Sustainable Packaging
Industry Experts discuss all the new materials and ways that packaging can be more sustainable and how we can do our parts to help recycle and reuse. Sustainable Packaging is and will continue to affect us all in our daily lives. We have lots of fun and get down to the real data of what's working to help our planet!
Sustainable Packaging
Is Refill the Secret? CEO Petros Palandjian (Good Filling)
Could we have refill stations on every corner?
Is this the end of small plastic single use containers?
BYOB (Bring Your Own Bottle)
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Welcome to Sustainable Packaging with Cory Connors. Today's guest is Mr. Petros Palandjian. He is the CEO and founder of Good Filling. How are you, sir?
Petros Palandjian:I'm doing well. Thank you for having me,
Cory Connors:Corey. Oh man, it's so good to have you. It was really great to meet you at Circularity 23 in Seattle. And thank you again for showing me how your systems work and talking to me about that, but let's start with your background. We were talking a little bit about, your lineage and your background before the show. I'm fascinated to share that with the audience.
Petros Palandjian:Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. I grew up in a small town just outside called Belmont and started my business probably about 20 minutes away from where I grew up. originally in Boston, Massachusetts, largely recognizing the problem that we have within Massachusetts and. searching for various solutions, to ultimately combat them. I think you were also referencing, my last name being Kalanjian. And so I am Armenian. and a little bit Irish, French, Dutch, and whatnot as well. but yeah, that's some of my background. I
Cory Connors:love it. We were talking about how, oftentimes, Families, or, that have recently immigrated, super motivated and become great entrepreneurs. And, I look up to people like you that have taken that leap and started your own business. So well done. Thank
Petros Palandjian:you. I hope to live up to that.
Cory Connors:Excellent. So tell us about the inspiration. You said, there was some inspiration for starting this business. and then let's get into what it is.
Petros Palandjian:Yeah. So it's, I mean, the core of the inspiration is very, core to your podcast as well. It's the idea that. There was a lot of waste being generated, and so I was looking at my own life, frankly, and recognized that I was producing a lot of waste and I looked for various solutions to try to reduce that. And essentially, I stumbled across this concept of kind of these refill stores and I'm not sure if I've done similar podcasts with any of those refill stores, but I found the concept to be super, super interesting of these, essentially these residents of the Boston area. We're going to these small stores and kind of these suburban towns. And bringing their empty glass bottles, or their empty plastic bottles to the store and refilling their laundry detergent and hand soap and dish soap. And I thought, wow, that's incredible. you're getting more life out of the packaging that you already have. Rather than kind of this default mode of wasting or throwing out or recycling this plastic. And so I started to incorporate that in my life. About probably 5 years ago, and I recognize more than anything that it was super inconvenient and it was super expensive. I was like, this is a phenomenal solution. This plastic is meant to last for hundreds of years. The glass is meant to last for even longer than that. Why not continue to use this packaging that's made to last for a long time. But how would we go about making it a more, more inexpensive, more accessible for folks and be easier to access? And so, rather than driving to these small suburban towns, can I bring it to it? to where the people truly are. so that was really the core idea of let's bring this concept of refilling. Let's bring this kind of refill store, idea and bring it to the people and make it more accessible for, for the average consumer.
Cory Connors:it's brilliant. I'm so excited to, to see the equipment that you've got. can you walk us through like, how does it work? So I'm a consumer. I'm walking in. I've got my container or do you provide reusable containers as well?
