Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

waste

The Restaurant Trash Problem Is Actually a Major Opportunity

This is the web version of our restaurant tech newsletter. Sign up today to get updates on the rapidly changing nature of the food tech industry.

Here’s a small silver lining alert. The restaurant industry’s urgent shift to off-premises meal formats has created an urgent need to combat packaging waste. And people are finally starting to do something about it.

Let’s not sugar-coat the issue too much. Packaging waste is a major problem, one to which restaurants contribute greatly. Prior to the pandemic, some cities were taking steps to reduce or ban single-use plastics, and materials like polystyrene (aka Styrofoam) were out of vogue. All that changed when the pandemic forced the entire restaurant industry to rely on to-go orders for sales and regulations and company policies began banning the use of reusable containers for health and safety reasons.

In fairness to many restaurants, alternative forms of packaging (compostable, reusable, etc.) are expensive, and can even require operational changes for the staff. It should not be expected that these businesses suddenly come up with strategies for more eco-friendly packaging, particularly not at a time when many still struggle to keep the lights on and many more have shut down forever.

But those that can explore alternative packing options should, and of late we have seen some encouraging developments in this direction:

  • Last week, Just Salad announced its famed reusable bowl program would be available for digital orders. The company also highlighted, in its latest sustainability report, its Zero Waste delivery program, which integrates reusable packaging into the delivery order process.
  • Sweetgreen last week announced its plans to go carbon neutral by 2027. Details were pretty high-level, but the company already uses compostable packaging for its to-go orders, so it would not be surprising to see some additional developments in this area in the future. 
  • Just Salad was also in the news last month for the launch of its new meal kit service that’s free of both extraneous portion sizes and plastic packaging.
  • At the end of 2020, Burger King announced a partnership with circular packaging service Loop to pilot reusable food and beverage containers this year.
  • Ditto for McDonald’s, which struck a similar deal with Loop in the second half of 2020. The mega-chain has other circular solutions in place, too, like its Recup system in Germany.
  • There are plenty of other notable efforts being made here, from individual restaurants, like Zuni in California, to companies like NYC-based DeliverZero, which partners with restaurants to fulfill delivery meals with reusable containers. Additionally, Dishcraft Robotics lends some automation to the process of collecting and cleaning reusables at restaurants.

The bigger point here is that while we have a massive packaging problem on our hands right now, we also have a massive opportunity to change that and introduce new innovations in the process. Those innovations could simultaneously curb our single-use plastics problem while also addressing things like food quality, tamper-resistant packaging, and other elements that have surfaced over the last year. The public’s appetite for to-go orders is not going away. That means the opportunity to change our relationship to packaging is around for the long-haul, too.

Innovation won’t come as a one-takeout-box-to-rule-them-all format. Instead, what we’re more likely to see is collaboration among restaurants, material scientists, package designers, and many others. Nor will the issue be solved next week. Weaning an entire industry off single-use plastics will be a complex, costly undertaking that will probably meet a lot of resistance and a lot of failures.

None of that is a reason to ignore the packaging problem and opportunity. Based on developments from the above companies, many are already willing to start changing the system for everyone.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web

White Castle’s recent ghost kitchen effort in Orlando generated so much demand the location had to close will not reopen until spring, when the chain finds a location better suited to meet that demand.

Food delivery search engine MealMe has closed a $900,000 pre-seed round led by Palm Drive Capital. Slow Ventures and CP Ventures also participated in the round.

For the second year in a row, the National Restaurant Association’s annual conference is cancelled due to COVID-19. Instead, the Association will host a series of virtual events throughout the rest of 2021.

Zero Grocery Raises $3M Seed Round for Plastic-Free Grocery

Zero Grocery Founder and CEO Zuleyka Strasner announced today via Medium that Zero has raised $3 million in Seed funding for its plastic-free grocery delivery service. According to Strasner, “the largest check” came from 1984, with other investors such as Arlan Hamilton, AVG Basecamp Fun, Bluestein Ventures and more participating. This brings the total amount raised by Zero Grocery to $4.7 million.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Zero Grocery doesn’t use any plastic in its grocery delivery service. According to the company FAQ, food is bought wholesale and packed into glass jars, tiffins, boxes and other containers.

