Author Archives: Tom Mowat

Getting to know your customers part 2: There’s a whole ocean of data right under our feet.

Auto replenishment through connected packaging is here. More and more manufacturers and packaging companies are seeing the opportunity to change their business models, using connectivity
and powerful new platform services to make their products into a service. Auto-replenishment
carries many benefits, including the opportunity to increase direct sales, customer loyalty, and in the
case of Vesta Smart Packaging, a proved solution to help reduce the reliance on long life materials
(plastics!) in your packaging, delivering greater sustainability, increased environmental credentials,
enhancing brand value.

There is another benefit, and that’s data. Lots and lots of data.

It has been widely written that “data is the new oil”. It was a catchy expression, and did serve to
highlight the power and value of data in a global and increasingly digitised economy. Like most
catchy sayings though, it was superficial and falls apart quickly under scrutiny.
With reference to packaging , one critical way in which data is decidedly not the new oil is this : data
gets more valuable the more you use it.

There is no limit on how often you can use data or for how long. At the most basic level you can start
to ask questions not possible until now, and historical tracked data sets also have predictive power
that gets better and better the more data you have. Imagine how your business might be
transformed if you knew :

Who are my customers?
Which products do they have and how much?
When will they run out?

Yet we can move past the basics quickly. The more you use data, the more valuable it gets and even
at Vesta, and the data from Vesta packaging supports innovation in several key areas:

Personalisation – what do your customers like to use as individuals
Adherence – help your customers use your products well
Efficiency – how can your customers get the most from your products

Not all auto-replenishment will be created equal, so what should you look when looking for your
auto-replenishment partner? How their offering satisfies these questions could make the difference

Who retains exclusive ownership of the data?
Who has direct and ongoing access to the customer?

Vesta gives you both of these, as well being your partner for our primary objective. We work to
support your transition away from long life packaging by making your supply chain more efficient. If
you’d like to know more about how – get in touch at info@vestapack.com or message me directly
through LinkedIn.

Make it smart, not disposable

Lessons from big tech can help packaging and FMCG meet the demands of doing business in an environmentally conscious world

Last week, British MPs (politicians, for any non-UK reader) took the unusual step of rebuking Amazon and Apple for their part in the UK’s electronic waste problem, singling out the ‘built in obsolescence’ of products, encouraging regular upgrades. To put the problem into perspective, around 155,000 tonnes of phones, cameras, laptops and other similar items is thrown out each year. That’s about 1,500 average sized houses for those, like me, who have trouble imagining that much waste.

Given their position at the forefront of the never-ending revolution in technology, shouldn’t we find it remarkable that two of the world’s biggest and most successful technology companies’ business models are based on selling items that are viewed as consumables, when their components are anything but?

It’s not just famous technology companies which are going to need to handle this conundrum. How do you protect your business when your customers’ buying behaviour is starting to be affected by their views on environmental cost? FMCG and packaging companies are among the most vulnerable to this. A critical measure of their success is based on how many packages they put out into the world, a world which is becoming rapidly intolerant of more pollution.

Vesta Smart Packaging’s offering can help packaging companies and manufacturers transform their operations by decoupling revenue from the number of packages produced. Our proven smart packages and platform create an effective ‘just in time’ model that drives efficiency, helping to increase margins, whilst eliminating the need for harmful long-life plastics. Furthermore, it provides a valuable data set showing product supply and usage that can be separately monetised. Potentially a game-changing position.

That the answer for packaging comes from technology might seem surprising. Adding more technology to packaging might seem like exactly the wrong thing to do in this situation, but we don’t have to follow the example of the tech giants in order to run a successful business that helps to minimize environmental impact. Vesta packages, unlike phones, have battery lives of up to 20 years, can be refilled hundreds of times and don’t require constant upgrades. At the end of their lives, we are 100% committed to recovering, refurbishing and recycling every single part of them.

