed and returned to the circular system. 

Deliveroo is the first major delivery service to offer a program for reusable containers. While 60 restaurants in a single city is only the smallest of dents, it’s nonetheless a dent in the world’s restaurant trash problem. If the Paris program is successful, it could bode well for reusables throughout the rest of Europe, where serves multiple countries, including the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and its home country, the U.K. The company also operates in Australia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, and the UAE. 

No delivery service in the U.S. has yet to implement a widespread reusables program, though the hope is that a company as large as Deliveroo could wield a certain amount of influence over others. DeliverZero is a smaller operation that offers reusable packaging in parts of the U.S., and Dishcraft offers its own “containers as a service” program for restaurants. Some chains, including McDonald’s and Burger King, are working with TerraCycle’s circular packaging business Loop in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Starbucks Reinstates Its Reusable Cup Program With a Low-Tech Twist

Starbucks will reinstate its reusable cup program in the U.S. on June 22, more than a year after suspending the program because of COVID-19-related safety concerns. 

The Seattle coffee giant halted its longtime reusable cup program in March of 2020. Since then, the chain has only served up beverages in its own to-go cups. However, as Starbucks pointed out in a letter this week, the company has a goal to reduce single-use cup waste by 50 percent by 2030 as part of a larger, multi-decade goal of becoming a resource positive company. 

The newly reinstated cup program will still offer customers that bring their own cups to Starbucks stores a $.10 discount. The company has also introduced a low-tech but seemingly effective way to get these reusables from the customers hands to the barista’s and back again: keep the cup in a ceramic mug while the barista makes the drink.

For now, the reusable program is only available to in-store customers, though Starbucks said it is “testing safe options” for reusable cups in the drive-thru lane. “For here ware” — ceramic mugs and plates — will once again be available for in-store customers, too.

Elsewhere, Starbucks is in the midst of a pilot test for its “Borrow a Cup” program, where customers can get their beverages in a reusable cup for a $1 deposit. For the program, Starbucks has partnered with Ridwell, a company that collects hard-to-recycle items, to offer a home-pickup service.

Worldwide, we throw out roughly 264 billion paper cups per year. Most of these are difficult to recycle because of their plastic inner linings. When it launched the Borrow a Cup program, Starbucks itself noted that a major hurdle to curbing this problem is convenience. “The challenge is how to make choosing reusables as convenient as you expect from Starbucks – no extra steps – especially with 80% of Starbucks beverages being enjoyed on the go,” the company said.

Other restaurant chains, including McDonald’s, Burger King and Just Salad, will grapple with a similar challenge as they further develop their own reusables programs. In all likelihood, the most effective strategy to cutting down cup waste (and packaging waste in general) will be a combination of bring-your-own-cup programs, partnerships with circular-packaging services, and regulatory requirements.

Dishcraft Launches Serve it Safe Reusable Takeout Containers as a Service

Dishcraft, the automated dishwashing as a service startup, announced today the launch of its reusable takeout container program, Serve it Safe. The new service aims to help restaurants reduce waste by serving takeout meals in sanitized, reusable containers.

Dishcraft first announced its reusable takeout container service just under a year ago. The company developed the Serve it Safe containers in collaboration with environmental nonprofit UPSTREAM. The first Serve it Safe containers will be available at Tootsie’s at the Stanford Barn in Palo Alto, California in a pilot program that will run for four weeks beginning today.

Tootsie’s will place takeout orders in the new reusable containers. When diners are finished, they can drop off the empty container in one of the Dishcraft collection bins located at or near the restaurant. Dishcraft then picks up the containers daily for cleaning and sanitizing before bringing them back to the restaurant the next day.

The reusable container service is similar to Dishcraft’s initial line of business, which is dishes as a service. Prior to the pandemic, Dishcraft was working with restaurants and cafeterias to collect, clean and return dishes on a daily basis. Dishcraft built a robot that used computer vision to automate the dishwashing process.

But then the pandemic hit and restaurants closed their dine-in operations, shifting towards delivery and takeout options. This helped the restaurant generate much needed revenue and stay in business, but definitely came at an environmental cost as single-use containers were used to package food.

It also meant Dishcraft didn’t have restaurant dishes to wash. So as startups do, the company pivoted and began developing its reusable container program. Dishcraft says the cost of its reusable containers includes daily service and is similar to what restaurants pay for disposable containers.

This is obviously a limited pilot program, but hopefully it can begin to answer some issues that immediately come to mind. Cost and ease will be paramount to both restaurants and consumers. For restaurants, the price of the containers can’t eat too much into their already-thin margins, and the containers will need to be readily available. For consumers, the process of returning the containers will need to be dead simple. No one really wants to carry around dirty dishes in their bags or backpacks when throwing out old containers is so much easier.

There is reason for optimism, however. Restaurants are already signaling their willingness to break up with single-use plastics and consumers are more aware of our plastic crisis than ever before. Perhaps Serve it Safe is actually serving itself up at just the right time.

Just Salad’s Reusable Bowls Are Going Off-Premises, Too

New York-based restaurant chain Just Salad plans to pilot its popular reusable bowl program for digital orders in the near future. The announcement comes as part of the fast-casual chain’s annual sustainability report, which was just released, and tracks company progress on making its business more eco-friendly.

