A Crowd-Funded Startup Is Making a Coffee Cup That Can Be Eaten

A trash can overflowing with disposable drink cups is an all-too-familiar sight outside any high-traffic cafe or fast-food joint. It was during a lunch-time walk in Melbourne that colleagues Aniyo Rahebi and Catherine Hutchins passed by several such eyesores and decided to combat the piles of waste. A few months later they arrived at an idea: a to-go cup that can be eaten. After hundreds of hours in the kitchen refining their concept, the duo took it to market. Their startup Good-Edi now offers an edible, biodegradable, plastic-free alternative to the standard polyethylene-lined paper cups used for coffee that largely end up in landfills or gets incinerated.

The company raised about $98,000 through a crowd-funding site in 2021, and its baking team currently produces about 500 cups a day for clients across Australia, including coffee shops, roasteries and concert venues, from a facility in a suburb of Melbourne. Good-Edi aims to boost output and expand sales internationally this year. The world goes through more than 250 billion plastic-lined paper drink cups every year, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. Only about 1% of those cups are recycled. Good-Edi says about 2.7 million disposable cups find their way to landfills each day in Australia.

Good-Edi’s product works for both for hot drinks like coffee and tea as well as cold drinks. After about 250 recipe adjustments, the founders settled on a blend of rye flour, wheat bran, oat bran, sugar, salt, coconut oil and water. They say their container stays crispy holding a hot cup of joe for about 40 minutes and won’t leak a cold beverage for about eight hours. For Hutchins and Rahebi, who have a combined 20 years experience in the food-processing and packaging sectors, Good-Edi is still a side hustle. They are banking on shifting consumer sentiment and a beverage industry under pressure to offer more sustainable to-go options to drive sales and compensate for the fact that their containers can increase the cost of a cup of takeaway coffee by A$1. “Will coffee drinkers be keen to gobble up the company’s innovation, if it doesn’t feel like a treat?” asks a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter that says the cup tasted like an unsweetened wheat biscuit.