Petros Palandjian:Yep, all great questions. So, essentially the way most refill stores work is you bring your own container. So I'll answer 1st, on behalf of the refill stores and then I'll answer kind of what we do because we truly back in the day. We started as a refill store. We had a small store in a mall and I realized firsthand why it's so expensive and why it's so inaccessible. It's really hard to open up a store and to do all this stuff and to clean bottles and whatnot. but most refill stores, people are bringing their own bottles to the stores and or, some refill stores will actually have bottles already there. And so they'll collect, like kombucha bottles that someone maybe drank from washed out, cleaned and they'll stock it on their shelf as a, as leave 1, take 1 type approach of, if you don't have a bottle, go ahead and take 1. If you have an extra bottle, go ahead and leave 1. And it's kind of the sharing community around packaging, which I thought was really interesting. There's a whole bunch of legal complexities to doing stuff like that. Who's to say that someone properly cleaned out the bottle. Should the business be liable for if a bottle contains salmonella for 1 reason or another, or should the individual who left the bottle be liable and so on and so forth. And so we decided to avoid that problem altogether. it's, I could go into a lot of detail onto that specific topic when I owned a refill store. but we decided to avoid it altogether. So essentially the way we work is we're BYO as we would describe it and you'll see it on a lot of our. As I give you the tour around the around our headquarters, you'll see it on a lot of our marketing, but it's bring your own bottle. So the idea is people already have laundry detergent bottles. People already have hand soap bottles. Most people already have multi surface spray bottles and why not just continue to use those rather than needing a new 1 or. Supplying a new 1, we encourage folks and for the most part require folks to bring whatever bottles they already have. I think people get pretty creative and that's 1 of my favorite parts about this business is seeing just how creative people get. They'll use old Mason jars. They'll use. I saw someone legitimately fill up a laundry detergent in a Dunkin Donuts cup. which was bizarre to watch, but they had a clean Dunkin Donuts cup and they needed 32 ounces of laundry detergent. And sure enough, the cup is huge. And so why not go and fill off the cup with laundry detergent? And they brought it home. They stuck the lid on it and they just pour it into their laundry machine. And, so people get pretty creative with, how they choose to kind of reuse or recycle.
Cory Connors:That's incredible. These single use cups that have been distributed around the world, in, quick serve restaurants or, even in nicer establishments that are to go containers, Are reusable many times and it's a shame that we've created packaging for single use that is so stout and so strong, that it could be reused hundreds of times and people don't do it.
Petros Palandjian:that's exactly right and a lot of my free time I spend focused on what I like to call 0 waste plastic, which is those to go containers or the condiment packs that restaurants give you and making sure that those are not given by default. And instead are. only upon request, so I'm passing a whole bunch of legislation or working on a whole bunch of legislation within the Massachusetts and New England communities focused on that. But within single use, you're exactly right. these materials are meant to last a really long time. And so we're trying to give it the life that they deserve as opposed to breaking down into their core of. Essentially carbon, the vast majority of them being carbon and made in carbon.
Cory Connors:Well, that's a whole other side of your, goals here that I didn't know about. So that is one of my pet peeves is receiving, to go food or being at an event and all the. so wars wrapped in plastic and all this, it's a huge waste when it could be so easily, like you said, just omitted. not every meal needs a set of silverware. well done. How is that? Is that something that's, having success?
Petros Palandjian:definitely we've seen small successes throughout the United States. So there's a general movement that they like to call skip the stuff. That's promoted by upstream, who was also at the conference that I met you at and they've passed legislation via these smaller coalitions in Los Angeles in Washington in Denver in a couple cities and a couple states as well, all focused on making the norm that a customer needs to ask for that in order for it to be given and essentially restaurants could be fined if they don't do it or punished in 1 way or another for. Defaulting to handing someone a condiment pack that they're not planning on using. And so we're working on similar legislation fingers crossed. It ends up getting passed in the Massachusetts area. New York City also passed or New York state. I can't remember which of the 2 ended up passing similar legislation as well. So, we've seen successes in other communities. I'm trying to do the same in the New England states. That's incredible.
Cory Connors:I was hoping you could kind of show us how the machine works. Yeah, definitely. If you've got some time, I'd love to do a walk around and if you could verbally explain it to for the listeners, and then eventually we'll post this on YouTube so they can see it. Sure.
