SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the NextGen Consortium — a multi-year consortium that addresses single-use food packaging waste globally by advancing the design, commercialization and recovery of food packaging alternatives — announced the launch of reusable cup pilots in local cafes in the City of San Francisco and City of Palo Alto, CA.

Two of the 12 NextGen Cup Challenge winners – CupClub and Muuse – will pilot their respective “smart” reusable cup systems in open environments across clusters of local cafes on a rolling basis over the coming weeks. Live piloting offers these cup companies the opportunity to further test, learn and innovate according to the unique material, technical and operational changes necessary to facilitate a seamless and convenient transition to reusable cups for customers and companies. The size and complexity of the pilots, along with the customer feedback and data captured during them, will provide valuable insights into each cup’s technical feasibility, business viability, user desirability and circular resiliency. Alongside participating local cafes, the City of Palo Alto will be hosting cup drop off points in a number of civic buildings downtown and the City of San Francisco has helped to facilitate connections with local businesses.

Scaling the next generation cup won’t happen overnight; the cup system is complex and calls for multiple layers of testing. From the ability for baristas and customers to handle cups with ease, to alignment with diverse waste recovery systems after-use, testing is key. Reusable cup systems will need to be cost-competitive, integrate smoothly across diverse operations and technology platforms, minimize operational disruption, and have a positive impact on the environment and meet the convenience and performance standards customers know and trust in order to scale.

These pilots build on the NextGen Consortium’s work to advance the development of new, alternative cup solutions through the necessary iterative loops of innovation and testing before scaling. Additionally, in March, two NextGen Cup Challenge winners — Footprint LLC and PTT MCC Biochem Company Limited — will also begin pilots in cafes in Oakland, testing their single-use cup solutions that pioneer alternative materials for cups and cup liners that are recyclable and/or compostable. These ensure that the valuable materials in cups are kept in circulation and out of landfills and the natural environment.

The NextGen Consortium is managed by Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. Starbucks and McDonald’s are founding partners, with The Coca-Cola Company, Yum! Brands, Nestlé and Wendy’s as supporting partners, The World Wildlife Fund as the advisory partner and global design firm IDEO as the innovation partner. IDEO is designing and running the pilots in the San Francisco Bay Area on behalf of the NextGen Consortium.

“We know finding a more sustainable cup solution will continue to require partnership and innovative thinking,” says Michael Kobori, Chief Sustainability Officer at Starbucks. “The ongoing work from the NextGen Cup Consortium provides valuable insights and learnings for all the members, us included, as we continue to explore a variety of ways to better manage our waste and reduce our environmental footprint.”

“We’re excited to see many of the winning ideas become potential solutions that can be tested in a customer-facing environment,” says Marion Gross, Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer, McDonald’s North America. “Finding a cup that can be scaled will require continued innovation, testing and honing of solutions, so these pilots are an important step forward on that journey.”

Together, the NextGen Consortium’s unprecedented collective of brands are helping to shape the ultimate form these cup innovations will take in the world. “As we strive to build a more circular economy in which we design out waste, unique partnerships are essential,” says Kate Daly, Managing Director at Closed Loop Partners. “Our work to engage diverse stakeholders, from brands to universities to NGOs, ensures that we create the necessary robust testing framework to help these cup teams succeed.”

These pilots represent one important initiative within the broader work of the NextGen Consortium to create long-lasting, positive change across the cup system. The NextGen Consortium takes a systems view, pairing upstream product innovation with downstream recovery infrastructure. The Consortium brings together leading food and beverage companies to work together pre-competitively to identify and scale solutions that work for the whole industry.

