New name, new system, new box – but the same mission: Our goal is to make take-away waste-free. After we launched the Tiffin Project in 2014, many things have changed. The Tiffin Project became Tiffin Loop – a plastic-free deposit system for your take-away food.
The beginnings of the Tiffin Project
At the beginning, the system of the Tiffin project was developed by the Berlin start-up ECO Brotbox. With the help of a StartNext crowdfunding campaign and the Stiftung Naturschutz Berlin, the pilot phase of the project was financed. During this pilot phase, we used the opportunity to test the feasibility of the project idea in practice and to optimize it.
The Tiffin Project’s system initially required participating restaurants to pay a monthly usage fee per container. The final consumer was also supposed to pay a daily rental fee for the Tiffin Box and register for use in advance. However, the administrative effort involved pushed many of our partner restaurants to their limits. The follow-up of the containers also required a lot of organizational effort. Ultimately, the restaurant owners’ concerns – that customers would rather use free disposable packaging than pay a fee for a reusable system – caused us to rethink. The system proved to be too complex. Now we were faced with the challenge of simplifying it and making it more suitable for everyday use.
From rental to a deposit system – Tiffin Loop was born
This was the birth of our returnable deposit system called Tiffin Loop. The system is simple and easy to grasp: When you order at a restaurant, you leave a 15 euro deposit for our Tiffin Box and can enjoy your meal from the box afterwards – completely free of plastic and pollutants. Then, you can return the box to one of our partners at any time, without any additional effort or costs. We have also simplified the system for our partners. As a partner, you no longer pay per container, but with a monthly membership fee of 19.95€. In return, you will receive a comprehensive Tiffin Loop starter kit to kick off our partnership.”
We also optimized our Tiffin Box after the pilot phase. Initially, we worked with stackable stainless steel lunch boxes based on the Indian model. Although the four-layer round containers were visually appealing and practical to stack, they did not prove themselves in practice. Many of our partners gave us feedback that they were difficult to fill. This cost time and made processes more difficult. That’s why we developed a new practical Tiffin Box in close cooperation with our partners and had it patented. Now we are ready to start another pilot phase with our new concept Tiffin Loop. We have already signed up a few restaurants in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne as partners and look forward to you becoming a part of the loop.