What if there was a better way to make and deliver pizza to

you? Turns out there.

Zume is revolutionizing delivery model.

All pizzerias out there, you're in trouble.

At the time Zume was a pizza company that used robots to

automate the pizza creation process and utilized large oven

carrying trucks to bake the pies as they traveled to customers.

The idea was a hit and earned Zume a $375 million investment

from SoftBank. So why are we talking about pizza made by

robots in a video about compostable packaging? That was

our question too.

One of the problems that we encountered in pizza was our

beautiful pizza with no stabilizers in it in a

traditional box, declined in quality from the time you cooked

it to the time it was delivered to the point where we didn't

think it was good enough. So we designed a new pizza box.

At the beginning of 2020 Zume laid off half of its workforce;

360 employees.

This is another stumble for SoftBank's Vision Fund, which

invested $375 million into Zume, bestowing that unicorn status;

$1 billion valuation.

But the company kept going. Now Zume is dedicated to producing

compostable packaging that is durable and backyard

compostable, breaking down in a matter of 90 days. Zume is

breaking into the $274.2 billion sustainable packaging market,

which is expected to grow to $413.8 billion by 2027. But the

industry does face challenges.

I wish I could say it was just the cost, you know, and cost is

gonna come down or it's just that we need one thing but it's

really, I think a variety of factors.

As the oceans fill up with plastic waste, and as companies

make pledges to switch to greener packaging, it could be

great timing for Zume. So let's take a look at some roadblocks

in the compostable packaging industry and what can be done to

overcome them.

Let's talk about the lifecycle of a package first using a

takeout container as an example. Takeout containers can be made

of many different materials which all have their pros and

cons, like plastic, metal, styrofoam, cardboard, and a

compostable material like molded fiber. Some plastics and metals

can be recycled, but they have to be perfectly clean in order

to be made into another product. They can also be down cycled,

which is where they're used to create something that cannot be

recycled again, like a park bench. But recycling has failed

in the US. In 2018, less than 9% of plastic waste was properly

recycled in the US. And it got worse in 2019 when China stopped

importing American trash. So most of what you think may be

getting recycled is actually getting sent to landfills or

making its way into rivers and oceans.

The UN says that by 2050, we'll have more plastic than fish in

the ocean. Plastic's become so prevalent that every person on

the planet eats a credit cards with a plastic a week.

Plastic recycling has actually been considered by some to be a

ploy by oil companies to make plastic production seem more

environmentally friendly than it is. And even sending food scraps

to the dump can be harmful.

When you're actually introducing those organics in a landfill,

you create a lot of methane. And as you know, methane is a very

important greenhouse gas emission. So then you want to

reduce that amount of organics that you send to the landfill.

But the US loves plastic. The country generated more than 14.5

million tons of plastic in 2018. It's not easy to get away from

that.

Plastic's an amazing material, it's miraculous, and the

convenience of plastic has powered many of the modern

conveniences that we enjoy as consumers around the world. But

unfortunately, the things that make plastic great come with

catastrophic consequences.

Aluminum containers are a bit easier to recycle but still only

saw about a 35% recycle rate in 2018. Cardboard is recyclable

and compostable, but only if it's clean and doesn't have some

sort of coating on it. Virgin cardboard can also contribute to

the deforestation of endangered habitats. Styrofoam, or

polystyrene is technically recyclable, but not in a way

that is economically feasible or environmentally effective. Many

cities and states including New York City, Maine, Vermont,

Maryland, and a long list of cities in California have

completely banned the use of polystyrene and the trend is

growing. Compostable materials seem like a solution to these

recycling issues but come with their own set of confusing

marketing tactics and end of life difficulties. For instance,

the word biodegradable which is used to describe certain

materials like plastic made from corn has been scrutinized.

That necessarily does not mean that a bio acronym at the

beginning will mean that the polymer is from a based

resources or is biodegradable and if it's biodegradable that

doesn't mean that it's compostable either.

The word biodegradable on its own for a marketing term is seen

as potentially pretty misleading. So several states

have passed laws actually forbidding the term

biodegradable in marketing language when it comes to single

use items. So states like California, Maryland, and

Washington, Minnesota for bags specifically,

Some materials require composting in an industrial

facility like certain cutlery and coffee cup lids, which means

you can't just throw it in your backyard and hope it will break

down. It has to be sent to a facility that monitors the

chemical and temperature levels of a large compost pile. The

materials are also sifted to make sure everything has broken

down properly. And if you think you're doing the environment to

favor buying these industrial facility compostable products,

and still throwing them away in the trash, you're only partly

correct. Landfills are usually too compressed to allow oxygen

and micro-organisms to break materials down. Even for things

like food or paper, which are usually pretty easy to break

down.

