Portland entrepreneur Jocelyn Quarrell is taking her knowhow from years of working in car and bike sharing and applying it to the emerging area of container reuse.
Quarrell is owner of Bold Reuse, a company she bought in 2019. At the time, it was called Go Box PDX, and Portlanders may remember that business as a consumer subscription service for reusable to-go boxes from participating food vendors, particularly food carts.
She has since rebranded the company Bold Reuse and pivoted to an enterprise service that works with companies to replace single use plastics. Portland Trail Blazers fans can see the company’s products at the Moda Center, where concessions on club level come in reusable trays that are managed by Bold Reuse.
The company has a team of 10 and operates out of an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in inner Southeast.
It recently secured investment from Seattle-based Mastersfund, which invests in women-led, revenue-generating seed stage companies. The investment is part of a seed round the company is raising. Additional investors include Boston-based MPactful Ventures.
The company plans to invest in growth as well as in its food safety program. This is an unregulated industry and the team recognizes the responsibility to reduce risk in its operations, Quarrell said. It works with consultants to build its food safety program.
When Quarrell saw that the Go Box business was for sale she was also learning about the recycling industry and the way U.S. waste was sent China and China’s subsequent decision in 2018 to stop taking the waste.
“I thought, here is a business working more upstream from recycling. It reminded me of car and bike sharing — container sharing as a way to address this waste problem,” she said.
Initially, the business was growing and she had robust work with New Seasons at its deli counter. However, that all came to halt with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and questions about how the virus spread.
“It was very dark for a few months and people were afraid to touch anything,” she recalled. “I was unsure reuse even recovers.”
But, by summer 2020 it was clear that standard commercial washing and sanitizing could achieve the results needed to clean surfaces.
“That was when the door reopened to the business. In fall 2021 we were getting inbound calls,” said Quarrell, who is co-founder and CEO.
Those calls were from direct-to-consumer grocer Imperfect Foods and coffee giant Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX). Both were interested in working with Bold Reuse on projects to reduce waste. For Imperfect Foods, Bold Reuse collects and washes the reusable cooling gel packs that come in a grocery box. For Starbucks, the company ran a three-month pilot in Seattle to collect, wash and then redistribute reusable cups at five stores.
On a weekly basis the company saves 30,000 gel packs from landfills for Imperfect. For Starbucks it saved more than 10,000 cups over the course of the pilot.
The company now also works with Loop, a company that works with brands to create refillable versions of single-use products. Bold Reuse collects and cleans the used packaging and brings it back to retailers. Bold Reuse is working with Loop in certain Portland-area Fred Meyer stores and on a one-year pilot with two Walmart Supercenters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The Bold Reuse model is to work with enterprise customers who already own the assets, whether it’s the cups, the trays or the gel packs. It will then do the collecting and commercial washing.
The company is focused on growing with customers like Moda Center, where there is a specific footprint with a lot of consumption that can be converted from single use to reuse at a high volume, Quarrell said.
The company is in talks with Portland Community College and Portland Public Schools, said Heather Watkins, co-founder and chief revenue officer. The company hopes to be coast-to-coast in five years with venues, schools and big events as the main driver.
Quarrell sees the trajectory of reusable packaging as similar to bike sharing and other transit that required subsidies and sponsorship to get going. It’s why she is going after enterprise customers and not consumers.
“We now need big brands to recognize that continuing investment in compostable material won't solve the (waste) problem. I give credit to brands like Starbucks, they recognize they are part of the problem. A lot of bigger brands are getting pushed from consumers and consumers are driving the change,” she said.
