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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

waste

McDonald’s Joins Starbucks in Recyclable Cup Challenge

Fast food giant McDonald’s announced today that it is joining the efforts of Starbucks and Closed Loop Partners to spur development of a recyclable and/or compostable cup. The golden arches will contribute $5 million to Closed Loop’s NextGen Cup Consortium, which follows the $10 million Starbucks committed to the project back in March.

According to Closed Loop Partners, which invests in sustainable consumer goods and recycling technology and launched the Center for the Circular Economy, 600 billion paper and plastic cups are distributed worldwide each year. To help combat that waste, Closed Loop developed the NextCup Consortium and Challenge, an accelerator program to identify and commercialize “recovery solutions for environmentally friendly single-use hot and cold paper cups.”

The NextCup Challenge launches in September of this year and is “open to suppliers, innovators and solution providers with promising ideas to recover single use cups.” Awardees will get a grant of up to $1 million and will enter a six month accelerator program to scale up their solutions. Those interested can find out more here.

Five million dollars is a rounding error for a company like McDonald’s which had revenue of $5.14 billion in the first quarter of this year. But it’s a positive step for the company, which has 37,000 locations worldwide supersizing drinks on a daily basis, to join the public chorus about the negative impacts of single use cups and straws on the environment.

Reducing drink waste has become a hot topic during this hot summer, and with good reason. Plastic is junking up our oceans and becoming a huge environmental problem. Last week Starbucks announced that it would be phasing out single use plastic straws in all of its 28,000 locations by 2020. Celebrities are rallying against straws and cities at home and abroad are enacting plastic straw bans.

All this focus on waste reduction? I’m lovin’ it, and can’t wait to see more of it.

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.

Aeropowder Turns Feather Waste into Biodegradable Food Insulation

Meal kits may help you make good use of fresh ingredients, but there has been a lot of buzz about the waste they generate. While most of their insulation, containers, and wrapping are technically recyclable, many have to be broken down or driven to particular recycling facilities — which means that most of the packaging ends up in a landfill.

London-based startup Aeropowder is trying to reduce packaging waste by making use of a different waste stream: feathers.

Their first product, called ‘Pluumo,’ is 95% waste feathers and 5% biobinder wrapped in a compostable sheet. This biodegradable product is meant to insulate perishable food and replace polystyrene (a non-recyclable material used for packaging) in food delivery and grocery ecommerce.

According to CEO and cofounder Dr. Ryan Robinson, the U.K. wastes one thousand tons of feathers every week, and the E.U. wastes 3.1 million tons a year. (He didn’t have stats for U.S. wastage.) He and his co-founder Elena Dieckmann decided to take this massive waste stream and turn it into something valuable. “Basically, we’re up-cycling byproducts,” he told me — which is a fancy way of saying that they’re recycling a waste product into something better. 

After their launch in 2016, Robinson and Dieckmann initially focused on turning waste feathers into building insulation. However, they were soon approached by companies looking to use Pluumo as a packaging insulator, so they pivoted to develop a product for food transport. 

Two years later, they had a product that would insulate food as effectively as polystyrene and biodegrade much more quickly. Aeropowder just sold their first set of units (around 350 feather-packed “sheets”) to a craft butcher in Oxford this month. Robinson told me that their feather-packed sheets cost 10-20% more than conventional polystyrene at the moment, but he expects it to be competitive soon.

As of now, Aeropowder gets their feathers as surplus from the down industry. They pay a small fee to use feathers that are too big or too bulky for pillowcases and comforters. The end game, however, is to source their feathers from the poultry industry. “At the moment, poultry producers actually have to pay to get rid of feathers,” said Robinson. Since regulations prevent feathers from being burned or tossed into a landfill, the poultry industry has to turn them into extremely low-grade animal feed, which has high labor costs and low return.

Aeropowder currently works with manufacturing partners to produce their insulation but plan on opening their own production facility. Actually, they have even bigger dreams for production. “This is just a concept, but we want to make a special kit that gets plugged in locally to a poultry processing plant and creates Pluumos to use in that area,” Robinson told me. The kit would wash and process the feathers on-site — which has to happen within 24 hours lest they start to smell. That way they can capture mass waste streams throughout the world, especially in places that struggle with infrastructure and access to materials, without having to ship feathers or finished Pluumos insulation back and forth and adding to the carbon footprint. 