Unlike with recycling, where you have different plastic types,

you have different shapes, and that can help determine the

recyclability, and each community has different

requirements based on what their recycling facility can sort,

there's no common one common definition of what is

recyclable. With composability, it's different. We have these

international standards saying this is what is compostable

regardless of what plastic type you're using, regardless of

whether there's paper in there or not.

According to one report, only about 27% of the United States

population has access to some kind of composting program that

accepts either food waste only, or food waste and some form of

compostable packaging. So it's not a ubiquitous solution yet.

The real difficulty here at Zume is finding solutions to replace

all of those arrows. Let's get rid of those arrows so that you

don't have the confusion at the consumer level. You know, can I

or can't tie and throw your hands up and I'm just going to

throw it in the trash and let it go to landfill. So it's going to

be make it simpler, easier. I know I can just take it, compost

it and 90 days later, I can use it to fertilize my garden.

Zume developed packaging that is backyard compostable, and it

really makes a difference. Backyard compostable packaging

can break down without the use of industrial monitoring. They

use the microorganisms in the soil or water to break down

packaging. For people living in areas without composting

services, this gives consumers the option to discard their

waste in a local compost pile, or even in their backyard

compost piles.

I can tell you that we've tested our products with independent

labs in all of the known waste streams and we have all the

certifications that give you the results that you'd be looking

for.

Recently, compostable products have been on the rise. Companies

like Full Cycle in the US, Astu in India and Biofase in Mexico

have been springing up left and right. Unilever and PepsiCo

among others have goals to design 100% of packaging to be

reusable, recyclable, compostable, or biodegradable by

2025.

That's partly a technical definition, so making it

technically recyclable, or compostable, but you also have

to be able to get it recycled or composted at scale. And you

know, that's what we're all working on right now is how do

we make that happen both technically recyclable or

compostable, and at scale.

And Zume is trying to make the compostable transition easier

for brands, brokers and distributors by creating

packaging out of materials that are local to the companies that

need them. For some of their packaging, the materials they

use come directly from nearby farms who can sell their

agricultural waste to Zume.

One of the big things I think we can do here is the revamping

this supply chain. So let's build a pulp mill, next to the

source of the agricultural waste so it doesn't get burned or it

doesn't get taken to a landfill, turn it into premium molded

fiber packaging that then is composted, so it's a place to

grow the next crop. It's a closed loop supply chain. And,

you know, something I think we've heard a lot about over the

past year is the supply chain.

The company has products available in 21 countries

including takeout containers, cosmetics packaging, and their

robotic technology when a company wants to produce

packaging themselves.

We work with some of the largest industrial companies in the

world, and they build factories based on our technology. At the

same time we work with some of the biggest brands in the world,

and what's All of their product problems, we help give them a

road beyond plastic. When we have these fully qualified

products and these fully qualified factories, we connect

the two of them together. And we give brands a path beyond

plastic at scale with great economics for the brands, and

great economics for the factory partners.

The sustainable packaging industry is a $274.2 billion a

year business. Of course, the packaging industry as a whole is

about $900 billion. So there's still a lot of work to be done.

There are some constraints when it comes to compostable

packaging like higher cost. 100 plastic straws can cost as low

as $1.53 when bought in bulk, compared to paper straws, which

can cost $1.67 for 100, when bought in bulk. That's an

increase of 9%. These plastic clamshell containers for burgers

and sandwiches can cost 13 cents each when purchased in bulk.

Their natural fiber counterparts cost 19 cents each when bought

in bulk, an increase of 46%.

Remember, packaging is a commodity and it's always a low

cost product. So in general, for food, or for this kind of

situation, your margin is very small that you can actually not

have a large amount of room there to have a course in the

packaging system.

Zume says it's robots are the reason it can keep costs down.

Previously, machines could either make very low quality

things quickly, some machines could make high quality things

very slowly, but they were so expensive that they would be

outrageous for a consumer market. What our technology does

that so revolutionary is it can make very high quality parts

very fast.

And then there's the question of performance. Compostable

packaging companies have come up with many ways to make their

products as durable as environmentally damaging

alternatives. But it's not always easy.

We're using technology to advance the state of the art in

molded fiber production. So we can take many, many millions of

tons of agricultural waste and turn it into not plastic. And we

can do that without compromising on performance or on price and

we can do it with speed that is absolutely category leading.

One thing Zume doesn't have control over though, is the

difficulty that comes with waste management, including the lack

of composting programs mentioned before, along with the general

confusion of whether something is compostable or not.

The problem is that the waste management system is at the

state level. So we have 50 states with different types of

goals. So we should have tried to get at least an aggregation

of a state or if the government can actually pass some type of

regulation on whatever we have goals to move the whole country

forward.

Without a fully circular economy, meaning packaging is

created, used and turned back into materials that can be used

to create more, our packaging obsession will continue to cause

problems.

There's tremendous demand for these solutions in the market

and with consumers. So now that the solutions exist, and the

demand is there, now we're getting the scale.