In the latest episode of Hospitality Hangout, Michael Schatzberg “The Restaurant Guy” and Jimmy Frischling “The Finance Guy” chat with Lindsey Hoell, founder and chief executive officer of Dispatch Goods about how restaurants can help reduce waste with reusable packaging.
Hoell had a career in cardiac surgery first on the clinical side and then started selling the equipment in Hawaii. She is a surfer and was confronted by plastic pollution in her favorite surf breaks. Hoell got involved with Surfrider Foundation’s program called Ocean Friendly Restaurants where they helped restaurants transition to more sustainable practices. She says Dispatch Goods was created because of her love for surfing.
Hoell describes Dispatch Goods by saying “we are a reverse logistics infrastructure that’s supporting circular packaging. What that means is we’re kind of like recyclers just we reuse instead of send stuff to another country to hypothetically be recycled but probably not.” She adds, “And what we started to build is essentially a curbside and business collection system for reusable goods and that we process more locally and which also reduces the carbon footprint of travel and process and then we basically redistribute packaging and other items back to businesses. We started with the restaurant industry because that’s generally consumers’ number one waste related pain point is food packaging so that’s how we got there.”
Dispatch Goods has launched on the East Coast. Hoell says, “we’re not doing home collection yet. That’s something that will be building out but navigating the kind of complexities of apartments is a new challenge. And I would say that there’s probably just more people eating kind of on the go and where they put things on the go than in San Francisco where food’s generally going to either offices or homes. So the home collection piece we’re going to need a much more kind of robust collection system, so that’s one piece that we’re working on right now.”
Dispatch Goods partners with restaurants to offer food to customers in completely reusable packaging. Hoell says, “so Dispatch really, we’ve thought about this from both the end of life as well as like the beginning of life, the entire process. And why reuse is really the clear solution and not just from a sustainability standpoint but we think about the customer experience, restaurants take so much work and care into preparing meals and we just don’t think that the trash that you’re eating out of represents the quality of the food. So that’s another place where we think reuse really has an opportunity to have an off-premise experience that’s much more closely in line with what the dine in experience would be for customers.”
To hear Hoell’s insights on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and Dispatch Goods’ partnership with DoorDash, tune into this episode of Hospitality Hangout on Spotify.
This syndicated content is brought to you by Branded Strategic Hospitality.
