Out of the Box

A meandering exploration of what surrounds our food: its packaging, history and meaning for our world.

Featuring Hugo Lynch, Sustainability Lead at Abel and Cole, Alice Kain, curator at Museum of Brands, Renée and Anshu, founders of Dabba Drop and Sohini Banerjee, chef and founder of Smoke and Lime supper clubs.

Dabba Drop are offering 50% off the first order for Lecker listeners in London zones 1-3! Enter LECKER50 to use this excellent offer.

This episode features excerpts from longer conversations published for paid subscribers on Substack and Patreon. Support Lecker by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

You can buy zines on BigCartel. You can also order print-on-demand merch at Teemill.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

You can find the transcript for this episode after the embed.

This transcript is autogenerated by Descript and may contain unintended errors.

This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove.

This is Out of the Box

I've been thinking about packaging for a long time. And over the past few months, for paid subscribers on the Lecker Substack and Patreon, I've been talking to different people about it, and I'm sharing some bits taken from those conversations here - if you want to hear the full thing, and support the work I do with Lecker, you can sign up on your preferred platform via the link in the shownotes. Paid subscribers help make the work I do with Lecker sustainable and enable me to devote more time to making new episodes. If you enjoy the podcast, I'd really appreciate any support you're able to give. Find out more in the show notes. Also, I've got an exciting offer for Lecker listeners in London who love to eat delicious food - keep listening to the end to find out more.

As a result of the predominantly industrialised nature of our food systems, the vast majority of what we eat comes to us packaged. This happens for various reasons: because it's processed in some way and needs to have its own container, because it comes from a long way away and needs to be transported and preserved, or it's a fragile product that degrades quickly and needs to be packaged in a certain way to avoid food waste. It didn't used to be this way, and there is a specific point when food packaging shifted towards the non-reusable, as you'll hear more about in this episode.

So many of the containers and surroundings of the food we buy are unable to be refilled. Many are entirely disposable - or might as well be for many people, as materials like flexible plastic film - the sort you might get apples or spinach in, aren't usually recyclable without being taken to a specific collection point. 

A Parliamentary report published in 2017 found that the UK uses 38.5 million plastic bottles every day, of which 15 million are not recycled. The report goes on to say that 700,000 plastic bottles are littered every day, encouraging more littering and causing damage to natural habitats and human well-being. Plastic bottle waste is not simply a recycling or environmental issue; it is a social issue with considerable direct and indirect costs for taxpayers through litter picking and healthcare

In Oliver Franklin-Wallis's book Wasteland he draws attention to how this shift from reusuable to disposable was coupled with a shift in who was responsible for the packaging. Previously the packaging had belonged to the company - they needed it back, in order to sell more product. But once disposable packaging became the norm, it quickly became the responsibility of the customer. He points out that the UK charity Keep Britain Tidy -"whose Tidyman logo, a stick figure throwing paper into a trash can adorns most packaging 'to remind people to dispose of their waste reponsibility' he writes, has historically received donations from corporations like Coca Cola, Nestle, and McDonalds - in other worlds, those ultimately at the root of the production of this so-called litter.' I think this is such an unjust burden to put on the consumer, who has no choice about how their food is packaged.

The way food is packaged tells us so much about the way we live. And amazingly, many items of packaging from the past century and earlier were saved and preserved. The museum of brands in west london is a truly fascinating walk back in time, a history of consumer culture through packaging. The museum is a personal collection - that of Robert Opie and brings together over a century in the history of branded goods.

[00:04:09] Alice: So the collection starts in, um, sort of mid Victorian period. And he is really interested in the points of, um, sort of social change, particularly to do with the railways and particularly to do with shopping and how those two things are reflected in everything that we have in our lives.

And then there is, obviously, there's brands that we know. Coleman's is here, Cadbury's is here, you know. It's things that are still around. We also find here, which is a really good base for what we were trying to do with the, um, reuse exhibition is some of these containers, obviously, particularly for bottles.

Um, here we've got an example of ginger beer, but the reuse of bottles, the going into circulation, staying in circulation, redistributed, coming back in and out again. And we've got that with like these, these.

[00:05:16] Lucy: I've mentioned this already, but what's remarkable about the way that the museum is laid out, when you're interested in tracing the history of food packaging, as I have been, is that it's all there. Because, there's so much. The history of packaging is inextricably linked with the history of brands. All of these items can tell us a story, not just about companies and brands and products, but also about materials and systems and habits.

[00:05:41] Alice: These are really interesting too, these cross and black quill pots here. 

[00:05:46] Lucy: Yeah, 

[00:05:47] Alice: so the Cross and Blackwell store in London, they would do all of their jam making and pickling and everything like that on site. So as a customer, you would take back your empties, they'd clean them and refill them for you there and then, all in one place.

What an 

[00:06:02] Lucy: amazing system. Yeah. What a great system.

