Like everywhere else, colleges saw a jump in takeout food and delivery during the pandemic as students avoided the dining hall amidst stringent social distancing rules at the height of COVID. However, even as things normalize, on-the-go food options put into place during the pandemic remain popular due to the convenience they afford busy college students, resulting in a lot of single-use containers making their way toward landfills.
But the good news is that a growing number of schools are trying to find more sustainable options, including reusable containers. One such school is Texas State University, which has partnered with food service management provider Chartwells to deploy a container system built by reusable container startup Ozzi according to an announcement sent to The Spoon.
According to the announcement, Texas State has over two thousand reusable containers in circulation. The way it works is students pay $6 for an O2GO container, get their food to go, and, when they are done, students can return rinsed containers at a student dining center, where they are given tokens for returned containers. Tokens can be traded in for clean containers when the student returns to get more food.
OZZI has been at it for a while, deploying its reusable container system to universities across the country. They even have a kiosk that handles the return of the containers – each of which can be used up to 300 times – and give students credit for the return. You can see how the system works in the video below:
While systems like that from OZZI have been rolling out at places like Texas State, UC Berkeley, and Cornell over the past few years, we’ve seen comparably less action in reusable containers for restaurants. However, some companies are working on the challenge, including a startup called DeliverZero, which has been getting restaurants to deploy their reusable container system around New York City. As of early this year, the company has convinced 150 New York City area restaurants to come on board and has also signed Doordash and Caviar to trials.
Despite DeliverZero’s early success, there are several challenges in getting restaurants to adopt reusable containers compared to university diners. Unlike university dining halls, restaurant to-go customers aren’t dining at the same place on a daily or weekly basis, which makes it hard for them to return the containers. They also aren’t likely to have their daily meals charged to the same dining services account every day, which makes it hard to create a financial reimbursement system to incentivize diners to use a container system. Finally, restaurant owners have a thousand battles to fight every day to maintain profitability, and maintaining a reusable container system is probably far down the list.
Despite this, a growing number of consumers are becoming mindful of the packaging waste steam they are contributing to through food delivery and innovations to support reusable containers at restaurants. One such system is being created by Perks99, an Ontario-based company working on a reusable container system built around their food drop-off lockers tailored toward office workers. The company will work with office managers to deploy the drop-off lockers in lobbies and give workers the option to subscribe to a certain number of meals per month.
Ultimately, the success of Perks99, DeliverZero, GoBox, or individual chains like Chop’d, who have deployed reusable container programs, will be up to the diners and the delivery infrastructure providers. As more students exposed to systems like OZZI exit university and enter the workforce, there’s a good chance these student-turned-employees may opt into reusable container systems for employees. Let’s hope more third-party delivery providers like DoorDash and UberEats continue to experiment here, and maybe we’ll get something resembling the adoption rate we’re starting to see at universities.