Petros Palandjian:Okay, I'm gonna lift up my laptop. So we're actually in my headquarters right now. As you can tell from that sign behind the way, we have a prototype device right here that I'll probably walk through last. We have a whole bunch of storage in the facility, and so everything that we do is focused on reuse and closed loop economies, circular economies. And so that doesn't just apply to our customers between us, the relationship between us and our customers being closed loop. It also applies to our supplier relationships and so I'll get into this as you see some of the machines, but 1 of our suppliers, for example, supplies kegs. And all of them come in stainless steel, reusable keg containers. And so we'll send those containers back to get reused. And so we create closed loop systems, both on our supplier side and our. Customer side, and I definitely encourage businesses to do that too, because it saves quite a lot of money. The single use containers tend to be a lot more expensive. But for the sake of diving into it, so I'm kind of in our main room, which has the vast majority of our machines. So, this is basically what our machines or what our headquarters currently looks like. None of these are plugged in right now. I mean, hopefully I can plug 1 in for the sake of showing you. But basically we have, let me go over to 1 of our newer versions. Basically, this is our machine. There's 4 different nozzles, which you can see. I go like this with 4 different buttons on the screen itself. You select 1 of 4 different products. So you could take, you could decide to refill hand. So dish, soap, laundry, detergent, multi surface spray out of the vast majority of our machines. You select the product, you select the number of ounces. You pay for it using your phone, we're installing a credit card reader right up here in the next week or 2 and then basically you hold up your bottle underneath 1 of the nozzles. The button lights up, you push the button outcomes, laundry, detergent outcomes, hand soap. So the whole idea being again, which. I'm trying to see where it is on our marketing, recycle less, refill more for clean. it might not be on these machines here. They're on some of our machines, but essentially the idea being you bring your own bottle up to it. You'd use the screen to dispense the products. I think there's two really key things about what we're doing, because this sounds very similar to a refill store. One is with these tiny machines, we're able to install it into communities as opposed to having communities have to drive to a refill store. And so from an accessibility perspective, it's a lot more convenient. And so people will walk down into the lobby of their building or down the street to their kind of local machine and go and dispense the products as opposed to driving or commuting 20 minutes to a suburban retail store to go and refill their products. And so it's a lot easier to install 100 of these than it is to go and open up. 100 stores in downtown Boston. so that's one of the, one of the reasons why I really like this sort of solution of kind of an automated system. and then the second really important thing that's worth covering is it's a lot cheaper. because fundamentally, I don't have any labor involved and I'm not paying for a plastic bottle or a plastic pump. All of our products out of this machine are typically about 20% cheaper than our own supplier sell it for. And so I've got like a seventh generation laundry detergent bottle up there. If you were to buy that on Walmart, it would be about 20 or from Walmart or on Amazon or virtually anywhere else. It would be about 20% more expensive to buy a brand new bottle via Amazon or Walmart than it would be to fill up that same bottle. The 2nd time. VR machine. So two components to kind of why you should use them is for three components. Really? It's sustainability. It's you're saving plastic. You're saving money because you're not paying for that plastic. And there's the convenience factor of you're not walking to a Walmart. You're not going to a refill store. You're not shipping something on Amazon and waiting two days. You kind of get it right then and there. I can try to plug one in. Hopefully it'll be enough fast enough for the same. I
Cory Connors:don't think we need to, I think we understand. I did have a question. A lot of the. the, detergents and hand soaps are fairly high concentrate of water in them. Are you connected to a water source when you have your machine? Or are you providing already mixed, ready to use materials?
Petros Palandjian:So that, that's a fantastic question. And that's one of the areas that a lot. Of people in my space are currently thinking about is how do we reduce the CO2 per sold? I'm in concentrates is without a doubt the solution to do that. So, to answer your question directly, no, our machines are not currently linked up to water. What we do if I take you into this other room is we buy a lot of our products in concentrate and use local water sources to then go and dilute it. So. in some ways, this room always makes some people feel as if we're a super wasteful business, because fundamentally you'll see a lot of plastic, but you have to remember, again, we create closed loop systems with our suppliers, right? So even though this is a ton of plastic jugs all here, all of these go back to our manufacturers to go and get refilled. And so we find massive quantities of laundry detergent and soap, dish soap, you name it. More often than not in a concentrated solution, dilute it with water when we ultimately then go and install it in the machine, such that the machine then dispenses it not in a concentrated form, but with local water. So that there's not the CO2 emissions of shipping water.
Cory Connors:how many, jugs of soap would 1 of those 55 gallon, replace have ever done that math?
Petros Palandjian:Yes, so it, it depends what you're refilling. So typically, the way it works, so this is a terrible example because this machine just, but it's worth showing. So essentially, the way the machine works. so this is an older version of our machine. but essentially it's drawing from these 5 gallon drums down here and so 55 gallon drum over here is drawing from 5 gallon drums right here. And so each of those 55 gallon drums ends up talking this for, talking about 11 of these. The 11 of these typically last most communities about a month. or sorry, 1, 5 gallon drum last each community for about a month. and so it really depends on the community itself in terms of how quickly they're pouring and whatnot. I guess some laundry detergent bottles are 16 ounces. Some are 32, some are 35. It kind of math in terms of 55 gallon drum to a 16 ounce container. I'm sure I could do that.