Yes, there’s a lot of “hoping” going on here — but the market for Aeropowder’s product is certainly there. As anyone who’s read the internet lately knows, grocery ecommerce and food delivery are on the rise. At the same time, the global sustainable packaging market is expected to reach $440.3 billion by 2025; an almost 8% increase from 2015. Combined, this means there’s a big opportunity for food insulation that’s both effective and sustainable. 

Two sheets of Pluumo will fully insulate a meal kit or food delivery box.

So far, Aeropowder’s four-person team (the two co-founders plus two interns) has raised two hundred thousand pounds through grants and awards. They’ve also racked up an impressive pedigree of awards; the founders were in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe Social Entrepreneur 2017 and the company was recently was named a finalist in the 2018 Thought for Food (TFF) Challenge. 

Robinson told me that they’ve also had interest in Pluumos from pet food producers and confectionary organizations, as well as food delivery giants looking to keep their meals warm en route to customers’ doorstep. Robinson said they’re even exploring ways to use Pluumos as insulation for pharmaceutical and biotech transport.

It’s still too early to tell if Pluumos will indeed be a sustainable, affordable, and scalable alternative to packaging like polystyrene. But as the poultry industry continues to grow and we move towards a more delivery-heavy food system, both the market and demand are certainly there.

Food Tech News Roundup: Plastic-Free Grocery Stores, Food Waste Accelerators, & Crowd Cow Tackles Pork

This week certainly kept us busy. Bear Robotics, which we were the first to cover, got a $2M investment, and Amazon opened the door to in-car grocery delivery. We also explored meat alternatives, from a tour of JUST’s cultured meat lab to Omnipork’s plant-based pork. Most excitingly of all, we had our first food tech meetup in which we explored the future of recipes.

If you don’t feel news-ed out, we’ve rounded a few food tech stories that caught our eye around the web this week. Great to peruse on a Sunday morning, post-snooze.

Photo: Crowd Cow

Crowd Cow moves to pork
Beginning May 2nd, Crowd Cow, the Seattle-based startup that lets carnivores buy cuts of meat directly from farmers, will expand into pork. Customers will be able to buy various snout to tail porcine products like bacon, pork chops, and sausages from four pig farmers; two on the East Coast, two on the West Coast. This expansion speaks to consumers’ growing interest in food transparency, especially in meat, as well as their demand for convenience — Crowd Cow cuts out the visit to the grocery store and delivers flash-frozen meat directly their customers’ doors.

 

Photo: Somadetect

Documentary on minority women in Agtech
Journalist and filmmaker Amy Wu has created a documentary called “From Farms to Incubators,” which tells the stories of minority women entrepreneurs in agtech in the California area. The film will premiere on May 3rd in the 2018 Steinbeck Festival in Salinas Valley. The documentary profiles minority women who are creating innovation in the agricultural sector through mobile apps, robotics, data systems, and beyond. Agtech, like many tech fields, is male-dominated. (Despite notable exceptions like women-run companies SomaDetect and AgShift.) The screening is free and open to the community.

 

Photo: Hooch

Hooch debuts next-level exclusive subscription
Hooch, the company that lets you claim a free drink every day from one of their participating bars and restaurants, just launched a new subscription level: Hooch Black. It’ll cost you quite a bit more — $295 per year, instead of $9.99 per month — but it has a lot more perks, too. On top of the drink-a-day service, subscribers also get hotel discounts, preferred restaurant reservations, and even tickets to performances like Hamilton or Coachella. Wannabe users also have to fill out an application before they even have the option to pay for the subscription.

CEO Lin Dai told Techcrunch that Hooch Black will continue Hooch’s mission to be the “an antidote to apps that ‘facilitate a couch economy’,” such as food delivery services. Instead of bringing the booze to you, they’re encouraging you to get out and drink it in a bar — and Hooch Black takes that even further by pushing users to go on trips, eat at restaurants, and attend live shows.

 

Photo: Ekoplaza

100% plastic-free grocery store opens in Amsterdam
This Wednesday a grocery store opened in Amsterdam that claimed to be the world’s first plastic-free pop-up store. The shop, dubbed Ekoplaza, has over 700 grocery items according to The Washington Post — and no plastic. Instead, food is packaged in plant-based compostable biofilm or just displayed, packaging-free, in glass, metal, and cardboard containers.