A radical re-think is required in how products get to consumers, whilst retaining brand market share and tackling the waste problem. If you’re a packaging company or a manufacturer which is ready to think differently, get in touch on info@vestapack.com or via LinkedIn

Getting to know your customers with Vesta – part 1; how did we spend our research budget again?

Vesta Smart Packaging will tell you who your customers are, how they use your product and how you can build a relationship with them. This is part 1 of a 3 part blog explaining how we can help the environment while also improving your business performance.
In case people have missed it, there was a high-profile election last week. Many things have come up in the fallout of that election, not least that yet again the polls were a long way off.

Biden was projected to win by 8-9%, yet it appears that the actual lead will be around half that. US polling agencies spend a FORTUNE getting people to say who they’ll vote for and once again, as happened in 2016, we see that simply asking people what they’re going to do is not the most effective way of predicting what they will do.

A little context before I go further: I have spent a significant proportion of my professional life involved in research. Primary, secondary and digital research have been major parts of my consulting career. I’ve got a lot of love for research and think that when done properly it can be a superb tool, but times are changing. Over the last decade the disappearance of the phone as a primary communications channel has complicated research design. If you look at the activities of some of the more technologically savvy politicians (see AOC’s appearance on Twitch), it should be obvious that a research approach needs to evolve to meet the reality of voters.
Manufacturers also spend heavily on research, and with good reason. What smell, texture or flavour do customers like? What kind of design do they favour? What price will they pay?

These are all good questions, and deserving of investment, but is this falling into the same trap as the election polling questions? Is simply asking people the best we can do? Back when I was working as a consultant and researcher, my team developed an NLP approach to segment conversations on review sites to try and get feedback for our brands very cheaply. We were able to take thousands of review scores and programmatically translate them into themes to communicate back to the brands. That was an improvement certainly, but Vesta takes this one further. We measure what amount of a product people have and use in order to make sure they don’t run out. But this data provides much, much more than just when to send a refill. What time of day is the product used? Is it used more when it rains? After an advert on TV? Does an uptick in usage tell us something? Does a cessation of usage tell us something?

The bad news for brands is that a more complex communications environment is going to make understanding people more difficult. One data source will not answer every question and we must evolve research strategies to match. The good news is that for product manufacturers who have never had an easy path to understanding their customers, Vesta Smart Packaging provides a brand new data source to help them deliver an experience their end users will truly value.
Get in touch to find out more – you might find that trialling with us is a more productive use of a research budget than putting another poll in the field.

A 2 year update

Having looked back at our blogs, I was startled to see we’ve published nothing since February. For Vesta, as for businesses everywhere, the pandemic has had a profound impact. Much of the focus on plastic pollution has been lost in an effort to maintain the global economy – a justifiable, if dreadful trade off. Some 194bn disposable masks and gloves were being made each month (based on an estimate from August). The environmental impact of this may take some years to fully comprehend.
It has now been almost exactly two years since we started Vesta in earnest. Winning a space on the 2019 IoT Startupbootcamp accelerator was the catalyst for moving the company from an interesting idea to something that Vesta’s founders (me, Elisabeth, Web Dave and Dr Dave) were ready to heavily invest our time, money and effort into establishing as a real company.
The great news is we’re in a stronger position than ever as we run into the end of what must have been one of the most challenging trading years in history. A few highlights:

Our client base has grown from one to four. We’ve focused on driving sales into large clients, and our client’s annual revenues exceed $100bn
Our revenue is on track to grow by a factor of more than ten in 2020 – achieving the fabled ‘10x’. This revenue growth helped us decide to pause our funding round in February, and pay ourselves for the first time this summer. We may well decide to try and raise again in the future, but we’re strong enough now to wait for the right partners in the right market conditions.
The technology in our solution is unrecognisable from what we were delivering at this time last year. Our packages now support short range communications technology (NFC/RFID) and we’re able to handle packages with weights anywhere between 50kg and 0.01g.
Our use cases are expanding. Vesta was designed for low interest home care products – dishwasher tablets, detergent etc. – but we’re now working in personal care, food & beverage, wholesale and are talking to pharmaceutical companies about using our technology for drug monitoring and adherence.
We’re developing partnerships with traditional packaging and logistics companies to bring a more comprehensive Vesta solution to our customers.
We have had a Vesta package in market for 12 months (as of October 30th). It has taken readings on more than 270 days, been refilled over half a dozen times and used just 3% of its battery. Considering how far our technology has come in those 12 months, I am really excited to see what the next generation Vestas can do.

Challenging conditions, such as those we’ve all experienced over the last eight months can often make it seem like investing in transformation and innovation is too much of a risk. The pandemic has changed the way business is done, perhaps forever. Yet consumers want convenience, they are ready to pay for sustainably delivered products and the market for direct-to-consumer has never been stronger. Do get in touch if you’d like to understand more about what Vesta can do to help your business.
Tom

Smart Packaging Conference 2019

There’s more than one kind of smart, but the key to sustainability in packaging is value. This week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Smart Packaging 2019 conference in Hamburg. This was thanks to the kind people at AMI, following an introduction by Ophelie Gourdou at Cairn Consulting. It was an engaging and well-attended conference, with an innovative format including a mini-showcase at the end of day one. This was a great way to keep the audience actively engaged when they had half an eye on the cocktail reception.

I confess I did not know what to expect. We have researched potential competitors, but from years as an analyst, I know that active engagement is really the only way to understand what’s going on under the skin of an industry, and this was our first real chance to spend some time talking to others who are innovating.

I came back with two main conclusions.

Firstly, the smarts going into smart packaging are INCREDIBLY varied. Everything from advanced and highly flexible tracking and provenance services, to connected devices, to chemical engineering that stops food from spoiling (on a small sticky label no less!). I was pleased to present the Vesta solution following an industry introduction from Tim Paridaens of Delloite. One of his slides showed a conceptual model of automated refill ordering packaging of exactly the kind Vesta makes, which is a reassuring sign that the solution we’ve been building for 18 months is beginning to enter the popular consciousness.

The second is broader, but covers something fundamental. There is a clear paradigm shift around packaging, from a view that cost is absolute and must be reduced, to an understanding that cost and value can be balanced. It’s this which gives me great hope that the economic philosophy behind Vesta’s mission – that we don’t throw away things we value– is on a solid footing. By making the vehicles in which our products move and function an essential part of the value of the products themselves, we should start to see a rapid move away from single use disposable behaviours. This is cause for hope.

Thanks to all at AMI for a thought-provoking couple of days!

How Packaging Innovation is Helping Tackle the Plastic Problem

We founded Vesta in October 2017 on the basis that we believe that technology can be built into packaging to help remove the need for single-use plastic.

Since then, global awareness and action relating to the plastic problem has expanded beyond anything we could have imagined. The dominant users of packaging; manufacturers and retailers, have started to change their businesses in more dramatic ways than even we could have hoped. We’ve been watching closely over the last 12 months, and I’ll attempt to summarise some of it here.

I’ve identified four main categories of innovation, though this is not exhaustive and there are several innovations that cut across categories:

New materials

There has been enormous growth in the availability of short life packaging, including plant-based options (seaweed is looking promising). The ability to produce plastic-like packaging from sustainable sources that are completely bio-degradable is vastly encouraging, and the potential is there to do so at scale.

Upside – potential long-term large-scale solution, producing non harmful plastics. What’s not to like!

Issues – lifetime of bio-plastics, carbon costs of production, ability to scale, challenges to bio-diversity

Reuse

This year, and to great fanfare, Terracycle launched Loop, the first e-Commerce platform based on the ability to return packaging for cleaning and reuse. We at Vesta have already raised our concerns over the viability of Loop and I won’t do so again here, but if nothing else, it should be loudly applauded for its originality and the bold attempt to change consumer behaviour.