Participating Local Cafes

Reusable Cup Pilots: Palo Alto, CA

CupClub:

• Coupa Cafe:
  • Ramona
    • 538 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA
  • Lytton
    • 111 Lytton Ave, Palo Alto, CA
  • GSB
    • 655 Knight Way, Stanford, CA
  • Green Library
    • 571 Escondido Mall, Stanford, CA 94301
• Verve Coffee Roasters
  • 162 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301

DROP POINTS

• Cafe Venetia (drop point only):
  • 419 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301
• City of Palo Alto (drop point only):
  • City of Palo Alto City Hall
    • 250 Hamilton Ave, Palo Alto, CA 94301
• Coupa Cafe Y2E2 (drop point only):
  • 473 Via Ortega, Stanford, CA

Reusable Cup Pilots: San Francisco, CA

Muuse:

• Andytown Coffee Roasters
  • 181 Fremont St, San Francisco
• Ritual Coffee Roasters
  • 432b Octavia St, San Francisco
• Equator Coffees
  • 222 2nd St, San Francisco, CA 94105
• La Boulangerie de San Francisco, Hayes
  • 500 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94102

Single-Use Cup Pilots: Oakland, CA

Footprint LLC:

• Red Bay Coffee
  • 3098 East 10th Street Oakland, CA 94601
  • 2327 Broadway Oakland, CA 94612
  • 1503 Macdonald Ave Richmond, CA 94801
• Equator Coffees
  • 175 Bay Pl, Oakland, CA 94610

PTT MCC Biochem Company Limited:

• Snow White Coffee
  • 3824 Piedmont Ave, Oakland, CA 94611

About NextGen Consortium
The NextGen Consortium is a multi-year, global consortium that addresses single-use food packaging waste globally by advancing the design, commercialization, and recovery of food packaging alternatives. The NextGen Consortium is managed by Closed Loop Partners’ Center for the Circular Economy. Starbucks and McDonald’s are the founding partners of the Consortium, The Coca-Cola Company, Yum! Brands, Nestlé, and Wendy’s are supporting partners. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is the advisory partner and IDEO is the innovation partner. Learn more at www.nextgenconsortium.com.

About Closed Loop Partners
Closed Loop Partners is a New York based investment firm comprised of venture capital, growth equity, private equity, project finance and an innovation center. The firm invests in the circular economy, a new economic model focused on a profitable and sustainable future. Investors include many of the world’s largest consumer goods companies and family offices interested in investments that provide strong financial returns and tangible social impact. In 2018, Closed Loop Partners launched the Center for the Circular Economy, a New York City-based collaboration center for innovators to commercialize products, services and technologies that are leading the transition from a linear take, make, waste economy to a restorative one in which materials are shared, re-used, and continuously cycled. Learn more at www.closedlooppartners.com.

Contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Closed Loop Partners

The NextGen Consortium is working to change the future of beverage consumption. Together, brands, industry experts, and innovators are aiming to bring a waste-free to-go cup to market. With 250 billion fiber to-go cups produced annually, the majority of which end up in landfills today, this is not a small task that one stakeholder can solve alone. And that is the spirit in which the multi-brand NextGen Consortium was formed, launched by Closed Loop Partners in 2018 to advance the design, commercialization, and recovery of sustainable food packaging alternatives.

NextGen Cup is the Consortium’s first initiative, which began with an open call for solutions from around the world to redesign the fiber cup so that it’s fully recoverable at a global scale. Twelve winning teams were selected from the 480 submissions, and six of those teams recently completed an accelerator focused on getting their solutions ready to go to market. The accelerator led to significant progress for each of the teams, as they move along the journey from concept to tangible solution—Accelerator teams have now tested their solutions in a live environment, developed scalable manufacturing plans with 1-3 year rollouts, and have made improvements to their cup design to meet specific circular design criteria.

As we reflect on the learnings of brands, innovators, experts, and designers coming together to tangibly move the needle on a global issue, there are three conditions that have continuously contributed to measurable progress.

One: Collective brand investment

Why was this a collective effort, rather than one spearheaded by a single brand alone? Creating and scaling the next generation fiber cup for global recovery or reuse brings a host of challenges throughout the value chain.

From material choice, to cup design, to barista and customer experience, to integration with waste recovery streams (and much, much more), each component must be carefully designed, tested, and prototyped prior to piloting to ensure the solution can perform to the necessary quality and standards.