[00:06:05] Alice: I mean, obviously, you know not practical anymore. But at the time, all of this stuff was just, you know, really normal and natural. And you wouldn't think twice. And the companies were responsible for those pots and jars and bottles. They had a responsibility for them.

So then we go into obviously the 1940s and a really important part of the story of, with the packaging.

In the uh, display on reuse I've titled this kind of um, change in crisis. And, uh, It shows that when things are really bad, brands will step up and change and you have to. And I feel that I do see a reflection of that now in the environmental crisis and we can change. It is possible. On a large scale, we can see here all of the ways that the, the tins haven't got full labels on them.

All of the colour has gone for it really. 

[00:07:08] Lucy: Yeah, the contrast is remarkable isn't it? The contrast is 

[00:07:10] Alice: huge, you know, just like this little cross and blackwell label here is tiny and they're not using ink. They don't want to use paper. Yeah. We're being told bring back your empties. 

[00:07:19] Lucy: Yeah, so this is actually a government message here.

Your empties wanted, please bring back your empty cod liver and oil. And orange juice bottles when you come for any supplies. So yeah, actual government messaging around it. 

[00:07:30] Alice: Government messaging around it has changed. And that, that changes again, like how people are thinking about their packaging. They're thinking, Oh right, I must take this back.

I must reuse this. Um, there's always, um, some nice examples on particular metal things of, you know, the metal being needed to please, you know, don't, don't throw this away. Yes, of course. Do not destroy this carton when empty. Put it with other waste paper and cardboard for the salvage collectors. Again, I mean this is That's on the box itself.

That's huge. Yeah, it's almost as big as the logo. Absolutely. Mmm.

We've now walked into a whole other room. Wow! Yes! 

[00:08:20] Lucy: Oh my God. So different. 

[00:08:22] Alice: So different. 

[00:08:24] Lucy: All about brands, look how big the brand names are. 

[00:08:27] Alice: The brands have gone wild. Obviously we've got this huge change in how people, we've got a nice fridge, This is the, probably one of the hugest changes, but then of course, you know, the, the tech, yeah, the technology of the appliances, toasters and blenders and the, you know, the cooker is changed.

Everything's, everything feels different. 

[00:08:50] Lucy: And it mentions here, the influence from America. I guess that feels very visible here. The kind of like American packaging, I guess, as a result of our relationship in the war and the allyship there. 

[00:09:02] Alice: Yeah. And I mean, obviously we've still got examples here of things being reused.

So for example, these yogurt pots here, it says, please, please return bottle on the yogurt pot. Now, again, we kind of forget that the milkman didn't just deliver milk. The milkman would deliver your eggs, your yogurt, your orange juice. If you want it, you know, the milkman was actually very, very useful. Yeah, they've got like a whole lot of mini groceries.

Yeah, little daily provisions. So, you know, didn't just lose the milk delivery. All these other different things got kind of neglected as well. 

[00:09:36] Lucy: But at this point in the 20th century timeline, as told by the products collected by Robert, we've moved firmly away from the idea of rinse, return and reuse.

And this is clearly explicitly communicated to consumers. 

[00:09:49] Alice: You can see it more on plastic bottles, but the messaging changes on all the bottles at this period, and things start being specified that there is no return on the bottle, there's no return on the jar, there's no, there's no reuse.

Um, and that messaging, it, it starts to become really clear to sort of late 70s and into the 80s. Yeah. That you start to see that really big shift in what people are told to do with their rubbish. 

[00:10:15] Lucy: So that, that's really, I hadn't really thought about that aspect of it, but obviously it was a habit that had to be trained out of people.

As well as now we're trying to, you know, maybe push towards turning it back into people, but yeah, like that's so interesting. 

[00:10:27] Alice: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's, it's like, it's saying you were doing this, now you're not, and now we're telling you what you are doing. And then in the 1980s it shifts into actually you're going to be throwing this away and recycling it.

rather than just telling you, oh, don't, don't return it back to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you start to see the little, um, the little logo of recycling starts appearing on things. 

[00:10:54] Lucy: But it should be noted. There were still exceptions to the shift towards disposable packaging. 

[00:11:01] Alice: But there was one brand in, through the 1980s that we, that we have a little bit of a focus on in the, in the reuse display, and that was Corona.

So we can see here. 

[00:11:12] Lucy: I've never heard of that. 

[00:11:13] Alice: So Corona had, had very, it's actually Welsh. It had a very, very strong relationship with reuse. So we'd seen, we'd seen how people would pick up the bottles and refill them. Corona was doing that well into the 1960s. So they had Corona van man. would come and pick up your empties, give you the money back for your deposit, and then give you the Corona that you wanted.

Wow. People felt very, very connected with this. They were kind of centered around, um, where the drink was being produced. Okay. So it was quite a regional, it was quite a regional thing. And I think people feel have a very strong relationship with their memories. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So they actually continued their deposit scheme on their bottles right throughout the 1980s, and they also had the deposit on plastic bottles in the 1980s.