Upside – increasing the number of uses of a plastic package has the potential to ENORMOUSLY reduce the amount of plastic we use overall. Put it this way – use the same package 10 times cuts plastic use 90%.

Issues – economics of pickup, increased demand on consumers, lack of convenience

Self-refill

Waitrose in the UK, along with a whole variety of others have started using the kind of refill stations we have only previously seen in health food shops. Ecover have also grown the availability of in store refilling stations.

Upside – similar to reuse. Plastic is not, in itself, the problem. It is that we misuse it.

Issues – taking large numbers of empty containers to the shop each time does not feel like a mass market sustainable solution. I believe a lot of us would like to do this, but it asks a lot of consumers.

IoT

Vesta obviously fits into this category, where connected packaging is used to help manage supplies. To date, we are the only packaging company we’re aware of that combine IoT technology with the drive to eliminate the requirement for single-use plastic. However there are other connected device companies out there using RFID and other tech primarily for provenance and tracking (if you are using IoT for packaging, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!).

Upside – the meeting of sustainable reusable solutions with a convenient consumer proposition could mean self-refill achieved entirely in the home.

Issues – this is a new technology approach, so consumers will have to be willing to adopt new behaviour. Short-life refill packaging should close the loop allowing for manufacturers to avoid single use plastic all together, but we’ll need to make sure its impact is minimal. It should not be a surprise that we at Vesta think this is the way to go, but we are not complacent on the amount of work that needs doing to yield the benefits.

I am really excited by the number of companies making big strides in this area (including those we’re working with!). Honourable mentions also go to Iceland and Morrisons for both taking major initiatives to cut their plastic use.

However, it’s not all good news. Amazon are something of a laggard when it comes to a sustainable approach to packaging, and this week’s news that their latest envelopes are not even recyclable comes as a massive disappointment. We know now that in most markets, a sustainable approach to packaging is so popular with consumers that it comes with a price premium. It seems likely therefore that companies unwilling to make changes to help the environment will suffer correspondingly.

Dash runs out of road

How value exchange is key when designing a disruptive service

We at Vesta were never much fans of the Dash button, and we weren’t alone. When you have to assure the world that your product isn’t an April Fool’s joke, it must be a rough day to work in marketing. Now the dash buttons are being withdrawn, there is value in assessing why this ambitious and bold, but flawed product missed out on mainstream adoption.

Dash was never claiming environmental credentials to be fair to it, but the rather glib one-button re-ordering of all that packaging was one of the things that inspired Vesta’s creation. However, the main reason behind its demise is about the experience and value it offered. A consideration of value exchange offers a useful way to understand service adoption, and we’ve voiced our concerns about Terracycle’s Loop in a similar way.

What did Dash offer? Simple ordering and a potential time saver. Sounds good, but what did it ask for?

Own a button per product
Don’t lose or break any of the buttons
(at some point) recharge the buttons (we never quite understood how that would work)
Restrict button access to responsible individuals
Buy the buttons in the first place

Listed like that, the convenience Dash was trying to deliver was clearly more than offset by the demands the service made on its users. A really disruptive service must offer more than it takes to be successful. The iPod is a wonderful example of this. It asked us to effectively burn most of our invested capital in music collections and go digital. For those of us with a giant pile of CDs (we might be showing our age here!), there was a process of copying them all to MP3. One by one. Which took hours.

But we did it, because it offered more. All of everything we wanted to listen to. Anywhere. It outweighed the inconvenience of the change.

At Vesta, our packages offer fully automated re-ordering that is completely integrated. A single scan of our packages through Vesta’s store room application is the only step end-users need to take, and everything else is taken care of. It remains to be seen if our value exchange is the right one for mass adoption, but we believe that combining real convenience with the chance to eliminate single-use plastic is one that will work.

Amazon scraps Dash buttons

Amazon stops selling its Dash buttons because shoppers are using other methods to buy products.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47416440

Don’t shoot the messenger

BP’s energy report looks alarming, but has some interesting insight for those looking to tackle the plastic problem

It’s easy to demonise big oil, especially when they publish something that seems as nakedly self-serving as an opposition to a plastics ban. However, the BP 2019 energy outlook doesn’t look like quite such a whitewash.

The point they seem to be making is that simply replacing plastics won’t necessarily be a big win for the environment, if it fails to be accompanied by systemic changes to infrastructure and fulfilment. The good folk at Herriot Watt university have done some solid-looking work to support this too. The energy involved in making glass, for example, would be a real problem if we had to make the half- trillion bottles a year currently made with plastic this way.

At Vesta we, cautiously, agree with this. We need a more intelligent packaging solution that allows us to make efficient use of the materials available. Our connected devices allow for orders to be made when they’re needed, and provide a permanent home for whatever they’re storing. This allows our customers to look at short life packaging for transit, allowing us to provide convenience for consumers and a viable business model for manufacturers.

A reduction in plastic use is essential, but we will have to think about smart solutions. We must make sure we change to a method of packaging our products which provides a lasting benefit for everyone.

Plastic ban could backfire says BP

The oil and gas company believes a prohibition on single-use plastic could increase CO2, but is that true?

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47255249

Towels and Netflix: how hotel stays and film nights provide a model for sustainable change.

There have been major changes in my lifetime. My phone used to be attached to a wall in the hallway of the house I grew up in, for example, whereas now I don’t even have a landline. Technology facilitates changes in behaviour, so that what was once commonplace becomes rapidly antiquated.

At Vesta Smart Packaging, we are trying to facilitate one such change. Our packages monitor and report how full they are, reordering automatically. They will change the way that people and businesses shop for day-to-day essentials, so that we can cut single-use plastic out of the supply chain. It is an intimidating challenge, but we are encouraged by examples of changes made by other businesses which have had a major environmental impact (whether they intended it or not).

On a recent holiday, I saw the now-ubiquitous sign asking that the towels in the hotel be reused. All over the world, hotels now use these signs to save countless millions of unnecessary washes. And it feels like it happened overnight. A simple confluence of ideas that improved efficiency and helped the environment was enough to affect global change.

Later that evening, I watched a couple of episodes on Netflix, and was struck for the first time by the environmental impact that it and other streaming services have had. DVD sales, and trips to rental shops, have declined massively – almost completely in the latter case – and the plastic savings must be enormous. But it was never intended that way. Streaming services offered convenience, and choice, and almost immediately eradicated the old way of watching films on hard copy, which has gone from commonplace to exceptional.

The adoption and usage of smart packaging to cut single-use plastic in supply chains will be a similarly massive change. However, as we develop our product – combining convenience for consumers and efficiency for businesses, these two simple examples provide much needed encouragement, and demonstrate that behavioural change at this scale is eminently possible.

Return of the milk bottle

Plastic pollution is suddenly in the public eye, with everyone from legislative bodies such as the EU (though recent delays are a concern), to David Attenborough highlighting the appalling scale of the problem.

Recyclable one-use packaging – whilst welcome – looks unlikely to be enough to stem the tide of waste. The reduction in plastic content of disposables can be easily matched or exceeded by an extended period of reuse, and by adopting smart-packaging built to be re-used.

Companies and consumers alike need to spearhead the widespread adoption, or re-adoption, of reusable packaging. Simply using the same package twenty times would reduce plastic waste by 95%.

This is not an entirely new idea. Most people over the age of thirty remember the widespread use of milk bottles, which subsequently disappeared. There are a number of reasons for this, but what has changed since the demise of the milkman, is the widespread use of personal delivery and the availability of connected platforms that can more effectively manage the process.

It’s time for the milk bottle to make a comeback.