TIPA-CORP
Flexible packaging solutions that are very similar to conventional plastics, but yet fully compostable.
Website: tipa-corp.com
Founded Date: 2010
Country HQ: Israel
Business model: B2B
Industry: Flexible Packaging
Applications: Food, Fashion
Funding stage: Series B
Team: 40+
Daphna Nissenbaum, Founder and CEO of TIPA-CORP
YOUR JOURNEY TO FOUNDING
My name is Daphna Nissenbaum, I am based in Israel, and I am co-founder and CEO of TIPA. I started my career as a software engineer in the Israeli Navy and then in a few other companies. Later on I changed career direction, and I became CEO of a Research Centre on Capital Markets in the biggest private university in Israel.
After that experience, I decided to start my own business. I had a few ideas and eventually a packaging idea won. I met my co-founder at the kindergarden of our kids and that’s how we started the discussion. Today I am still the CEO of that packaging company. We started around 2010, but the acceleration of the process of building the company was around the end of 2012, when we were working out of the basement with loans. In 2013 we raised our first financing round.
FOUNDING MOMENT
Few years ago, I had kind of an argument with one of my kids around plastic bottles they used to take to school and throw away. I went out jogging, and I thought to myself ‘well, there must be a different solution to plastics to pack food; within a few years the world will need packaging that is not based so much on plastic’.
Then a question came to my mind: ‘what is the most natural way to pack food?’. My mind immediately went to an apple or an orange, because they are ‘naturally’ packed, and I thought ‘what if we can invent packaging that is similar to an orange?’ If I throw away it will disintegrate by itself and not be damaging to the environment the way plastics are.
“What if we can invent packaging that is similar to an orange?”
The very basic idea was to replace bottles with compostable, drinking pouches. But if we fast forward through the early stages of our company, TIPA® really began after a deeper investigation into the needs in the world, and the status with packaging and plastic, from which I understood two things. One, there were no materials available on the market that would do what I wanted to do, so we had to invent a material. The second thing was that the main problem of the industry is not plastic bottles—because they are possibly the only product that can be successfully recycled on a large scale—but the vast majority of other packaging, like flexible packaging, which cannot be recycled.
So, there was a switch from water pouches to compostable flexible packaging. I understood that it would not be easy to invent those materials, and that’s how we started the company and the R&D phase.
THE INNOVATION
Our goal was and still is to be a mass market player: we want to replace the materials that are used today with compostable materials. That’s how I look at it: we have to replace one with the other as fluently as possible. Therefore, we work with the same machinery as conventional plastics and we try to keep everything the same, just replace the materials.
Flexible packaging is all the packaging material that is not rigid. Think of all the snacks, cheese, and fresh produce. All these products have soft packaging made from rolls of films. It is in this sector that we had to invent and innovate. We invented new materials for the films - films that on one hand emulate conventional plastics (i.e. polyethylene), but on the other are fully compostable, which means that they can be treated as organic material.
That was the innovative step. We had to develop those formulas that would enable us to manufacture high-properties, high-level packaging fully based on compostable materials. That was a huge challenge, but we developed it. Now we have 7 families of patents and we are working on more.
Flexible packaging, TIPA
APPLICATIONS: MARKETS & INDUSTRIES
We focus on flexible packaging: a market of more than 100 billion dollars. Within this huge market, we focus on the food industry, because it’s the number one producer of plastic waste. Almost 66% of plastic waste comes from the food industry.
“Almost 66% of plastic waste comes from the food industry”
Within the food industry, there are so many segments; packing bread is different from packing dairy, for instance. Each segment looks different. We target the whole flexible packaging market - we started with specific segments, but definitely plan to scale to all the other segments as well. Today we provide a nice variety of packaging solutions. We pack fresh produce, bakery (breads, etc.), snacks, grains, meat, chilled meat, and frozen food.
We’ve also been asked to expand our solution to the fashion industry and we see a nice growth there as well. We currently work with companies like Stella McCartney, Meltin Pot and many others. So, at the moment we mostly work with these two industries: food and fashion. The fashion industry is less complicated; the food one is very complicated.
Candies packaging, TIPA
Hast resealable, TIPA
Why?
Each product in the food industry is a different product. For instance, for packing crisps we need to provide shelf life and prevention from oxygen and water getting in and out of the package, Each product requires a different solution and different properties. The shelf life is crucial, because the product can be spoiled if the package cannot protect the goods as it should be. The food industry is much more complicated and delicate than the fashion industry.
