Tuesday, March 13, 2012

A Novel City Wide Food Package System

Many groups are trying to make it easier for people to get pre-prepared foods (either prepped ingredients, like veggies, or premade meals) as a way to make it more convenient for people to eat healthier, but they are failing to penetrate the food market primarily because of the packaging. Yes, the packaging! Health conscious people whether they are aware of it or not have a sort of weekly quota or tolerance limit for plastic and "compostable packaging". 

If there was a city-wide universal container system that was made of sleek non-toxic, oven-proof, reusable (not compostable) materials and a novel distribution and collection system (think milk bottles of old) then the number of take away and prepped meals or raw ingredients we'd purchase would increase dramatically. For example, I refuse to buy prepped veggies packaged in plastic but would love to buy prepped veggies if they were packaged differently. The way to operationalize this would be to get city approval and pilot in one neighborhood - convincing the key restaurants and grocery stores to use the service all starting at once (akin to non-smoking laws). The biggest hurdle is operationalizing a collection system that would worth the hassle - I have ideas but none convincing yet. If such a system could fly, lots of web app and monetization options exist...

No comments:

Post a Comment