Reinventing the Milk Bottle with Abel & Cole (Out of the Box #2) Lecker
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- Food
Welcome back to Out of the Box, an exploration of what surrounds our food. That is, the containers and packaging that it enters our lives in. In this series, I'm talking to people who have taken an interesting and innovative approach to packaging what they cook and produce, as well as exploring some of the broader context around the history of particular food packaging, as well as, obviously, waste and the impact that food packaging has on our environment.
I'm back after a couple of months break to rest and recuperate, and while I was away, I have some really interesting conversations about packaging that I'm excited to bring to you. One of the types of packaging I feel like I'm confronted with most physically in my own home is milk bottles. Even though there's only two of us in my household, I feel like the plastic really just piles up.
I obviously recycle the bottles, but It feels like there's a better way. Shouldn't we be going back to the milk rounds of yore? As soon as I started researching this topic, I very quickly started getting some very well targeted Instagram ads for Abel & Cole and their Club Zero milk delivery service.
Club Zero is actually a branch of Abel and Cole's business that applies to over a hundred products which, like Abel and Cole's veg boxes, can be delivered to your front door in pre filled packaging and you simply leave it out the next week to be returned along with your box. They're now delivering milk to thousands of people in refillable, returnable containers.
But it turns out it was a pretty complicated process to get to this point. I met Abel and Cole's sustainability lead Hugo Lynch, who has been a major part of launching Club Zero, to talk about all of this and some of the backstory. as well as the challenges of rethinking milk packaging in this way. We were also in the room with Holly Bradley, Abel and Cole's PR manager, who along with Hugo, had very kindly rescued me from the riverbank path when I couldn't follow a series of very simple directions to their HQ in Wimbledon.
Welcome back to Out of the Box, an exploration of what surrounds our food. That is, the containers and packaging that it enters our lives in. In this series, I'm talking to people who have taken an interesting and innovative approach to packaging what they cook and produce, as well as exploring some of the broader context around the history of particular food packaging, as well as, obviously, waste and the impact that food packaging has on our environment.
I'm back after a couple of months break to rest and recuperate, and while I was away, I have some really interesting conversations about packaging that I'm excited to bring to you. One of the types of packaging I feel like I'm confronted with most physically in my own home is milk bottles. Even though there's only two of us in my household, I feel like the plastic really just piles up.
I obviously recycle the bottles, but It feels like there's a better way. Shouldn't we be going back to the milk rounds of yore? As soon as I started researching this topic, I very quickly started getting some very well targeted Instagram ads for Abel & Cole and their Club Zero milk delivery service.
Club Zero is actually a branch of Abel and Cole's business that applies to over a hundred products which, like Abel and Cole's veg boxes, can be delivered to your front door in pre filled packaging and you simply leave it out the next week to be returned along with your box. They're now delivering milk to thousands of people in refillable, returnable containers.
But it turns out it was a pretty complicated process to get to this point. I met Abel and Cole's sustainability lead Hugo Lynch, who has been a major part of launching Club Zero, to talk about all of this and some of the backstory. as well as the challenges of rethinking milk packaging in this way. We were also in the room with Holly Bradley, Abel and Cole's PR manager, who along with Hugo, had very kindly rescued me from the riverbank path when I couldn't follow a series of very simple directions to their HQ in Wimbledon.