Zero has a membership option for $25 a month, which gives offers free deliveries and also collects empty containers from previous deliveries (which then get sanitized and re-used). You don’t have to have a membership to shop at Zero, though non-members pay a $7.99 delivery fee.

The timing is certainly ripe for Zero’s fundraise. First, the pandemic has spurred record amounts of online grocery shopping over the past six months. And while the numbers have fallen, the online grocery sector is projected to keep growing and hit $250 billion by 2025.

In the Medium post, Strasner even mentioned that the pandemic drove 20x new business for Zero, but it was it was able to adjust on the fly and survive:

As other grocery stores faced out-of-stocks due to a mutual reliance on the same distributors and sources for their products, we were able to avoid out-of-stocks and maintain a consistent customer experience. We had put our model to the test and succeeded, and it allowed us to serve customers in the best way we possibly could.

But the plastic-free nature of Zero’s service is also compelling. People are more acutely aware than ever, especially in light of a recent NPR and Frontline’s recent headline “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled.”

Thankfully, there is a new wave of waste-free grocery stores coming up to help tackle the problem. In addition to Zero Grocery, there’s Zero Market in Denver, CO, and Nada Grocery in Vancouver, Canada. Even big brands like Unilever and Pepsi are getting in on the reusable container train through the Loop store.

All of this combined, along with $3 million means that there are a lot more zeros in Zero’s warchest to help it scale its plastic-free mission.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post misstated that there was a jar deposit for non-members.

When It Comes to Food, What Compromises Will We Make in the Age of COVID-19?

This weekend I went to my favorite neighborhood coffee shop and, just like always, reflexively brought along my takeaway mug. But when I got there I saw the signs that — duh — coffee shops aren’t using takeaway mugs anymore in an attempt to cut down on potential contamination. So I got my coffee in a paper cup and, once outside, poured it into my own mug so that it would be easier for travel.

That interaction got me thinking: with restaurants shifting from dine-in to all takeout and delivery, what will the toll be on packaging? Americans already throw out a staggering amount of food and beverage to-go containers, most of which ends up in a landfill. It’s too early to see any new data from the past few weeks, but I’m willing to bet that that number is increasing.

Really, we’re between a rock and a hard place: on one hand I want to support my local restaurants and cafés however I can, which, right now, means ordering takeout. At the same time I feel guilty when I end up throwing away a clamshell container, cutlery, napkins, and a cup and plastic straw every time I get a veggie taco meal with a drink to go.

This quandary brings up a bigger question that will only grow as we continue into the great unknown of post-COVID-19 life: what are we willing to sacrifice? The question applies to several sectors of the food world.

Grocery. Ordering groceries for delivery has the benefit of convenience and brings less risk of contamination. However, if you’re ordering from Instacart or Amazon, you’re supporting an enterprise that doesn’t necessarily take care of its workers the way it should.

On top of that, you might not be able to get exactly what you want, when you want it. Our own Chris Albrecht wrote about his not-entirely-pleasant experience with online grocery delivery, which was both “misleading” and “confusing.”

Food delivery. If you want to support local restaurants/eat delicious food that you don’t have to cook yourself but aren’t leaving the house, food delivery is an easy option. But as our resident restaurant expert Jenn Marston wrote, delivery is not without its fair share of compromise. Third-party delivery services often take large percentages of each sale from restaurants, despite deals that they’re implementing in the face of COVID-19. They’re also notorious for treating drivers poorly.

However, if you’re trying to really do the social distancing thing or are in quarantine, delivery might be one of your few viable options for feeding yourself.

Health. If you’re working from home right now, like most of us are, staying healthy might be a real struggle. Snacking is all too easy when your pantry is right there all the time and filled with dark chocolate peanut butter cups.

Admittedly, eating healthy is likely not the highest priority for a lot of folks right now. And there are tools that you can use to help stick to a balanced diet, if that’s a goal for you right now. But if this crisis lasts significantly longer and people are stuck eating canned foods and takeout with nary a fresh vegetable in sight, we could start having another health crisis on our hands.

