Creating a circular -product based- company: Selling in Bulk (Part 3)
The last two weeks have been very interesting for Odysea bars. After hitting one of our milestones “creating an MVP” we focused on how to bring this MVP as fast as possible to the market. Here we hit one crucial doubt:
Packaging or No packaging?
After receiving a few quotations from different packaging suppliers we realised that the dream of packing our bars on fully home compostable packaging will need to wait.
What does that mean? Will we pack them on nasty single-use plastic?
NOPE
We will sell them in Bulk
We will start selling our bars in places as cool as the ones you see above, these supermarkets are booming in Barcelona right now. Only in the Barcelona area there are more than 50 locations where you can buy things in bulk, one retail chain has more than 20 supermarkets distributed all over the Spanish territory. We believe the power of this community has just started, and will keep growing.
Zero Waste: A vibrant community of conscious people
Buying in bulk has been a very common practice in Spain, I can clearly remember my grandma and even my mum buying grains and legumes in bulk, some stores you can even buy them already boiled. But what is different from before and now?
How did this shops, starting booming now?
The difference is the appearance of the term Zero Waste, a lifestyle and trendy topic nowadays. Instagram is populated by accounts of (mostly) women living, working, exercising, buying clothes, etc. and creating virtually no waste. The trend is starting to catch on on the mainstream media as well.
Everyday more and more zero waste lifestyle shops appear:
We really believe this movement and choice of lifestyle will keep growing and we believe it is a great idea to start offering our bars to this community of changemakers. The will to change is already there, new businesses are being created everyday and the options to live without creating waste are now widely available.
So what is next you may ask…
Food safety, the elephant in the room
Of course the first thing these shops have asked us is to bring them all the paperwork according to the spanish laws of food and health safety. We will also need to find a cooking space, luckily Barcelona has a nice ecosystem of foodpreneurs and many options are available when it comes to shared kitchens with all the machinery and paperwork already done.
But before we can get our food safety approval done we need to find our suppliers. As you may remember we want our bar to be local and organic.
The forgotten Spanish date
Our bar base is basically dates, a delicious, creamy and sugary fruit that grows on certain types of palm trees. The dates you find in the supermarket in Spain come basically from Egypt, Israel or Tunisia. I find this very interesting because less than 600km south of Barcelona there is a thriving plantation of palm trees known in spanish as “Palmeral”, and yes they grow dates over there.
We started to get in touch with the palm tree community in Elche, and we discovered the site is recognised as a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO.
So far we haven’t found an organic certified dates grower, but we believe we’ll find one or convince one to go organic, and this is the base of the Circular Economy and Odysea, to grow together to a better, more fair and waste-less production system.
The other ingredients were very easy to find since most of them are grown less than 200km from where we will be making the bars, Barcelona.
The project is taking shape and we are starting to get ready to bomb you with information, you can now follow us on instagram.
Follow us HERE
Read the other parts of the story:
