Evoware
Innovation Prize Circular Design Challenge winner.
Circular Design Challenge winner
Category 2: Redesigning sachets
An edible or water soluble sachet solution for restaurants and other hospitality businesses.
Delta, from the United Kingdom, offers a compact technology that allows restaurants to make and serve sauces in edible and compostable sachets.
How does this innovation accelerate the transition to a circular economy?
The Delta team has created an edible sachet into which condiment sauces, for example, can be packaged when they arrive in bulk at a restaurant. This enables the sauces to be transported efficiently and economically right up to the point of sale. Should the packaging leak into the environment, it will rapidly compost. As a bonus, the packaging material is derived from seaweed, which captures CO2 as it grows.
What’s new?
The sachet has a shape that allows easy handling and stacking into secondary packaging, and can have varied thickness and number of layers depending on its purpose. What matters more is the innovative business model in the form of a service solution that puts a machine on clients’ premises. The machine produces the packaging close to the customer, and fills it with what the client wants, be it ketchup for a fast food restaurant or shampoo for a hotelier. Since all edible films have poor barrier properties, this approach is a necessity to avoid the problem of short shelf-life. A licensing model can ensure fast roll-out and customisation of solutions to different brands and applications.
3 questions for the team
Rodrigo Gonzalez, Co-founder and Co-CEO
What led you to come up with this idea?
Delta is an evolution of our previous product (Ooho!). We were originally inspired by the way nature encapsulates liquids using membranes, from egg yolks to cells or fruits. We investigated old food technology, such as spherification for making fake caviar, and started the project whilst at Imperial College London by applying those techniques to packaging. We’ve been working for three years as a startup to bring the technology to the manufacturing stage.
Many others are proposing edible solutions for condiments and other products, but the shelf life is just not long enough. What makes your idea stand out?
Delta’s technology is based on local manufacturing. Our compact machines produce sachets daily, directly at the point of sale to lower the supply chain requirements for a natural material.
What excites you the most about the New Plastics Economy Accelerator Programme?
Being part of a pioneering programme that really believes in the circular economycircular economyA systems solution framework that tackles global challenges like climate change, biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution. It is based on three principles, driven by design: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials (at their highest value), and regenerate nature. with partners representing the many aspects of the system on the brink of change. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation is one of the few organisations getting its message heard loud and clear, and it creates hope for innovators like us out there that we will solve this.