Image via Blue Bottle.

Packaging. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, single-use packaging for food is a humongous issue plaguing our planet. Before ish hit the fan with coronavirus, a crop of companies were stepping up to reduce their waste. Sweetgreen and Chipotle were rolling out fully compostable to-go containers with no “forever” chemicals. Pre-prepped meal delivery services like Daily Harvest were also transitioning to compostable packaging. These companies are hopefully still moving forward, but other initiatives, like Blue Bottle’s drive to transition to all-reusable cups by 2020, are likely put on pause.

What’s next?

For now, people are going to prioritize feeding themselves and their families — packaging and ethics are not necessarily the highest concern. Nor they should they be. But I have to wonder: will these questions start to factor in again once things go back to normal?

The truth is we don’t know when things will return to the way they were — or what parts of the meal journey will be permanently altered. Will we go back to our old balance of dining in and takeaway? Will we continue to order out more since many folks have struggled with unemployment and thus have less spending power? How many restaurants will even survive to reopen?

The scary answer is, we don’t know. But you can bet your bottom dollar we’ll be here to report on the shifting food space throughout the coronavirus pandemic — with a cup of to-go coffee in our hands.

Food Tech News: A Trash Robot Sorts Recycling, plus Space Mac & Cheese

You made it to the weekend! Hopefully you don’t have too much of a candy hangover from Valentine’s Day festivities. Over here at The Spoon, we’re laser focused on Customize, our food personalization summit coming up in a little less than two weeks (!) in NYC. (Wanna come? Use code SPOON15 to get 15 percent off tickets.)

But conference or no conference, cool food tech news keeps on happening. This week we’ve rounded up stories about recyclable-sorting trash bins, space mac & cheese, and a plant-based burger taste test featuring Bill Gates. Enjoy!

TrashBot automates recycling and waste sorting

It’s something most of us do every day — try to figure out whether our cup/bowl/utensil belongs should be thrown into the trash, recycling, or compost. Startup CleanRobotics is trying to automate that choice for us with its TrashBot, a metal bin that will automatically sort your garbage for you. FastCompany wrote about the company this week, which is trying to streamline the waste management process and also gather data on what we’re throwing away. To use the device, just toss in your item and the robot uses a combination of camera and sensors to determine in which internal bin — recycling, landfill, etc. — it should go.

Scientists develop mac & cheese for space travel

It looks like astronauts’ menu might now include mac & cheese. Scientists at Washington State University (WSU) announced that they have developed a way to make macaroni and cheese shelf stable for up to three years (h/t IFT). And not the boxed stuff either — this is the ready-to-eat version. The new offering, which uses thermal sterilization and a special protective film, has triple the lifespan of your typical ready-to-eat mac and cheese. WSU is currently testing the product with the Army.

Photo: Mark Rober

Bill Gates taste tests plant-based and beef burgers

This week Bill Gates appeared in a video by YouTube star Mark Rober (h/t GeekWire). In it he talked about meat alternatives and, most importantly, did a mini taste test between two offerings: one plant-based Impossible burger, and one burger from Seattle classic Dick’s burgers. Gates, who has invested in both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, said that the plant-based burger was “quite good” and “light years away from what they used to like.”

Newsletter: Why Blue Bottle Coffee is Like the Tesla Cybertruck

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Sign up for it and get all the best food tech news delivered directly to your inbox each week!

The new Tesla Cybertruck is a polarizing vehicle. People seem to either really like or hate the triangle-shaped truck. (I’m squarely in the like side because I’ve always wanted a vehicle from Megaforce.) Tesla CEO Elon Musk is definitely a polarizing figure in his own right, but between electric cars, solar powered roof tiles, and hyperloops, Musk isn’t waiting patiently for the future to arrive. He’s shooting it full of harpoons and trying to drag it towards us right now.

I thought of Mr. Musk when I read about Blue Bottle Coffee’s big announcement last week that the coffee company was trying to make its locations have zero waste by the end of 2020. Not 2024 or 2022. But twelve months from now.