The NextGen Consortium was intentionally designed to be collaborative, both across the NextGen Consortium brands, and with the solutions themselves. The strategy behind this was two-fold:

1. It’s faster together: Pre-competitive collaboration allows these brands to come together and share insights, learnings, and resources, making for a richer knowledge ecosystem overall. Similarly, cross-brand partnerships can send a unified signal to the market; for example, incentivizing wider adoption of sustainable materials or encouraging recovery systems to collect cups. By looking at multiple concepts at once, all stakeholders can move forward faster, including the teams themselves. Shared feedback mechanisms lead to enhanced learning for all involved.
2. It’s less risky together: As partners and innovators learn, experiment, and work together across a number of concepts and concept types, all participants receive a clearer picture of what works through shared learnings and aggregated needs. With time and cup solutions iterations, the Consortium can work to mitigate any risks around introducing new concepts to market.

Two: Controlled prototyping experiences

In June 2019, the NextGen Circular Business Accelerator teams conducted live in-context prototyping at three different Google campus cafes in the South San Francisco Bay Area.

The goals of which were to:

• Accelerate learning: Prototyping helps teams learn faster and identify areas in need of development by testing solutions in an environment that is as close to a real market as possible.
• Test the whole system or a single hypothesis: Product and service systems can have a lot of interdependent moving parts. Prototyping is a low-risk way of testing how all of those parts work (or don’t work) together. It’s also useful for testing out a new feature or hypothesis that a team might have.
• Learn from users: Seeing first hand how users (coffee drinkers, restaurant workers, etc.) interact with and react to the solution is invaluable. The ability to hear their comments, answer and ask questions in real time is an important part of the process.
• Decrease risk: If a part of a solution does not work, it’s useful for teams to learn this early while the stakes are lower and while they still have the opportunity to incorporate what they learn into the next iteration of the product.

Choosing Google campuses as the prototyping location was a specific design choice. The closed environment of a campus approximates a high traffic retail cafe while offering the benefits of being able to control for key variables.

Cup teams had the opportunity to learn from a highly engaged group of users, and leverage Google’s network of micro-kitchens to explore multiple iterations of their solutions at the same time. Maintaining control across key variables provided teams with the opportunity to develop a prototyping plan that focused on the needs unique to their specific cup solution. For instance:

• Footprint was testing lid use and performance.
• Colombier was looking to compare different coating applications on their cups.
• CupClub wanted users to try out the UI/UX of their mobile application.

Three: A niche and specialized accelerator

Cup design is incredibly technical. From the integrity and safety of the cup itself, to the ability for baristas and users to handle them with ease, to becoming truly waste-free, constant attention to each and every one of these details (plus many more) required the development of a set of specialized metrics and tracking specific to this ecosystem.

For example, during the Google prototyping, teams were specifically evaluating:

• User experience: Teams explored first-hand how beverage drinkers interact with and react to their solutions. Testing was conducted in a variety of ways including design research interviews, surveys, observations and comments, and deep-dive question sessions.
• Barista experience: Many teams had yet to see and understand how their cups do or do not work within the barista context. This was a key initial exploration to determine how well the cup is nesting / de-nesting, holding up to certain types of drinks being made, as well as overall impressions from baristas on each cup.
• Performance: Teams measured general performance of each cup solution, including: how long cups must hold liquid at this location based on user habits, how well the cup regulated temperature either with / without a sleeve, how well the cup stacked, stored, nested and de-nested within the space, overall lid performance, etc.
• Disposal: Teams tracked where the cups ended up in bins across campuses in order to better understand what signifiers (written, visual, verbal, etc.) helped to inform consumers of the proper disposal method.

Where cups end up after-use is a critical part of the journey and a key focus of the NextGen Consortium’s work. By connecting upstream cup innovation to downstream recovery infrastructure, and focusing on understanding and integrating new cup solutions within existing recovery systems, the NextGen Consortium aims to keep the valuable materials in cups in circulation. During the accelerator, teams visited and ran their new cup solutions through materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to see first-hand what happens to their cups at end-of-use. They examined the value of their cup materials post-processing to better understand the market incentives for recycling or composting, which are ultimately driven by end markets.