Cory Connors:Well, I can tell you it's a lot and that's exciting to replace all of that blow molded. Plastic that's probably single use and, although, those are recyclable and I have walked through where they can recycle that plastic and that's good. but that's not always the case at every Murph and not every consumer is recycling those. So this refill and, this refill system is pretty brilliant. So well
Petros Palandjian:done. Yeah, no, I definitely appreciate that. And I think you're exactly right. There are some that definitely can, and there are some that cannot. I think fundamentally the transition towards. Reused as opposed to recycling is an important 1 and a distinction that I would love to make in the sense that yes, recycling without a doubt has its pros and 100% should be a part of our vocabulary and our methods, but fundamentally switching to reuse. Eliminates the need for trucks to go and pick up recycling to sort recycling to then melt down recycling, rebuild it, reblow mold it so on and so forth. and so I've always liked it in terms of, I think about the hierarchy of reduce, reuse, recycle as exactly that a hierarchy of if we can reduce, we should if we can then go and reuse, we should. And then as a last resort, typically recycle, but, I found some of our products tend to be more successfully recycled by some of the Murphs than others. And you're right. Laundry detergent is actually not that bad in the grand scheme of things.
Cory Connors:So those are the products that you're doing is hand soap, laundry detergent, dish
Petros Palandjian:soap, and multi surface spray. So that is our average machine. we have done body wash, shampoo, conditioner, and hand sanitizer in machines before. We've done a pretty wide array of different products. And again, so far, I'm just purely talking about the machines that are kind of behind me. These two machines here, we have two other machines that are out in the field. We have a copy machine that's over here that I could talk through. And then we've got the prototype as well, which enable us to do some other products. The
Cory Connors:scale potential here is massive. I'm so proud of you. This is awesome. it's, I could see one of these in every big city and every, or several, you'll need that to scale. I,
Petros Palandjian:I constantly need to remind myself I'm playing in a multi billion dollar industry. It's a lot of people think about me as competing with the refillers and the refilleries the local refilleries. In a lot of ways, I like to think that I'm competing against Procter and Gamble selling 16 ounce bottles of. Hand soap or dish soap or soft soap or you name it. because for a lot of people, that is the easiest solution. And the reason they're not refilling is because it's pretty darn easy to 1 click it on Amazon or to throw it in your shopping bag while you're at Walmart or at Target or at CVS. so, it is a pretty darn big industry. Just hand soap alone is plenty large enough for me to hand. For me to exist in, but expanding into coffee and then with our prototype machine, expanding into cooking oils and, dry goods like dog food and cat litter and grains and nuts, certainly expands the pie quite a bit. I think that's
Cory Connors:really brilliant. I remember at Circularity 23, the green biz event where we met, there was a company called R cup. Which is a reusable cup. have you ever considered teaming up with them or someone like them at a stadium for beer or wine or coffee or all of the above?
Petros Palandjian:We, we work a little bit, so via my coalition, the nonprofit that I, end up spending a fair amount of my time with, there is a local reusable container supplier. that we share kind of ideas with loosely, we're yet to actually go and implement something out in the field and I hope to soon. The coffee has been a relatively new addition, to our product lineup. And again, this is a little bit messy because we're using this as somewhat of a working space, but this is My office coffee and what all my employees drink out of, but it's a pretty good example of kind of how it works. and so it's very similar to our reuse system for soaps and whatnot. except there's kegs underneath it, which are pumping various, liquid products or drinkable products, and it's entirely food safe beginning to end. And so we can dispense things like cold pressed teas, kombuchas, obviously cold brew. Cold brew is kind of the main category that we tend to dispense. but we can also do things like beer, wine, liquor, you name it. it's a relatively flexible solution. I really wish I had our V2 here. You got to see it at the conference actually. We just got it wrapped and it looks absolutely beautiful. but this is kind of our V1 of it. And so you'll see four different products on tap. You'll actually see a card reader attached to it. You'll see four different products there. And so it works very much the same way where BYO, you bring your own container up to it. You swipe your credit card, you pour as much as you want, and then it charges you based on the number of ounces that come out. And so you're exactly right. It's super, super applicable to, to sports venues and to various other venues, concert venues, you name it. and our new version, the V2 that we just came out with and exhibited at the conference for the 1st time is without a doubt the most mobile version of that. It's on wheels. It has. Wi Fi compatibility built directly into it. The credit card reader is a remote credit card reader using an antenna, and we have a backup battery pack as well. So it's super, super remote and perfect for kind of pop up type events that want to try something that's zero waste or try something that's sustainable. and hopefully soon we get into our first stadium where one of our partners already is in a couple stadiums as well, which I can also theoretically go into. But, that's definitely a huge area of focus for us.