As my colleague Jenn Marston wrote, Blue Bottle is achieving this by having people bring in their own containers for coffee beans, their own reusable cups for coffee (or pay a “modest deposit” for one of Blue Bottles reusable cups), and packaging grab and go items in reusable containers.

This is a bold move that even Blue Bottle’s CEO concedes is risky. In a blog post last week announcing the change, Bryan Meehan wrote: “We are proud to announce an experiment that may not work, that may cost us money, and that may make your life a little more complicated.”

Good for him for not sugar-coating this experiment. Also kudos for pushing the plastic-free movement forward. Big companies have been doing little things to reduce their plastic waste output over the past year: Burger King phased out cheap toys in kids meals in the U.K., Live Nation banned single-use plastics at music festivals, and Ben & Jerry’s eliminated single-use plastic cups and spoons.

But Blue Bottle is going one step further and actually “inconveniencing” its customers by pulling them out of their normal routine. As Jenn wrote, the result could wind up being that busy people get pissed and take off for Starbucks. But I’m hopeful that people and other businesses will be inspired by Blue Bottle’s actions, and buy a Cybertruck-load of coffee from them.

Nomiku’s new RFID-scanning circulator

RIP Consumer Sous Vide?

Spoon Founder Mike Wolf broke the news last Friday that Nomiku, one of the early pioneers of the home sous vide movement, was shutting down all operations.

Last year Nomiku had pivoted from a hardware company to become a meal delivery service that used the company’s sous vide technology. But while growth in that sector was strong, it wasn’t enough.

As Mike pointed out, Nomiku’s demise isn’t an isolated incident:

The exit of Nomiku from the market marks the end of what has been a fairly rough of couple years for the first wave of startups in the connected cooking market. Sansaire, which started around the same time as Nomiku, shut down in February of 2018. Hestan Cue, maker of a guided cooking system, downsized its team in April, and just a few weeks later ChefSteps, another sous vide startup, had to layoff a significant portion of its team before it got acquired by Breville.

The bloom is definitely off the consumer sous vide rose at this point. The only question is whether the carnage will continue and expand into other parts of the connected cooking appliance market in 2020.

The Year in Kitchen Tech Crowdfunding

Speaking of hardware: If you are an entrepreneur looking to crowdfund an idea, may we suggest creating some gadget around beverages? I took a look back at our 2019 coverage of Kickstarter projects and there were five drink-related projects that crowdfunded more than $100,000 this year:

Mosi Tea mobile tea brewer – $458,200
uKeg Nitro cold brew coffee maker – $643,498
Stasis Glycol homebrew chiller – $184,369
Travel Decanter cocktail tumblers – $377,071
Ode coffee grinder – $609,094 (with 55 days to go in the campaign)

However, it hasn’t been all good news for the companies that made a bunch a moola on Kickstarter. Mosi Tea will miss its Dec. ship date, Stasis has encountered production issues, and some people who have received their Travel Decanters have complained about it leaking.

Crowdfunding food tech will surely continue through the next year. Hopefully those inspired by the Kickstarter successes will learn from the crowdfunding failures.

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.

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.

Will Liviri’s Reusable Packaging Help Retain Mail Order Meal Kit Subscribers?

When you order a meal kit online, you actually get two things: the meal itself and a huge pile of containers and packaging that you are now responsible for, and not all of it is recyclable. Dealing with all this excessive waste can give consumers pause when deciding whether or not to re-order.

To help combat this packaging problem, yesterday Otter Products debuted the Liviri container system that can be used — and re-used — to ship meal kits, groceries or other perishables ordered for delivery. The plastic container has vacuum-insulated panels to keep food cold, reusable ice packs, and moveable dividers to separate food or create different climate zones within the box.

Once a customer removes their food, they place a return label on the container to go back to a sanitization facility, where it is cleaned and sent out for another use. According to the company a Liviri Fresh box can be re-used up to 75 times.

Liviri’s website claims its box keeps perishables at properly chilled temperatures for longer than the existing, leading insulated cardboard box solutions. This extended cooling helps prevent food spoilage and, the company says, can increase customer satisfaction.