Does the package being compostable make it harder to achieve the required properties?
Compostable means it’s compostable - it won’t decompose on the shelf, but the materials are much more gentle than conventional plastics. This is exactly why we had to invent a new material. Compostable materials tend to break and decompose easily, so we had to solve that tension between biodegradation and the shelf life it needs to provide. Every product that we launched on the market—and we launched over twenty products already—went through all these shelf life tests and passed all of them. Currently, we have a nice portfolio of customers, including national supermarket chains to producers.
VALUE IN CIRCULAR ECONOMY TRANSITION
We are looking at an industry that consumes a lot of plastics. We know today that the end-of-life of plastics is the major problem, because it doesn't go anywhere. Every piece of plastic that we use today will last for at least 500-600 years.
Our innovation focuses on solving the end-of-life problem of plastic packaging. We source materials that will eventually turn into soil after consumption. They break down to small parts, these small parts will be consumed by bacteria and the bacteria will decompose. If all this process happens in a compost system, we have a new resource—the compost—that can be used as a fertilizer or as soil to grow the next plants of materials. This is a circular economy approach.
“Our innovation focuses on solving the end-of-life problem of plastic packaging”
The world needs packaging, but only if made from the right materials and following a circular economy approach. We all understand that recycling has very limited value, if at all. It only works for certain products.
At TIPA® we believe that there is not one solution for all packaging. If bottles can be recycled, let’s recycle them. If jars can be reused, let’s make them from glass. But where there are systems, markets, and segments where plastics cannot be a solution, let’s use compostable solutions. Flexible packaging is such a case and that’s why we need a circular economy approach.
Are you also actively looking into end-of-life solutions for your products?
Any way that you look at those materials, they are better than conventional plastics, even if the package doesn’t go at the end of its life cycle into a compost system. The way I look at it is that organic waste makes up almost half - 44%- of our solid waste, but only 5.5% is composted. We need to treat organic waste in a different way than regular waste. Organic waste shouldn’t go to landfill, and therefore the EU and many countries today built the infrastructure to treat organic waste separately from other waste streams. The majority of our products are home compostable, which means that you can put it in your home compost system. That’s also a viable, circular solution.
Once the infrastructure for organic waste is there--like, for instance, in Italy and Ireland--then compostable packaging goes in the same system. That’s maybe the best solution, but if packaging goes to other places, that’s also better than conventional plastics. We don’t take care of waste management, but definitely collaborate with companies who take care of the last mile or the first mile of the waste and with the compost facilities.
It’s a system change that needs to happen.
We are changing the market. This is a revolution: to look at packaging in a different way, to have packaging made of organic materials. Obviously, not everything is in place once we start taking steps into a new horizon, but if the market acts towards changing plastics into new materials, then eventually it will happen and a perfect circular economy will be in place. It’s not there yet, and that’s why we need to work together in order to get there. When Henry Ford invented the first car, there weren’t any roads. Today we see the difference. That’s how a revolution happens.
“This is a revolution: to look at packaging in a different way, to have packaging made of organic materials”
FUTURE PLANS
Our goal is to be a mass market player in the flexible packaging industry, to partner up and work with the big players using packaging for food and fashion, and to convert big manufactures into working with our materials, manufacturing our materials is our main goal. And—from an R&D perspective—keep finding new solutions.
Are you currently looking for additional funding?
We just finalized a round a year ago and currently we are not fundraising. But I guess we’ll be raising again at a certain period of time, but currently we are backed by a strong investor and we are focused on pushing the company forward.
How has the Covid-19 situation impacted your operations and plans?
I think this situation shows us something about how the health of the world and the health of its people are connected, and that we definitely need a circular economy approach to materials, consumption, and waste. It’s a lesson we need to learn from. We continue to serve our clients and we are working with them to find solutions, even during this crisis. We haven’t stopped our activities. We are manufacturing in Europe and sending our products to where our clients are. We fully support our clients in this period. Of course, things have slowed down, and hopefully we’ll be back on track sooner than later.
VISION FOR THE DECADE OF ACTION
I hope that as consumers and as society we will be more cautious with what we do, to be very aware of the damage we might leave behind us because of the way we live and the way we consume. I think that people will be more conscious, will have to, otherwise we won’t have a good future or a good life. People will be more conscious of how their actions and habits affect the planet. I truly hope we’ll see changes in materials and a move towards sustainable materials, and changes in our systems toward more circular systems for a more sustainable way of life.
May 2020
A conversation between Daphna Nissenbaum and Emanuele Di Francesco
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