[00:12:07] Lucy: Oh, 

very 

interesting. 

[00:12:09] Alice: And it really, it, the, the whole system. So, um, the system was basically broken down by eventually, like, people weren't returning things anymore. People weren't using the Corona Man anymore. 

[00:12:20] Lucy: Because they'd been trained out of it. 

[00:12:21] Alice: Trained out of it. They'd been completely trained out of it.

And you know, other companies come in, they buy things, they think, oh, that's a really expensive way of doing this. 

I found it fascinating to see this shift in behaviour dictated to consumers. In Wasteland, Franklin-Wallis writes about how in the post-war boom, the burgeoning middle classes were 'buried in an avalanche of disposable stuff." this disposable stuff was specifically made from plastic. "Empowered by a glut of cheap raw materials, packaging companies had already begun pumping out single-use versions of almost anything you could buy: pots and pans, plates, cutlery, towel, dog bowls. Drinks once sold as refills were now packaged in one-way bottles or plastic cups, designed to be tossed after one use."

And now it's becoming increasingly apparent to us that another shift needs to happen. We are simply drowning in plastic. A survey published earlier this year found that for every percentage increase in plastic produced, there was an equivalent increase in plastic pollution in the environment.

An international team of volunteers collected and surveyed more than 1,870,000 items of plastic waste across 84 countries over five years: the bulk of the rubbish collected was single-use packaging for food, beverage, and tobacco products.

They concluded that fewer than 60 multinationals are responsible for more than half of the world’s plastic pollution, with six responsible for a quarter of that.

So what happens next?

[00:13:53] Hugo: I'm Hugo Lynch. I'm the sustainability leader at Able Coal. And alongside the rest of my team, we work across the spectrum of everything we do at Able Coal. And Able Coal is an organic grocery, working online. We're a direct to customer, which gives us a a kind of unique position in the retail market because we have a little bit more control over packaging in particular.

And we, uh, We own our own delivery fleet, and that allows us to do a lot of return transit as a backhaul logistics, 

[00:14:28] Lucy: which 

[00:14:28] Hugo: is, is slightly different, well, completely different to, to how the majority of retailers do their direct customer deliveries.

So if you, if you do, um, Tesco home delivery, for example, actually, Tesco is a bad example, but some, but some, there's some supermarkets will, will outsource the, um, the deliveries. When that's, that kind of thing starts to become more popular. They really wanted to offer timed delivery slots. Um, and we have the.

Well, we were kind of sticks in the mud, I guess, and we decided not to offer that to customers. We wanted to optimize the full carbon. There was a decision to say we don't want to, you know, to do these time delivery rounds, send the drivers going all over the place, emitting more. CO2 from the vans and being just like completely inefficient with the fuel.

But as a result, because the drivers go on a round like a milk round, we're able to collect back the transit packaging that the customers receive the product in. And that's kind of been one, it's been one of the real selling points of our business model for a really long time. And our customers are really bought into it.

And in 2020, we launched a refill product range, Club Zero, which we launched in 2020, about two or three months before the pandemic hit. So it was, it was a little, yes, well, yes, but we did actually have to stop doing it during the pandemic because we had a. There were a lot of supply issues and we actually had a huge amount of increased demand to pack, um, pack fruit and veg.

So that was, that was sort of parked for about a year. And then it was restarted again in 2021. And we started to really put some investment into it at that time. And we've had a lot of growth in that range. We've expanded it from Just your sort of basic pantry items to include household cleaning more sort of tree oriented food I mean still mostly dried foods, but once we started transporting the household cleaning products around and liquids We then launched with a plant based milk.

That's from a third party. So that's sort of completely separate to us in a way, but we were able to operate that return logistics for them. And that was kind of the opening to finally do this project with milk, which had been talked about for probably five years to introduce a refill scheme for milk because customers.

Have always asked us about about packaging and milk is is so it's so visible It's also a very popular product and also everybody knows what the alternative is. Yeah, everybody has experience with a milk round Yeah, even people who have maybe too young to have actually yeah, I've learned know the like the law right they know of it So I think everybody knows everybody knows what the the concept of it is So that's but but it but they I mean as I guess we'll get to and I feel like I'm I'm just doing It's fine Yeah, there are some challenges that limit that, uh, the ability to do that.

It is interesting again in terms of how our customers interact with us because all of our products are available on subscription. So you don't actually have to think about what you're going to buy. You can just let your box roll over. So it's really a question of getting people to want to look at it and to offer them things that they want to buy.

And you're limiting yourself and the customer. If you say we only sell rice and rice and pasta and, 

[00:17:47] Lucy: you 

[00:17:49] Hugo: know, the more things you can bring in there and sort of mix it up and, and keep people interested. That's how you encourage this behavior change.

In 1975 94% of milk was put into glass bottles, according to Dairy Crest. By 2012, this was just 4%. Various reasons are attributed to this - cost, weight of glass, the breakilbility of it as a material. And it's pretty clear that the rise of supermarkets in the 90s and their decision to sell milk cheaply in plastic bottles had a lot to do with it.