Jim Parke, CEO of Otter told Fast Company that the company’s container system costs more up front than traditional packaging, but since it’s re-usable there is a cost savings. Plus, he said that Liviri’s eco-friendly and high-performance packaging approach will help meal kit companies reduce their customer churn because consumers can feel better about their less-wasteful orders and experience less spoilage (i.e. food going bad on a front porch).

Liviri is launching at either the best or the worst time, depending on how you look at it. It’s a great time because companies across the food stack are re-examining how they package their products in response to customers’ growing concerns around waste. Veestro switched to 100 percent recyclable packaging for its plant-based meal delivery, WoolCool offers a line of wool-based packaging insulation, and Imperfect Produce started a pilot where it picks up and donates used customer boxes to food banks and charities.

But Liviri is also launching at a time when most of the growth in meal kits is coming from retail, not mail order. Packaging is just one of the issues making customers move away from mail order meal kits. There’s still having to do a lot of work to make the meal, and there is always the problem of a meal sounding good when you click to order it, and little desire to eat it a week or so later when it arrives.

That’s not to say Liviri’s move is a bad one, quite the contrary. The container system can be used for groceries and other perishables, so there is a potential market, well, at the market. And any packaging that is re-useable in the meal journey is welcome in our waste-filled world.

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.

Imperfect Produce Launches Pilot Program to Reuse Your Delivery Boxes

Whenever I get home to find my Imperfect Produce box waiting for me on my doorstep, I congratulate myself on being a good person. After all, the box is filled with surplus and “ugly” produce — that is, fruits and vegetables that are cosmetically flawed and can’t be sold in regular grocery stores — so by purchasing them I’m supposedly saving them from ending up in a landfill.

However, after I put away all my virtuous vegetables, I’m always left with a big, bulky box, often much larger than it needed to be to fit my single-person order. Sure I recycle said box, but I can’t help but feel like I should be doing something more sustainable than just shoving the broken-down box into my recycling bin and going on with my day.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s been feeling some guilt over my cardboard consumption. Today I got an email from Imperfect Produce announcing a new initiative in Seattle (where I live) to reuse said boxes by giving them to Seattle Food Lifeline. The non-profit uses boxes to pack up and deliver donated food to food banks and shelters. According to Imperfect, Seattle Food Lifeline currently buys all their own boxes.

But starting today they’ll be getting reused Imperfect boxes to help them shuttle food around. For the next month, Seattlites can leave their clean, non-damaged Imperfect boxes in the same places they were delivered and one of the Imperfect drivers will pick it up on their next delivery. The boxes will go back to the local Imperfect warehouse until they’re picked up by the Seattle Food Lifeline. According to the Imperfect website, the company is doing the same thing in the Portland area with the Oregon Food Bank.

Imperfect Produce got some serious flak last year when a New Food Economy op-ed accused the company of a) diverting produce that was intended for food banks (an issue that was found to just be a result of a typo on the Imperfect website), and b) putting local farms out of businesses by undercutting CSA business. Initiatives like reusing cardboard boxes could help give the startup some much-needed positive PR.

Photo: Imperfect Produce.

Which isn’t to say that Imperfect’s pilot program is just a marketing ploy. It’s actually a pretty smart move: Imperfect gets to close the packaging loop, shore up its sustainability image, and give the boxes to a good cause. I’m not sure how many people will actually remember to put their box out at the pickup spot at the right time, or that the boxes won’t get stolen or ruined before they get grabbed.

But despite my qualms, the whole “reuseable packaging” idea is a solid one — both financially and environmentally — that more companies should be taking advantage of. With the advent of the robot revolution, it could become a lot easier to do so. The CEO of Korean company Woowa Brothers has outlined the idea that food delivery robots should pick up your recycling and return them to their origin where they can be reused or properly recycled.

Maybe Seattlites will eventually be able to load up their boxes into wee self-driving Amazon delivery bots, who can shuttle them to a warehouse where they can be reused to send you more stuff.

Can Tech *Actually* Help Solve Our Astronomical Food Waste Problem?

When we come across a problem that seems insurmountable, it’s easy to hold up technology as a cure-all.

