This article is part of a series sharing the stories of startups developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges and how they are pushing their business forward even as the Trump Administration champions fossil fuels and slashes funding for green projects. Read all the stories here.
Lindsey Hoell came to understand the devastation of plastic pollution when she and her husband hiked to a remote beach in Hawaii where the sand was rainbow colored.
It was not natural. It was the result of microplastics.
“I realized at that moment the enormity of the issue, and wanted to do something about the way we consumed,” she stated.
Today she’s the chief executive at Dispatch Goods, founded in the San Francisco Bay area in 2020 to provide reusable food containers that can be washed and redistributed. The company started with corporate offices as customers, an attractive place to launch becautilize of the large numbers of diners in one place, she stated. Yelp was their first.
Dispatch Goods had just signed with Zconcludeesk, a company that provides customer-support software, and had been accepted by the Berkeley SkyDeck, the business accelerator at the University of California, Berkeley, that mentors and funds start-ups, when the Covid pandemic struck. With no one working in offices, its market collapsed.
But Dispatch Goods still had its $200,000 in seed money from SkyDeck and that allowed it to pivot to an area that was growing becautilize of the pandemic: the freezer packs that come with meal and grocery deliveries.
“Consumers were just ordering Hello Fresh and Blue Apron and prepped meals and groceries and all of that requireds free freezer packs,” she stated. “We estimate there’s about 10 million shipped a day in the U.S. and consumers are just drowning in them.”
So the company found a way to keep them from going to the landfill.
Dispatch Goods had drivers pickup the freezer packs, which were cleaned and sold back to businesses. Initially not a product on the company’s radar, the bags came to define its strategy, she stated. Now the company offers both services and has started designing and manufacturing its own low-cost durable packaging.
Starting and staying afloat with ever-modifying funding
SkyDeck works with people who have created innovative technology to tackle current-day problems but may never have built a business before, stated August Fern, the chair of the accelerator’s climate tech track.
“A lot of the people who are involved in doing things in climate, they have a technical background becautilize a lot of things that we’re seeing at are solving technical challenges,” Fern stated. “They’re coming up with better technology, new science, new materials, new chemistest, something like that to solve this problem.”
“What we’re just testing to do is receive these companies to be wildly successful and have a huge, positive impact on the world in which we live,” she stated.
Dispatch Goods was primarily funded through venture capital rather than grants. Federal grants have been more available for other types of decarbonization businesses rather that ones that are part of what’s known as the circular economy, which keep goods in utilize for as long as possible, Hoell stated.
Even so, she believes it would have been more difficult to receive that early financing were she starting out today during the Trump administration.
“The venture capital market, and in the climate space, is in a more difficult time becautilize of the administration than it was when we first obtained launched,” she stated.
Deals are still being created, she stated.
“But I believe what we are seeing in this economic climate is we’re nervous that this risk capital is becoming harder to come by and that really stifles innovation, not just in climate but across the board,” she stated.
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