[00:18:23] Lucy: Let's talk Specifically about milk. You mentioned that this is a project that has been a long time in the making. So when did it start being something that was being talked about?

[00:18:33] Hugo: It started being talked about in 2019. We ran a trial with a product called Ecoline, which is, which is actually a plastic film, a flexible plastic film, and when we were launching that trial or thinking about doing it, we commissioned a carbon calculator from a consultancy in London called Re London.

That's been a really useful tool that we've, you know, we've really factored, um, been using for a lot of our calculations, you know, cross referencing with other data. At the time what we were looking to do was to save carbon and to save plastic. So the concept was that we would Pack the milk into these film packages, which like a bag a bag basically Yeah, like you'll see it on planes and things like that.

The concept was that the the bag would be filled, sealed, sent to a customer And used as a normal milk bottle would be.

And then they would send the plastic back and we would send it to the manufacturer to recycle. 

[00:19:34] Lucy: That was 

[00:19:35] Hugo: the, that was the concept. It kind of fell down on, in two areas. The first being. A very significant change to the bottling process at the dairy. And this actually I think is one of the kind of the really key considerations for how we've ended up going in the direction that we have.

The really big change there would have been essentially stripping out the existing bottling plant and putting in a new one to do this. And then the other thing was getting it to the customer required that it be, you know, completely sealed everywhere. Um, which meant that customers had to use a pair of scissors to open it up.

And so then we, we looked into doing perforations on the bag and once we did that, it started leaking into people's boxes. It just it just ended up not being something that we were able to proceed with unfortunately. Um, but we took a lot of the learnings from that in terms of the carbon savings that we could, we could generate.

And we also had modeled the, some scenarios about bottle reuse. So, because obviously, you know, glass has always been one of the things that we were thinking in the back of our minds, can we change to a refillable glass bottle? Yeah. But plugging in the, the data and plugging in the scenarios into our calculator, we found that the plastic would actually deliver those carbon savings significantly faster than the glass ever could.

[00:20:56] Lucy: That's so interesting. 

[00:20:57] Hugo: Because of the weight, the weight of the weight of the packaging. was so much heavier, like five, six times heavier than the plastic one is. And as a result, you know, once you factored in the, the production of both, which, which obviously is also higher for glass because there's more of it and there's very high processing temperatures for glass, you then have the.

The recycling routes, glass is really easily recycled, but so is plastic. Plastic bottles are really commonly recycled. It's not a difficult thing to get out there. And once you start to look at those, those two things together, and we, this calculates, you know, we can put in all of our delivery miles and all of this kind of stuff.

And when we did all of that, we found that the bottle would actually deliver a 50 percent carbon reduction on the packaging with four returns versus. Glass, which required 15 and in addition to that four returns felt like something that we could reliably get 

[00:21:54] Lucy: Yeah, 15 is 15 is 

[00:21:56] Hugo: really difficult to do because the customer has to keep coming and buying it 

[00:22:00] Lucy: and glass is breakable And 

[00:22:01] Hugo: it's breakable exactly.

So the glass might not even make it to 15. 

[00:22:06] Lucy: Wow 

[00:22:06] Hugo: Yeah, so that was kind of that was that was our thinking but then going back to the thing I said about the the filling machinery Yeah, and the kind of logistics inside the dairy The cost of, uh, repurposing that or changing, changing these things, it's in the hundreds of thousands because it's, it's industrial machinery.

So to go to class, it would have cost three or four hundred thousand pounds in equipment. Setting up the whole thing again, the bottling plant, and the mainly that would be to do with the capping technology, the way it's handled on the belt, and all these kinds of things, plus buying a cleaning, like a washing machine for the bottles.

That was like 300, 000. Glass is more expensive than plastic as well. So all of that kind of compounds to make something that is not actually a very attractive proposition to customers, or who are used to paying, our milk costs about 150, 000, which, you know, that's probably You know, one of the things that we, we sell that's like most price competitive with, with bigger retailers and, you know, customers really appreciate that.

We, we want to keep it at that price point. We don't want people to be, you know, having to pay an extortionate amount for a product that we believe is a lot better than, than what they would get elsewhere. 

[00:23:21] Lucy: Yeah. 

[00:23:22] Hugo: So we were looking at how we could We could keep the cost down as well. And there was all of these things factored in together.

It's not like I'm kind of painting it as if it was like step by step, but they've kind of all converged together. And so we saw, you know, we can make this carbon saving straight, you know, really quickly with the plastic. And we actually might be able to do it. Like we actually might be able to get it back that many times and the price of it would not increase.

We can use the existing resources that are there. So, our bottle uses the same cap as they were using on the old bottle. 

[00:23:51] Lucy: Ah. So, we 

[00:23:52] Hugo: reverse, reverse engineered the bottle, like designing it from the cap outwards. And it also fits into the same milk crates. So, there's very little about our distribution system that has changed in going to this.