That seems to be the case with food waste. Recently Eater published a story stating “Food Waste is the Next Great Gold Rush,” referencing Bloomberg’s post about how food waste startups raised more than $125 million in the first 10 months of 2018.

Neither of these pieces made the direct claim that tech will drastically reduce food waste; only that the fight against waste is has been getting a lot of investment of late. However, it got me thinking: many others have argued that tech could cut down on food waste — including ourselves. Is tech the key to solving our overwhelming food waste problem, where we throw out one-third of all food globally?

If only. Unfortunately, I think that framing technology as a panacea for our waste is overly simplistic. While there’s no question that the fight against food waste is a moneysaving opportunity for growers, distributors, and retailers, startups are mostly tackling waste upstream in the food system — when in fact we need serious help reducing food waste at home.

That’s not to say that companies fighting food waste before it gets to our kitchen aren’t doing important work. Many are leveraging technology to reduce wastage up and down the supply chain, from:

Harvest and Distribution

  • Agshift uses deep learning to inspect nuts and seafood and help establish across-the-board food ratings, which can help the supply chain route food more efficiently.
  • Full Harvest is a B2B marketplace that sells imperfect produce to companies like juicers that accept “ugly” fruits and vegetables.
  • Apeel makes an edible coating that doubles the shelf life of produce like avocados and citrus.
  • Spoiler Alert helps large food manufacturers and distributors better manage their inventory to optimize purchasing.

Grocery

  • Wasteless uses dynamic price tags at grocery stores to help incentivize the sales of soon-to-expire produce.
  • Walmart has its Eden Technology, which tracks its produce from farm to shelf so managers can divert older fruits and vegetables to closer retail locations.
  • Afresh uses AI to help grocery managers optimize all fresh food stocking.

Restaurant

  • Leanpath works with high-volume kitchens to help them track when and why they waste food so they can reduce their waste.
  • Similarly, in the U.K., Winnow helps restaurant track food waste so they can figure out ways to eliminate it.
  • Karma works with restaurants in the U.K. and Sweden to sell prepared meals at drastically reduced prices at the end of the day after the restaurant closes.
  • In the same vein, Too Good To Go is an app-based marketplace for surplus food.

Catering

  • Goodr uses blockchain to track surplus food that it redistributes from corporations to locals struggling with hunger.
  • Copia helps companies that make large amounts of food manage their inventories and find non-profits to which to donate excess food.

There are also a smattering of startups that are upcycling food waste products, turning them into everything from insulation to cookies to beer.

Yeah, that’s a lot of companies fighting food waste. But here comes the “but”…

Comparatively few companies are effectively tackling food waste at home. And unfortunately, that’s where most of the waste occurs. In fact, according to ReFed, 43 percent of all food waste happens in the home.

Yes, some companies are coming out with products and services aimed at cutting down on the amount of food we toss in the trash. Services like meal kits claim they’ll reduce waste by sending you exactly what you need to cook a recipe: no more, no less. However, sometimes people order a meal kit too far in advance and their plans change, so they have to throw it away. Meal kits also create a different kind of waste: packaging waste (though this is changing thanks to in-retail meal kits, which are the fastest-growing sector of the meal kit industry).

There are also tech startups working to cut down on home food waste by helping you keep better tabs on your fresh food. Ovie makes LED-lit tags that track your food and give you a heads-up when you need to hurry up and eat it. Similarly, Silo has a smart kitchen storage/vacuum seal system that keeps track of food freshness and also helps your food last longer.

But not everyone is going to buy these food-tracking devices, and even if they do, it’s no guarantee that they’ll actually eat those leftovers that have been lingering in the fridge for the past five days.

Bottom line: What we need is a behavioral shift. The American culture right now is one of abundance. Our fridges and pantries have to be constantly full. With the rise of grocery e-commerce and mega-stores that force you to buy in bulk (sorry, Costco, love you), it’s easier than ever to stock up on large amounts of fresh food. And unless you’re really good at buying exactly what you need or are feeding a hungry family, this mentality will inevitably lead to you throwing at least some of your food away.

