102 FASTCOMPANY.COM MARCH/APRIL 2020
Footprint
(Continued from page 79)remembers Swope wondering, “What about
the single-use crap that is outgassing onto
my produce?”
Swope left Intel in 2007 to launch a next-
generation industrial packaging outfit,
Unisource Global Solutions, and Chung
joined him two years later. They managed
to persuade several of their Intel contacts—
Apple, Dell, HP—to switch to a molded-fiber
alternative to EPS and EPE, popular foam
packaging the company manufactured
in China until competitors there reverse-
engineered their IP and began producing
cheaper knockoffs. A short while later, they
met Easler, who was 10 years into growing
his Sprouts empire. Easler knew that molded
fiber could be a game changer for the con-
sumer packaged goods industry and backed
the trio. Footprint launched in 2013.
The new company turned its attention first
toward disrupting frozen food. “We took the
hardest thing in the grocery store,” Swope
explains. “We felt like once we mastered that,
we’d have a moat separating us from our
competition.” They created containers that
met the industry’s challenging standards,
including a barrier that oil couldn’t permeate
for 18 months, plus the ability to withstand
flash freezing and 400-degree ovens but still
decompose in 90 days.
ConAgra gave Footprint its first ma-
jor break. Hoping that a bowl resembling
butcher paper could appeal to younger con-
sumers and help goose the declining sales of
frozen foods, the food giant considered us-
ing Footprint’s container for a small organic
frozen-meal brand it had just acquired,
called Blake’s. Instead, after seeing the actual
product, executives decided to think bigger
and use it in their new Healthy Choice Power
Bowls. Sales jumped 24% the following year.
ConAgra CEO Sean Connolly told Mad Mon-
ey’s Jim Cramer that the plant-based mate-
rial was “what’s fueling our growth so far,”
because it was making frozen dinners cool
with millennials again.
Footprint’s research and development
takes place in its Gilbert, Arizona, head-
quarters, past cubicles, meeting halls
named after Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur-
tles, and a lounge area with arcade games.
There’s a metrology lab where engineers do
mass spectrometry, or—as I observed in
November—“stick tests” in which a brand’s
instant mac and cheese is microwaved in
Footprint bowls, then stirred to see which
bowls repel cheese sauce best. One day,
Brandon Moore, the senior VP in charge of
design, might have his team drop-testing
70-inch flat screens in boxes to see when
they’d shatter. (“You could hear the men in
the office scream with every drop,” one em-
ployee recalled.) The next, they may be rig-
ging a contraption to simulate the swing of
an arm carrying a six-pack of beer.
Moore counts the TV box among the R&D
team’s greatest accomplishments. “Everyone
told us it couldn’t be done,” he says, beam-
ing—yet now they’ve got a product that’s
been used by Target and Walmart to protect
TVs from damage during shipment. Over the
past six years, Footprint secured nine patents
that cover 125 distinct inventions, including
a biodegradable six-pack ring that has more
give than its dolphin-entangling polymer
counterpart but degrades in saltwater after
12 hours (MillerCoors started putting them
on cans of its Colorado Native beer last sum-
mer), and paper straws, which decompose
in three months but can sit in liquid for four
days without losing shape (Wegmans, Whole
Foods, and Chick-fil-A are among the cus-
tomers currently using the straws). The most
deceptively simple-looking item of all—the
little flat meat tray—has already been recon-
figured five times, to improve tear resistance
and tensile and compression strength.
While giving me a tour of Footprint’s pro-
duction floor, Chung leads me behind a giant
set of industrial curtains hiding new propri-
etary machinery that will begin cranking out
150,000 bowls per day later this year, a five-
fold increase over the old system. Gesturing
at skylights 30 feet above us, he says, “We
brought our IP lawyer out here, and he goes,
‘You gotta cover those up—someone will fly a
drone over.’ ”We throw away 250 billion disposable
cups per year. Only a small percentage get
recycled, because of their plastic, waterproof
lining. Most municipal recycling centers can’t
separate the paper from that layer. The quest
to solve this problem has foiled chemists and
engineers for decades and has led to such
products as edible wafer cups, inflatable
thermal mugs, and carnauba-wax-covered
vessels that resemble Chinese takeout con-
tainers. (Starbucks has tested all three.)
The problem isn’t inventing a cup with
no plastic lining. It’s scaling one. You’d
need more than 8 billion to supply Star-
bucks and McDonald’s alone. And on aver-
age, recyclable materials add 2 to 4 cents percup—which is an extra $120 million to $240
million a year if you’re Starbucks. That’s why,
in 2018, Starbucks and McDonald’s (along-
side others like the Coca-Cola Company, Yum
Brands, Wendy’s, and Nestlé) partnered with
social impact fund Closed Loop Partners to
launch the NextGen Cup Challenge to seek
designs that were more widely recyclable,
compostable, or reusable—“a moonshot for
sustainability,” as Starbucks put it. Organiz-
ers received 480 proposals.
Several weeks before the submission
deadline, Easler alerted the Footprint team
about the contest. Jeff Bassett, senior VP of
marketing and another cofounder, realized:
“We have a bowl. Why can’t we make a cup?
We already had the base technology.”
So, Footprint entered. Its prototype—
called the CoolTouch—was named a win-
ner, alongside 11 others. Bassett unveiled
the design last September, during Climate
Week, to a group of investors at a pitch event
in Manhattan. The cup uses an aqueous-
based coating instead of the standard poly-
ethylene liner. This barrier actually keeps
liquids hot longer than plastic; the design
is completely sealless (the cup has no seam
down its length, as Footprint’s products are
cast in molds) and requires no extra sleeve.
It currently costs about 30% more than a
traditional cup, but McDonald’s is testing
a version of the compostable lids (which fit
so snugly you can tip a cup over and nothing
spills), and Footprint is developing a differ-
ent style of cup for another big brand. (The
company customizes its designs to meet the
specifications of each major customer.)
Food multinationals have started showing
up in Gilbert to see if Footprint can produce
the sustainable-packaging solutions they’ve
hatched on their own. Some are even willing
to alter the product inside, if Footprint’s fiber
packaging proves incompatible. Together,
they’re questioning some of our most in-
grained packaging habits: Why put chips
in bags when they encourage breakage and
grease up knuckles? Must shampoo be liq-
uid in a squirt bottle? Can anybody actually
reach the last particles of laundry detergent
in the bottom of those tubs?
When I ask why one large company isn’t
advertising its business with Footprint,
Swope says, “A lot of them can’t really cel-
ebrate what they’re doing. If they say, ‘Look,
we got rid of the plastic in this,’ they’re
afraid customers are going to go, ‘Wait, that
means your other products still use it.’ We
have this paranoia about needing to con-
stantly innovate. It’s a great vehicle for get-
ting people off plastic.”