Yeah. But we invested, obviously, in a washing machine. And even then we did receive some support from Innovate UK to be able to do that because the cost of all of these things still still adds up and that's kind of what's allowed us to launch it at this the price points. We kept the price point exactly the same and As, as far as we know, we are the first in, in, well, we're definitely the first in the UK to be doing this, but possibly, dare I say, the world, to be doing it in this way, and not asking for a deposit, we don't, we don't really track the bottles, we just ask customers to, to return them, and the compliance has been really good, so we're very happy with that, with how it's gone.

[00:24:40] Lucy: And like, outside of the compliance, what has other feedback from customers 

[00:24:44] Hugo: been like? So, mostly positive, overwhelmingly positive, but there are Some and I and I think this is a again a a very thorny subject area the use of plastic people are quite concerned about That's been one of the things that really slowed down the project was why it's taken so long to achieve because we had to go through so many validation stages to prove that a, we could even wash it to a suitable standard and to be able to prove that we had to make the machine first.

So you have to make the washing machine, put the bottles in the machine, and then they get washed to a standard that there's then considered clean enough to use microbiologically. And then you also have to factor in the leaching out of of plastic material of chemicals, which is something that we've tested extensively as well following the You know guide the guidance from the the european commission against what's called um, like controlled substances so we you know, we had to we had to work with the plastics manufacturer to get a spec with all of the different, uh, additives that have been put into the plastic, which is very few, all just, like, things for the process of making it, really, rather than, Yeah.

you know, some of the, some of the nasties that you, you hear about, like, BPA and things, it's completely free of all of that. 

[00:26:03] Lucy: Yeah. 

[00:26:03] Hugo: And then testing for those chemicals after a number of different washes, so we had to simulate the entire delivery process. So at launch, we'd managed to do it. We'd managed to do 16 washes.

So at launch, we were able to confirm that the bottles would be safe to use 16 times, which, which felt reasonable to do. But yeah, there are a lot of, there are a lot of obstacles to doing it this way. We're really happy with how it's, how it's turned out. And I think, I think what it's demonstrated. to the wider industry is that in order to do something at this scale, and it kind of has to be at this scale to be successful.

But our calculations showed that, you know, just as a really rough estimate, the dairy industry making this switch on a wider scale would save about 300, 000 tons of carbon a year, with just the four returns that we'd factored in. So it's something that we, you know, we're really trying to push the industry to replicate.

What's clear is that you can get a certain number of people excited about buying all of their household essentials in refillable packaging. But you need to kind of get everybody and in order to get everybody you need to sort of, you need to try out lots of different products and that's why milk was so transformational for us because it took us from a, you know, maybe like three or four thousand orders a week in club zero for the whole range of over a hundred products to now over thirteen thousand orders a week of milk.

Wow, 

[00:27:22] Lucy: okay. Just the milk. 

[00:27:23] Hugo: And that's a refill product. So that's now reaching about thirty percent of our customers. 

[00:27:29] Lucy: Wow. 

[00:27:29] Hugo: So it's a huge, it's a huge step change and that's kind of what we're trying to do. 

Over the past few years, the amount of takeaway food we consume as a nation has risen dramatically. It rose during lockdown, and then according to research - never went back down again. 

Takeaway packaging is really interesting and absolutely crucial to the whole system of food for takeaway and delivery. It needs to be durable enough and protective enough for drivers and riders to transport it to us, but it also needs to be cheap enough that retailers can buy hundreds and thousands of units without it increasing their prices so much that the customer is put off. To take one example, the history of the pizza box as we know it today goes back to the 1960s, when the first patent was filed for a folding pizza box made out of corrugated fibreboard. Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino's Pizza, is quoted as saying that the corrugated pizza box was one of the keyinnovations responsible for the success of the Domino's Pizza delivery system.

Interestingly, Deliveroo now have their own packaging store - in partnership with BioPak, the self-described market leaders in eco-friendly packaging. Much takeaway packaging is made of more sustainable material than it used to be - thankfully polystyrene tubs are mostly a thing of the past, but I'm still often wracked with guilt at the sight of multiple plastic tubs afterwards - I reuse as much as I can and recycle anything I can't but it doesn't feel great.

[00:29:09] Anshu: So Dabba, quite literally, means box. And in this version, it is a tiered, stacked box, clasped together with this, with clips, essentially.

East London's Dabba Drop was founded in 2018 by Renee and Anshu, who wanted to offer something different on the takeaway market.

[00:29:29] Renée: So for anyone who wants to sign up, they can go on our website and they can choose between either getting a delivery every week or every fortnight.

There's one menu that's cooked every week at the moment, but soon we're looking to do have a bit of variety in the menu. So you'll be able to choose between two different menus. Then on the week of your delivery, you'll get an email and. the Cyclist time the delivery window and then it will all be delivered basically So yeah, yeah Each of our doubles has four different stacks four different tins within it The bottom one is generally rice Then we usually have a dal a vegetable curry and a sort of a more dry stir fry vegetable dish on the top and then you can choose between Samosas and various other pickles and chutneys as sides as well.

