48. Josephine Liang

Company: CauliBox

Website: https://www.wearecauli.com/

Business: Creating a network of tech-enabled reusable lunchboxes, providing a win-win-win solution for businesses, users, and the Earth.

 

About Josephine and CauliBox

Josephine Liang is the co-founder of CauliBox and a featured honoree in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Social Impact. Her award-winning sustainability startup CauliBox was founded in 2019, and has created a network of tech-enabled reusable lunchboxes to take the hassle out of ditching disposables, providing a win-win-win solution for businesses, users, and the Earth.

Living in London, Josephine and her co-founder enjoyed the vibrant street food scene around their offices. However, the two noticed that the office bins were constantly piled up with takeout food packaging. After a bit of digging, they found that around 11 billion pieces of packaging waste are produced every year from food-on-the-go; the delicious takeaways came with a hefty price tag for the environment.

Josephine comments that “This was a huge problem with no solution, so we took matters into our own hands. We started grabbing after-work drinks, doing research, and meeting for the weekend brainstorming sessions to find the answer. Countless hours of ideas later, we had it! Armed with 20 lunchboxes, a clipboard, and the dream of London’s first reusable lunchbox scheme, we marched over to a food market to recruit members for the first trial. From there, a 10-person trial snowballed into a reuse solutions that serves hundreds every day.”

 

CauliBox-product

 

CauliBox has already been trialled at a number of London food markets, and they have partnerships with brands and organisations such as: Westminster City Council, Veolia and London School of Economics.

Within CauliBox’s circular economy the loop system is as follows: the packaging is used, collected or dropped off, washed, and repeatedly re-used at least 400 times, users of the app earn ‘CauliCoins’ for their efforts which rewards the user with gifts like exhibition tickets. The CauliBox system has helped UK businesses to reduce their carbon emissions in the UK since the business’s inception in 2019, reducing an impressive 237.5g of carbon emissions per use.

The startup have raised seed investment from SFC Capital to further their mission in eliminating single-use packaging waste in the food-to-go industry.

Josephine and the CauliBox team will be working with their catering partners to focus on improving tracking technology and refining the user experience to ensure the circularity of their reuse scheme, while helping users to switch to more sustainable practices without hassle.

 

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