Just Eat rolls out seaweed-coated packaging for restaurant partners

Irish restaurants registered with Just Eat are being encouraged to buy seaweed-coated takeaway packaging from the platform as part of efforts to reduce the impact of single use plastic across the food delivery sector.

Notpla, a London-based sustainable packaging start-up founded in 2014, produces seaweed-coated takeaway packaging, and Ireland is the latest of six markets where Just Eat has made Notpla packaging available to its restaurant partners.

Just Eat has also announced the launch of a €50,000 fund as part of a price-match initiative designed to offset some of the associated costs for restaurant partners in Ireland seeking to make sustainable packaging available to their Irish customers.

Just Eat senior global director Robin Clark said the roll-out was a first step in cutting back on the some 2 billion small plastic boxes used in takeaway packaging across Europe each year.

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“We can use this seaweed alginate that Nopla has been working on to coat the side of a sustainable box to avoid those awful chemicals and particle plastics to design what is really the world’s first properly sustainable alternative to plastic packaging,” he said.

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“We are opening up our platform, our restaurants, and our customers to access the technology to help them scale it and succeed. This is early stage adoption. This is our way of innovating on behalf of small businesses.

“If you look across Europe, there are probably about 2 billion small plastic boxes used every year. We have offered this out to all of our estate in Ireland, which is 3,525 restaurant partners, and this will be available to them. As long as they are on our platform, they can buy from our shop.”

To coincide with the launch of the initiative, Notpla packaging will be made available from food vendors at the RDS for all of Leinster’s remaining home fixtures this season.

Notpla co-founder Pierre Yves Paslier said: “Football and rugby and sports in general have a role to play in how we can influence people to change their consumption. The initiative is to encourage restaurant partners to switch to this more responsible form of packaging.”