If you want to sort of pimp your Dabba up. 

[00:30:19] Anshu: Yeah. Um, so everybody eats the same thing, which is, you know, in the early days, we sort of went with that because, you know, uh, well to make it operationally easy for ourselves. But now that everyone, you know, across London, well, there's. You know, this week, for example, there's just under 2, 000 people eating with us.

They're all, everybody's eating the same thing, you know, so it is kind of quite a lovely communal feeling, you know, it's something that started in our community, but now everyone's kind of welcome around or eating with us together, you know, and Renee ate her dabba last night. I'm going to eat mine tonight.

So, you know, there's a, there's that community, which is something in modern day sort of big cities you'd lack. So we wanted to bring that back. And you know, simpler times, taking a pause from your life, sitting down, opening up your Dabba and, you know, eating together. That's where it all comes from as well.

[00:31:08] Renée: And because we always know exactly how many people we're feeding every week, there's no food waste as well, which is obviously a really 

important part of 

the model. 

[00:31:16] Lucy: Yeah. Okay. 

[00:31:16] Renée: And sorry, I forgot to mention, you know, how does it work in terms of the, The Dabba being swapped out. So it's obviously a subscription model, which means that the next time you get a delivery, we'll pick up your empty tin and we'll swap it out with the, with the full one.

So it's a circle of good. And then the empty ones come back to base. We wash and sterilize them and they get prepped up for the next week's menu. 

One of Dabba Drop's problems is that their packaging is actually...too good.

[00:31:42] Lucy: Do you feel like there might be loads of like stray dabbas out there that where people have meant to order again and they, obviously it hasn't been picked up. Is that something that plays on your mind? 

[00:31:52] Anshu: Um, it does. I mean, one of the things, uh, yeah, one of the, I suppose. Uh, what's the word for it? Our goals for the next year or so is to try and find a way of tracing the dubbers because we don't, it's not built into the system yet and we don't, there isn't a program for us to be able to kind of scan a dubber in to our building and scan it out.

Yeah. 

[00:32:15] Renée: We'd have to sort of remake the dabba tins with an RFID chip or something, which is obviously expensive and we already have so many dubbers in circulation. So we're, we're working on that. Yeah. It's called Project Trace. 

[00:32:28] Lucy: Yeah. Maybe you need an amnesty. 

[00:32:30] Renée: Well, we do. Every now and again, we obviously send out emails to our database and just say, Hey, look, have you got any kicking around?

We'll come and pick them up or whatever. And yeah, we. Get an influx back to the kitchen. 

[00:32:41] Anshu: Yeah, because it's surprising how many people are just kind of, Oh yeah, put it away in the cupboard and forget about it. I went to a friend's house the other day and she was like, I haven't eaten with you guys since 2022, but I've got a stash of six dubbers in the basement.

I was like, what? 

[00:32:54] Renée: Who was it? Name and shame them. 

[00:32:57] Anshu: She's the head of the PTA. 

[00:32:58] Renée: And sometimes, you know, I'll just I'll just come back, you know, from work or in the weekend from doing something with my kids and I'll see like three dabbas on my doorstep. People still just sort of think that it's operates out of our home and I'll always have dabbas dropped off.

[00:33:14] Lucy: Although I guess it's still welcome. 

[00:33:15] Renée: It's fine. No, no. We'll take them back. But yeah, it's funny. 

[00:33:18] Lucy: That's so funny because they're quite an appealing thing as well. Aren't they? I can imagine people being like, oh, and they're so useful. 

[00:33:23] Renée: They really are. You know? In the summertime, they're great for picnics in the park or, you know, just keeping trinkets in them or taking them to the, you know, bulk food store to fill them up with, you know, berries and things.

Berry picking. Somebody sent us pictures, didn't they? Berry picking, or you can even bake in them. You know, you can bake cakes and brownies and things. So yeah, they're really handy. 

[00:33:43] Lucy: Yeah, so people should buy their own because they're very great, but they should return yours. 

[00:33:47] Anshu: Yeah, absolutely. Or just sign up and eat with us.

Abel & Cole anticipated this problem and designed their systems accordingly.

[00:33:54] Hugo: so yeah, we, we have kind of explicitly tried to design the pots to not be attractive, which is, um, 

[00:34:01] Lucy: like airplane blankets. You don't want to steal them. They're all brown. 

[00:34:05] Hugo: You know what? I, I quite liked the airplane blankets actually. So that was, wow. Not the greatest example. I have a few, but, um, basically it's, you know, it's just meant to be a purely utilitarian object and it's, It could have anything in it as well.