That “some” can add up to quite a lot. Twenty percent of food Americans buy is never eaten. The National Defense Resources Fund found that Americans throw out more than 400 pounds of food per person per year, which can equate to up to $2,200 per household.To make any sort of concrete dent in our massive food waste problem people have to be okay with buying things when they need them — and buying less. We also have to be better about making use of all parts of the food we buy, from broccoli stalks to chicken bones.

Easier said than done, I know. Especially if you live in a more remote area where you don’t have the luxury of being able to swing past a grocery store on your way home from work. But I truly think tech is just a band-aid to paste over our food waste problem — albeit a flashy one. The real solution is a lot less sexy, and will be a lot harder to achieve.

Would You Rent (and Return) a Coffee Mug to Reduce Waste?

At most coffee shops, if you bring in a reusable mug you might get a 10% discount on your mocha, or just a pat on the back. But Vessel Works is upping the ante: today the company launched a beta program in two cafés in Boulder, Colorado, which lets people rent a reusable stainless steel mug for free from their local café (h/t Fastcompany). “Think bike sharing or a library book but for to-go mugs,” states their website.

Customers can use a free app to rent a Vessel mug, after which they’ll have five days to return it to one of Vessel’s drop-off kiosks or at any participating café. As they walk around sipping from their rented mugs, people will get reports on their app about how much waste they’re preventing, how much water they’re saving, and how they’re reducing their carbon footprint.

If they go over that time, they’ll be charged for it: $15 for an unreturned mug, $2 for a mug top. The website doesn’t indicate exactly how the company tracks the mugs, but I’m guessing each mug is either fitted with an RFID tag or a QR code that customers scan before they start drinking and scan again when they drop it off.

Cafés pay ten cents per Vessel mug, which, according to an interview with the founder, shakes out to less than constantly restocking paper cups, at least for a relatively small-volume spot. Vessel also picks up and cleans all the mugs at its own commercial facility before returning them — café partners don’t have to do any of the work.

Across the pond, CupClub is doing something very similar. Here’s how Jenn Marston described the company when she wrote about it this January:

Participating coffee retailers stock the cups, made of plant-based plastic, and give them to a CupClub member buying a coffee. The latter can then “return” the cup to any number of locations around the city. Once returned, the cups are collected, washed, and redistributed to the participating stores. And since each cup is RFID tagged and registered to a user’s account, CupClub can charge a user for unreturned cups.

Like we said — similar.

CupClub’s reusable mugs.

But there’s plenty of room for innovation in coffee cup waste reduction, because, well, it’s a huge problem. Most paper coffee cups have a thin plastic lining, which means that they can’t be recycled. That leads to a truly shocking amount of paper cups end up in landfills: over 100 million every day in the U.S. alone.

On the surface, services like Vessel and CupClub sound like a slam-dunk: they reduce the amount of single-use paper cups without making the consumer or the café pay extra money or do extra work. But the success of both companies hinges on one thing: convenience. And that depends on how many drop-off kiosks they have available, and how easy they are for people to swing by when they’re done slurping down their morning caffeine dose. Because if the drop-off locations aren’t convenient, then Vessel and CupClub’s mugs become the same as any other reusable mug you have to tote around with you all day — a pain in the butt.

The link for all kiosk locations led to an error page on the Vessel website, so I couldn’t get a sense of where or how many there are. CupClub may have a better system in place: In October the company announced that it would be trialing its rental cups with the U.K. retail group the John Lewis Partnership, which owns grocery chain Waitrose. Since Waitrose’s and John Lewises are pretty ubiquitous on London streets, it wouldn’t be hard to pop into one to return a cup when you’re done sipping without going out of your way. The other benefit is that CupClub (at least theoretically) won’t have to build out any deposit kiosks, which are costly and could cause logistical headaches.

Here at the Spoon, we’ve been closely covering (and cheering on) the initiatives to do away with single-use cups and straws. Starbucks recently eliminated single-use plastic straws in its store, replacing them with a sippy-cup-like lid. The coffee giant is also working to create a recyclable and/or compostable cup, and McDonald’s joined their mission this July.

But until Starbucks finally develops a recyclable coffee cup, companies like Vessel and CupClub are a good interim solution to take a bite out of paper cup waste.