Cory Connors:Well, that's incredible. Well done. Petros, just really awesome to see. Good job. anything else you wanted to cover before we wrap up?
Petros Palandjian:do you mind if I do the last machine? The third machine? this is like my pride and joy right now. Oh yeah, I love it. Yeah. So, so everything I've described is about reducing and reusing specific products. And so machine one, hand soap, dish soap, laundry, detergent, you name it. Machine to coffee, cold brew, beer, wine, where I think this industry needs to go is just to generally promote the idea of reuse and have it to have it be more product agnostic. And so what I've been spending kind of all of my time on is developing a machine, which is behind me here that is capable of refilling various products, virtually any product. and so it's currently configured as an entirely food safe system beginning to end. with a similar kind of, 5 gallon drum component underneath it, such that we can do things like olive oils, which I mentioned earlier, baby foods, we could do, obviously hand soap, dish, soap, laundry, detergent, all the products we already talked about. but. Along with this concept, we're also doing dry goods. So, being able to dispense in that BYO format, in that refilling format, things like herbs, spices, cereals, grains, nuts, dog food, cat litter, you name it, cat food, virtually anything that you would buy in a grocery store, there's not really a fundamental reason why it's packaged or why it's contained. without a doubt, you still need packaging. And I think this podcast, or I would be doing this, podcast of disservice if I said that we're doing away with packaging. We need packaging for machines. We need to fundamentally need packaging. Consumers need packaging to refill it. but it's more so this concept of continuing to use the packaging that you already have. So if you have a Tupperware container already, that's sitting empty. Why wouldn't you go and fill that up with cereal rather than buying a plastic bag of cereal that's sitting in a cardboard box? It's why not continue to use what you already have. And so that's really the focus of this machine is buy all the stuff you're already buying in a grocery store, but fill it in a container that you already have. and so I'm super, super excited about this cause it's much, much smaller footprint, much more modular. And so we could theoretically refill like 16 different products out of a machine about the size of the first one I showed you. I mean, so this is where I'm spending all of my time right now. I could
Cory Connors:see, I could see the machines, branded with, 10, 10 different cereals that, what a great idea. Brilliant. And it can do the milk too. Yeah. Right.
Petros Palandjian:that's exactly right. And some of that needs to be figured out. There's refrigeration aspects that need to be worked out and we have that in our cold brew system. And so we're essentially trying to marry these different technologies That are all focused on refilling and that's exactly what circularity was so good at is setting us up with the right CPG companies and the big suppliers within the space to make those sorts of relationships and to better understand who amongst them are actually trying to reduce their packaging because some of them truly are not and I won't drop names or anything, but some of them talk a lot about their sustainability initiatives. And if you actually press them on it, Thank you. Hey, how do you adopt reuse? They're like, ah, it's not a focus area. We're focused on CO2 emissions. And I'm like, well, they're correlated and it's a really important thing to figure out. So, we should
Cory Connors:talk about this. Yeah.
Petros Palandjian:Yes. Yep.
Cory Connors:Well, this has been great Petros. Thank you so much. good luck to you and the good feeling team. excited to see where you go. Keep us posted. I think we should do another episode here in six months or a year, just to see where you are and see how it's going.
Petros Palandjian:It changes every day. It's a constantly evolving business. And if we did this podcast two years ago, I'd be sitting in a retail store. So I would love to reconnect in six months or a year.
Cory Connors:Excellent. Thank you. Aurora packaging solutions for sponsoring this podcast and stay tuned for more. Thank you all. Thank you.