That's kind of one of the important things when you're sort of designing these schemes. So our refill. proposition works on the basis that the, the pots are standardized in terms of material and they're standardized to three sizes, so small, medium, large, 

[00:34:31] Lucy: and then they can 

[00:34:32] Hugo: then be used to fill 200 grams of peanuts or actually we don't do peanuts cause that's a very high allergen risk, but 200 grams of walnuts or, you know, 500 grams or a kilo of porridge oats.

Those kinds of things. And because they are interchangeable, that's what makes it or part of what makes it an affordable. scheme because there's actually so much additional processing involved. That's kind of the biggest difference from traditional packaging and traditional retail is that when you look at plastic packaging as a, as a kind of an issue, and obviously, you know, it's an issue because of, because it gets littered and, and it's kind of overwhelms the recycling infrastructure that we have, it's just designed to be as light as possible.

Recently, at the Museum of Brands, Alice Kain worked with the Museum of Sheffield and their project Many Happy Rerturns to curate a display called Reuse, Refill, Rethink. And one of the examples they pulled out from the archive to include also created this appleaing packaging dilemma for its retailer.

[00:35:38] Alice: So one of them is this beautiful Haagen Dazs refillable container. It is gorgeous. It is like a beautiful aluminium, double walled, like, Straubi Hagen dust, um, embossed, you know, it's per I, I want one, but that's been part of the problem with that container, is that people want them, and they're not going to put them back into the system, where you might not get that back, or if you do get it back, it might not be as perfect, or, you know, they, so people have held on to them, and that's, again, it's just, it's perfect.

broken the chain. Yeah. So that's why I think you've, you also see things looking a bit more like kind of utilitarian. 

So I guess one of the other things which has been quite an interesting part of this is looking at other countries and the fact that in other countries these systems are are really actually very active, and currently, particularly in Germany, I think our examples are within Germany, Mexico, and Denmark.

In Mexico, they basically, Coca Cola, reuse almost all of their bottles. So it is possible. It is absolutely possible. 

do it. 

You just have to have a different, we have to have the system set up by And people just have to be willing to say, Oh, that's how we do it. 

[00:37:02] Lucy: Yeah. Cause they're one of the examples that get, you know, they make something, it's like a mind blowing amount of bottles a day or something.

It's something thousands and thousands and thousands of plastic bottles every day are produced by Coca Cola. So the fact that it is possible to create a system where they, they reuse them. It is so striking. 

I should interrupt myself here to give a depressing insight into the exact Coca Cola stats: from Greenpeace: In 2021, Coca-Cola had approximately 4 billion refillable plastic bottles and 25 billion refillable glass bottles in circulation. These numbers have remained virtually unchanged despite its pledge to increase refill and reuse by 25% by 2030, while the company has increased its production of single-use bottles by over 9 billion, from 125 billion in 2021 to 134 billion in 2022.

[00:37:49] Alice: Um, and also, uh, in the, in the case, we look specifically at German brewing. So the German beer industry, And that these bottles are, they're actually kind of a part of the culture of the drinking bot of this particular beer.

So they have a very strong regional connection. Mm. So the, the shape, the label, the all of that is really embedded within. the system of drinking it and participating in that culture. So again, it's this sort of like looking at the behavior, people's behavior and their relationship to a product. And then they're much more willing or just basically much more understanding of the fact that it is a circular system.

And you will give that bottle back to that, to that brewery. But again, that system's in place. That system exists, the breweries are used to it. It's the way, it's the way that it's always been done. And it's a very regional thing as well. So we're talking about like a smaller system, like, you know, taking the milk from a very local dairy or Corona with that example.

So again, it's like, it's saying that sometimes you see Smaller systems are more, are much more easy to set up and put in place than like, you know, large scale stuff. 

This was something that came up in multiple conversations I had - look outside of how the UK currently manages its packaging to different countries. I first contacted Sohini Banerjee when I read that she was producing completely unbranded Achaar, and she told me about her real inspiration for how food can be sold.

[00:39:27] Sohini: There's a concept of, um, this. It's like a corner shop in Kolkata where I come from.

It is, um, they're called mudir dokan. Um, so dokan means shop and mudir means a person who provides like necessities. So these shops, they're in every single neighborhood. Minimum like 15 steps from your house or something. There's so many of them and they stop all your necessities But they kind of give it to you in your containers or plates or bowls or whatever So you can go and ask for lentils or rice and there's a person who sits at the front of the shop Everything's behind them and you ask them for what you need and it is a basic shop So you can't get fancy things, but you can get you know, like your eggs your rice your lentils your beans Maybe butter oils and like some snacks and that's about it.

But they don't have any packaging. There's no branding on anything. And they're the old school shops in Kolkata, where I come from. Actually a lot of India as well. And they're kind of dying out at the moment because of supermarkets. Which I find so sad because those shops are so useful. Yeah. And you're not actually having to browse.

You just go tell the man, you know, I need, you know, a bowl of lentils for the next week. Yeah. And he just gives you a bowl of lentils and you bring the, either you bring the bowl back or you bring your own bowl from your house. And I've always felt like my grandma has only ever shopped from one of these shops.