The benefits of focusing on this very specific world of sustainable cups continued to ring clear as teams graduated from the accelerator and pitched their solutions live to NextGen Consortium Partners and a group of investors during Climate Week NYC, in September 2019. When it comes to storytelling and understanding the breadth of solutions available within the fiber to-go cup ecosystems, seeing each of the solutions side by side helped investors, partners, and teams understand the value of each of their approaches. The cup solutions included:

Reusable cups and cup systems solutions:

• CupClub: A returnable cup ecosystem, providing a service for drinks. Think bike sharing, but for cups.
• ReCup: A deposit system for reusable cups. Rent a cup and return it to any participating partner shop. No cleaning of the cup or carrying around required.
• Muuse: A deposit-based platform for smart, reusable beverage packaging, connecting their cups–and third party products–to Internet of Things technologies. (Formerly Revolv)

Single-use fiber cups and liners solutions:

• Colombier: A recyclable and compostable barrier for paperboard cups.
• Footprint: Cups, lids and straws that are fully formed fiber-based solutions, with an aqueous-based coating that is recyclable and compostable.

Innovative new materials:

• Solublue: Plant-based, food grade and non-toxic products that biodegrade after use.

What’s next for the NextGen Cup?

As each of the six teams stepped off the stage during the final accelerator pitch event, the NextGen Consortium entered the next phase of this work: pilot readiness testing.

After the initial prototyping at Google campuses, select teams will now work to increase the size and complexity of their testing locations, looking at universities and offices, among other locations. Additionally, these teams will now begin to prototype alongside select teams from the NextGen Consortium’s “Advanced Solutions Program,” later-stage teams from the NextGen Cup Challenge that did not require the initial accelerator programming. As these teams work to reach market readiness, their greatest need is additional data points that will prove their concept’s ability to operate at scale.

The pilot readiness tests aim to provide much of that data and help setup teams for next steps around scalability. In parallel, the NextGen Consortium will continue its work convening experts and identifying opportunities to align new cup designs and materials with the infrastructure like MRFs, paper mills, and other recyclers that would process them at end-of-use.

From 480 innovative ideas to live prototyping to preparing for pilot readiness and beyond, these next generation cups are paving the way for a waste-free future. These are not solutions that will be ready overnight and require multiple layers of testing and iteration. That’s why NextGen Cup has a multi-stage, multi-year approach to identifying, testing, and scaling sustainable cup solutions to integrate into the global supply chain.

NextGen Cup is designed to both acknowledge the complex journey of the cup, from design through to cup recovery after-use, and accelerate it by de-risking the process in its collective efforts and creating methods for effective prototyping and pilot readiness.

Witnessing The Transformation Of A Traditional MRF Into A Tech Enhanced One

It’s been three months since mandatory trash sorting was enforced in Shanghai and other big cities across China. We visited a local MRF to see how the new laws have impacted business. Tianqiang, led by CEO Mrs. Hu, has transformed its business model from a MRF to an all encompassing solutions provider, adding collection, reprocessing and production capacity.

• Tianqiang has implemented technology enabled collection services. They have set up café style smart collection centers with digital scales that are linked to real time commodity prices. Residents get paid immediately by cash or credit according to the commodity price on a given day. Also, operators of the MRF are able to see the exact amount of recyclables collected from each transaction and accumulated at each center on a dashboard. This data helps inform the local government’s waste reduction targets for different communities.

• Tianqiang is embracing vertical integration. Although their recycled plastic is sold mainly to car and furniture manufacturers, they are also producing their own products such as clothes hangers to sell to retailers. Their recycled paper is being sold directly to the no. 1 and no. 2 paper products manufacturers in China.
• Tianqiang’s collection centers are rent free, strengthening an earlier point that the Chinese government is supporting the development of local recycling infrastructure, for example by providing free land to encourage private sector growth.