If you’ve ever set foot inside a Just Salad, you’ll know the company’s line of colorful bowls made from heavy plastic resin that can be washed and reused on a regular basis. Just Salad started its reusable bowl program back in 2006 with the aim to cut down on single-use packaging for to-go orders. Customers could purchase a reusable bowl (mine cost $1 when I bought it in 2012), take it home, wash it, and bring it back for a refill each time they bought a meal from the restaurant.

In its most recent sustainability report, Just Salad said that sales of its reusable bowls grew more than 100 percent year-over-year in 2019 — then were abruptly halted by the COVID-19 pandemic. In New York City and elsewhere, reusable containers were banned from restaurants in an effort to lessen the spread of the coronavirus. Simultaneously, homebound customers switched to digital ordering and delivery formats, neither of which lend themselves to reusable packaging.

Now, in 2021, Just Salad said it plans to expand its reusable bowl program to serve off-premises channels like delivery. Under the new phase of the program, customers can order digitally for delivery and pickup. Food arrives in a Just Salad reusable bowl, which can be returned to any Just Salad location for cleaning and sanitizing afterwards. The phase is currently in beta and only available at one location, at the chain’s 3rd Avenue spot in Manhattan.

Just Salad told Nation’s Restaurant News this week that without any extra marketing done, roughly 30 percent of customers have already used the program since it launched earlier this year. 

The expanded reusable program is one item on a growing list of initiatives Just Salad has around sustainability — an area the company was championing long before the pandemic. Another notable item this week’s report mentions is Zero Waste delivery pilot. In partnership with NYC-based company DeliverZero, the Just Salad location in Park Slope, Brooklyn offers delivery items in reusable containers. Customers have six weeks to return the containers to either a delivery person or at a Just Salad location. Multiple other NYC restaurants work with DeliverZero, many of them local businesses. 

Hopefully that number grows, and quickly. If delivery and off-premises restaurant formats aren’t going away, nor is the mounting packaging waste problem, not if we don’t do anything to stop it. Restaurants account for 78 percent of all disposable packaging, much of it plastic. And plastic production has increased 200-fold since 1950, growing at a rate of 4 percent per year since 2000, with most plastic winding up in the landfill or ocean. Needless to say, our appetites for off-premises aren’t helping this problem.

In response, circular-economy-style delivery is slowly but surely making its way into the restaurant industry. Reusables are by no means the norm yet. However, major chains like Burger King and McDonald’s have various tests underway, which is encouraging for the industry as a whole.

Just Salad, meanwhile, has a number of other sustainability initiatives on the table, including its meal kit program aimed at combating both packaging food waste and a partnership with food “rescue” company Too Good to Go.

McDonald’s Partners With Loop to Pilot Reusable Packaging

With the restaurant industry currently being reinvented with to-go-first experiences in mind, there’s cause to worry that the shift will add even more single-use cups, straws, and boxes to our already bulging landfills. So it makes for a small silver lining that McDonald’s today announced a partnership with Terracycle’s zero-waste platform Loop to pilot a reusable cup model.

The program will first be trialed at select McDonald’s in the UK in 2021. For a small deposit, customers will get a reusable Loop cup for their hot beverages. The deposit can be redeemed by returning the cup to any participating McDonald’s location, according to today’s press release. Loop will retrieve the used cups, wash them, and return them to the cycle.

As to whether this reusable cup program will make its way to the States, a McDonald’s spokesperson said, “The feedback collected through these packaging trials will help inform which options are scaled up or adopted in other countries around the world.”

Loop’s main business lets customers shop online for grocery, household, and beauty products from well-known brands, then get them delivered in packaging. Living up to the platform’s name, Loop  retrieves and cleans the empty containers once a customer is finished, and the cycle starts again. The company currently has partnerships with Häagen-Dazs, Tropicana, Nature’s Path Organic, and several well-known personal care brands. The service is available in select U.S. cities and is in the process of expanding to more places, including international locations.

The McDonald’s partnership comes at a time when the fight for a more sustainable restaurant has to co-exist alongside the fight against COVID-19. Some chains, notably Starbucks, have banned reusable cups for the time being, (understandably) citing safety concerns. But the sustainability issue can’t be put on hold for long, particularly since the increase in to-go orders could eventually equal an alarming increase in trash, too.

Whether you love big restaurant chains or fear they’ll be the only ones left after the dust from the restaurant industry upheaval settles, it’s worth acknowledging that they’re typically the ones with the deep enough pockets to invest in new forms of to-go containers. For its part, McDonald’s has already piloted other circular solutions for cups, including the Recup system in Germany and the chain’s participation in the NextGen Cup Challenge in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the company also completed construction on its first “net zero energy-designed restaurant” in Florida. At the time of that news, I wrote that billion-plus-dollar restaurant chains like McDonald’s, Chipotle, etc. are the ones that need to take the lead in writing the playbook for sustainability in the restaurant. Smaller restaurants — the ones that have managed to survive the fallout — still struggle to remain open, so it seems unreasonable right now to ask them to also reinvent the paper cup. 

McDonald’s, on the other hand, has a $4 billion off-premises business and a recent track record that’s heavy on the innovation front. Using some of those dollars and resources to create a more sustainable restaurant experience seem the next logical step. 

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.