So I've always found it very fascinating how that works but sadly it's kind of dying out. But I do hope it has a bit of a resurgence with like the slightly, you know, climate friendly situation because it is, there's no plastic used in these shops. 

And Anshu was inspired by food delivery in India to use the particular containers they use at Dabba Drop.

[00:41:07] Anshu: ​I grew up in Mumbai, which is where the Dabba Wala system, I suppose, originates. It's been going for over a century and it's sort of kept the city fed for all of this time.

So we looked at that system, you know, an ancient system and we thought, how could we bring it to London and how could we modernize it for modern day? Londoners. 

When I first started thinking about these conversations about packaging, I couldn't get away from the emotional connection we have to the design and shape of them. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's lost hours of their life on the Sainsbury's archive, wishing our frozen pea packaging these days was half as aesthetic. After meeting Hugo at Abel and Cole I thought a lot about milk and ended up finally finding a milk bottle from my old family dairy - long sold off before I was born, and now display it happily on my windowsill. I even wrote an entire essay about the muller corner and its bespoke pots, which paid subscribers can enjoy on Substack and Patreon. I don't think there's any shame in celebrating these memories, because in an industrialised capitalist food system it's reflective of how we mostly have to eat, and as the Museum of Brands shows, it's an emotive and deeply informative way of examining and reflecting on our food system. But I had to wonder what our future might be like when it comes to branded produce. Sohini had an outlook towards this that I admired a lot.

[00:42:50] Sohini: And then I just decided, actually, I don't know if I want, I don't even need my name, my face in people's kitchens. I just want them to remember the taste. That's the main thing for me. So I kind of went down the route of just sterilizing old jars that I use.

I have so many jars in my kitchen at all the time. Like I have bags full of jars and now my friends give me their empty jars, which is great. So I just fill those up, like sterilize them, seal them, and that's it. 

I wanted to end with a note from Alice. At one point during our conversation I commented that I appreciated her optimisim - her energy in talking about the museum's work with the University of Sheffield on highlighting the importance of changing the way we think about packaging was inspiring, and made me feel more positive about the overwhelming nature of what needs to change than I normally do.

[00:43:44] Lucy: optimism from you about this. And I find that really refreshing because I think I can have a tendency to be very catastrophizing about it.

But it's really nice to hear that message. It feels important. 

[00:43:54] Alice: I feel really, really good. Positive about it partly having worked with with the university and seeing what they are doing Yeah, they've got they've got the theory behind it. They've got you know, the massive amount of like, you know knowledge and practical, like creating new materials, researching them, really extremely good way of thinking about what the future can look like.

Yeah. And then actually then doing it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. just witnessing the fact that they, that this has been a, you know, a really big project and being able to showcase their project and their work here. That's been real privilege for me. 

[00:44:39] Lucy: Yeah. 

[00:44:39] Alice: And yeah, I would say that, you know, I, I am, I am positive in parts because you, change is possible.

It just, it needs to be led to. change. It needs to, it needs people to be led in the correct way to make those changes happen. 

One of the things that was, was really stark in our conversations when we were, when we were discussing some of the things to put in the case was thinking about actually why are some of these systems, When they worked so well, these systems, you know, people participated in, um, particularly in terms of like thinking about milk delivery and it was a really, really close, secure system.

And the things that we've lost. Because these systems have been eroded and it's not the responsibility necessarily of an individual to try and replace these systems as individuals. We actually, we can't. We need larger corporations, brands, and the government to step up and put some of this stuff back into place with legislation, with making things responsible.

And guess what? I'm sure people Individual personal behaviors shift right back into using these systems again, like we've seen through the time tunnel, people being told different things at different times on packaging, you know, people, people's behaviors aren't set in stone. People are doing a lot of this stuff anyway within their own homes.

And so it's just taking that idea of who is responsible for this out of our own ideas of like, Oh, it's my football, you know, and say, actually no, we need the, we need other people to step in and make sure that, you know, a, a greener world is possible, but we need a larger change for that to really happen.

Lecker is written and produced by me, Lucy Dearlove. Thanks to everyone who talked to me about packaging: Hugo and Holly at Abel and Cole, Anshu and Renee at Dabba Drop, Sohini Banerjee of the supper club Smoke and Lime and Alice Kain at the Museum of Brands. You can find out more about them via the links in the show notes and I'll be posting about each of their approach to packaging on the Lecker instagram.

And as promised, here is a very special treat for Lecker listeners. Anshu and Renee have given me a code to get 50% off your first order with Dabba Drop - enter LECKER50 at checkout! Delivery is available to anyone in London zones 1-3. Just make sure you don't keep your dabba!

A reminder that all of these conversations in full are available to listen to paid subscribers on Substack and Patreon and these contributions help keep the podcast going. Head to the show notes to find out more.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Thanks for listening! I'll be back soon.