Plastic waste from food packaging is a huge problem — that’s why companies like NASA, the U.S. Army, and Unilever are working on ways to find alternatives. Ekoplaza, and other stores focusing on bulk shopping like Bulk Market, are tackling plastic food packing waste from the consumer shopping side.

 

Edible grasshopper company reportedly has $5M in order requests
This week Israeli edible insect company Hargol FoodTech told CTech that they had already received $5 million in requests for orders from companies in the U.S. and Europe. According to the aforementioned article, Ikea, Whole Foods, and Pepsico have already expressed interest in purchasing the startup’s grasshopper-based protein powder.

If these numbers are accurate, it would indicate a shift towards acceptance of edible insects — especially after recent growth news from Entomo Farms and Aspire/Exo. And if companies like Pepsico and Ikea are really getting on board, bugs could become a mainstream ingredient relatively soon.

 

A new accelerator for startups fighting food waste
Copenhagen-based transport and logistics company A.P. Moller-Marsk is partnering with startup accelerator Rockstart to create a program targeting food waste, reported FoodNavigator. Dubbed FoodTrack, the one-month program will start on June 6th and will offer workshops and guidance from mentors to the 10 startups selected to participate. They hope to help give the startups tools to tackle food waste, specifically in the early stages of the value chain (growth, harvest, and distribution.)

Can the Stircle Unseat Coffee Stirrers and Reduce Waste?

Consider the Stircle. A new invention that aims to reduce the amount of waste surrounding your morning cup of coffee by replacing those wasteful stirrers with a small machine that spins your morning joe to mix in all your cream and sugar. Although what might be more interesting is to consider all the chatter the Stircle is stirring up.

First, let’s agree that disposable coffee stirrers are a real source of waste. They’re used once for a few seconds and then discarded. I couldn’t find an exact amount of waste generated by single-use coffee stirrers (Today’s Homeowner said that 138 billion were tossed every year), but if you consider there are 24,000 coffee shops in the U.S. and Americans consume 400 million cups of coffee a day, it’s easy to imagine the number of stirrers adds up quickly.

The Starbucks Stircle ?

That’s where Scott Amron comes in. He’s a product designer and inventor of the Stircle. When you talk with Scott, you can hear that he really wants to try and make a positive impact on the world. “For years it’s bothered me that you use a stick or a plastic stick to stir your coffee,” said Amron, “it’s not just about the trash. It’s about the waste.”

Amron’s talking about all the resources that go into making, transporting and storing those stirrers. To him, those little sticks are a big problem.

So he invented a small countertop device that spins drinks around, stops, then reverse spins to mix them. Technically, according to Amron, the drinks aren’t just spun. Because people don’t put the drinks in exactly dead center, the contents rotate and oscillate. Plus, since the sides of the cup angle upwards, there is another dimension to the mix.

Amron says he built the Stircle with large coffee shop chains in mind and that the device can be installed by the milk and sugar for customers to use, or behind the counter for other drinks that need mixing by the barista. It requires a plug, and Stircles can be daisy chained, so multiple ones at a single location don’t each require a separate plug.

“You can stir 50,000 cups on ten cents of electricity,” Amron claims, “It requires very little money and very little energy.”

All this green stirring doesn’t come cheap, though. The cost of one Stircle is listed at $345. That seems high to me for a drink spinner. Plus, $345 is a lot of up-front money for large (and small) coffee chains who tend to think in the short term. Especially when that $345 (for one!) Stircle is up against a $5.65 pack of 1,000 plastic stirrers for a cost-conscious manager.

Amron published the Stircle video on YouTube earlier this month and the debate around it has been robust. Mashable thought it was “nifty,” Spruge hated it, and while TechCrunch was more positive, it called the device’s concept “ridiculous.”

Commenters have pointed out that a spoon, presumably many that are washed after each use, could achieve the same thing at a fraction of the cost. And it seems to me that even though the Stircle cycle is only 7 seconds, that would still cause a pile up of agitated people at the milk station, waiting to agitate their drinks.

But Amron may prove them wrong. He says he already has a number of customers, and part of the reason for the high cost is that he’s making each one to order. If it takes off, he can invest in manufacturing and bring that cost down.

All this aside, I’m more interested in the Stircle because of Amron. Unlike so many of us who have probably known forever that coffee stirrers are bad and kept on using, he is actually trying to do something about it. Even if he winds up just spinning his wheels.

Cup Club

Cup Club Brews Up an IoT-Powered Solution to Coffee Cup Waste

One of the most famous songs from the old musical 70, Girls, 70 is a song called “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup,” where one character decries the use of to-go cups: “The trouble with the world today/It’s plain to see/Is coffee in a cardboard cup.” The musical was written in back the ’50s, long before Starbucks, but its creators were unknowingly on to something.

Fast-forward to 2018, we’re throwing out over 40 billion single-use cups across the U.S. and Europe each year. Many have tried to address the waste issue; no one’s succeeded on a large scale. Offering to knock 10 cents off the cost of my $5.00 coffee isn’t much of an incentive to lug a bulky, reusable cup around (if I haven’t already lost said cup in a taxi cab).

Safia Qureshi considered all this when she created Cup Club, a subscription service using the Internet of Things and RFID to reinvent the reusable cup.

It works like this: Participating coffee retailers stock the cups, made of plant-based plastic, and give them to a Cup Club 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, Cup Club can charge a user for unreturned cups.

Cup Club will reportedly be available to the public this month in London, and will be followed by a worldwide rollout in the future.

Qureshi took inspiration for the company from the chai wallahs in India, who sell chai in glass cups that are returned, washed, and reused. “I’m very passionate about putting an end to products that are only used one time,” she recently said. “It’s a selfish and arrogant stance.”

For Cup Club to work on a large scale, Qureshi will need not just the support of the coffee shops who participate, but also a strong enough interest from the general population. I speculate here, but I could see Cup Club or its technology eventually getting acquired by a heavyweight coffeeshop chain, one with the kind of reach and brand power Cup Club needs to influence consumer behavior.

The fact that she’s not the only one to consider this type of approach is encouraging. In Germany, the city of Frieberg has introduced The Freiberg Cup: users put a 1 euro deposit down on a cup and can return it to one of the 100 participating businesses across the city. The system is reportedly cheaper for both consumers and businesses, and early results are “encouraging.” It’s not unfathomable for similar systems to start popping up all over the country as more people ditch the cardboard cup.

Because that’s what the success of the reusable cup really comes down to: changing our behavior. It’s automatic at this point to walk into a coffeeshop, order, and walk out clutching a paper cup. That companies like Cup Club offer an environmentally conscious option without the inconvenience of having to keep track of a reusable cup means the concept could have a real shot at success. If it doesn’t, “Coffee in a Cardboard Cup” is just going to get more and more relevant as time goes on.

Alexa Skill ‘Waste Guru’ Aims to Cut Waste in Restaurants

Last weekend, I wrote a piece speculating on some of the uses of Alexa inside restaurants. If the Waste Guru skill is any indication, getting Alexa integrated into restaurants might be tougher than I thought.

Based in the Bay Area, Zabble, Inc., started off as a consulting firm to help restaurants reduce waste. Co-Founder Nik Balachandran said he got tired of getting texts and calls from clients wondering which bin the yogurt container goes in and other small questions from befuddled restaurant workers. So he built the Waste Guru skill for the Amazon Echo to let Alexa answer those questions.

Once enabled, Waste Guru let people in the back of the house at restaurants ask Alexa how different items should be sorted for trash or recycling. Waste disposal can be tricky for businesses given the patchwork of city and county laws. For example, one county might allow compostable plastic cutlery in green bins while a next door county does not.

Waste Guru launched in October but Balanchandran has not gotten much traction out of his base in San Francisco. He estimates that only about three restaurants there implemented Waste Guru. He said that with restaurant margins being thin and the status quo working just fine for establishments, there hasn’t been a huge desire to implement a new Alexa-powered routine.

But Balachandran is undeterred, and is broadening the scope of his target market to go after buildings with cafeterias and food courts in malls. While many establishments already have signage that indicates where leftover items go, Balachandran thinks people are blind to those signs and that the interaction with Alexa will help make sorting better.

To help with that pitch, Balachandran is building out a visual component to Waste Guru, using an Echo Show as an interactive display to help people sort their waste. With the built-in GPS, these Waste Guru enabled Echos would automatically know the local city, county and state laws, and help people accordingly.

Having worked at a restaurant, I can understand how asking Alexa everytime you wanted to put something in the trash may have been too much hassle in such a frantically-paced environment. But I applaud Waste Guru’s out-of-the-box thinking and real-world attempt at diverting trash out of landfills. And, perhaps Waste Guru can still find a home in home kitchens helping out anyone who’s wondering where to put that used yogurt container.

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