Packaging Startup Targets Single-Use Plastics

Imagine eating as much as a credit card’s weight in plastic every week. That’s five grams of plastic, the amount that many people ingest in their weekly diets, according to a 2021 report published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.

Food packaging generates much of this plastic. Now, a University of Cambridge spin-out, Xampla, is a pioneer in developing eco-friendly, edible, biodegradable plant protein packaging.

Xampla, founded in 2018, aims to replace unrecyclable plastics that account for a great deal of polluting microplastics. “The only viable alternative is to have a material that is completely biodegradable,” says Marc Rodriguez Garcia, Xampla’s cofounder and CTO.

Rodriguez Garcia, who has a PhD in peptide chemistry from the University of Glasgow, spent several years as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Cambridge. There, he developed the company’s core technology with cofounder Tuomas Knowles, a professor of physical chemistry and biophysics. In 2021, meal kit retailer Gousto adopted Xampla’s technology to market the world’s first pea-based edible stock sachets as an option for its Indian spiced carrot and lentil soup recipe boxes. That zero-waste option could potentially replace 15.6 tons of plastic generated yearly in Gousto meal kits alone.

Such prepackaged meal ingredients exemplify an undesirable application for single-use plastics. These sachets conveniently provide consumers with precisely measured ingredients for their recipes. But the recipe boxes also come with a lot of plastic because they include properly portioned sachets for every single ingredient.

We want to develop the materials of tomorrow.

Marc Rodriguez Garcia

Xampla

The sachets are one example of Xampla’s Morro materials, which offer high-performance, plastic-free alternatives for home-care and personal products ranging from dishwasher and laundry tabs to shower gels and shampoo. That’s Morro, as in short for “tomorrow.” Xampla sees plastics, derived from fossil fuels, as materials of the past. “We want to develop the materials of tomorrow,” Rodriguez Garcia says.

Xampla focuses on single-use plastics. “Our philosophy is that there are some applications where using plastic might make sense,” Rodriguez Garcia notes. As a licensing business, the company focuses on developing innovative new materials, leaving their manufacture to its partners.

One of those manufacturers is Huhtamaki, which manufactures take-home food boxes made with Morro plastic-free coating. Many fast-food franchises now provide take-out containers made mostly of paper and board that still contain some plastic. “You cannot recycle the plastic. It’s very thin. And obviously that can also contaminate the paper recycling stream,” he says.

In 2025, the Just Eat Takeaway platform in Germany introduced the Huhtamaki-manufactured food boxes to more than 45,000 European restaurants.

Rodriguez Garcia derides as greenwashing the plastic-free claims he has seen many companies make about their products. Alas, no internationally recognized standards or third-party validation processes exist to verify such claims.

Xampla has worked with the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory to develop a testing process that would validate the plastic-free nature of the company’s materials.

“Plastics are polymers, generally speaking. So, by definition, a polymer should be considered a plastic,” he notes. But non-plastic, natural polymers also exist. “Cellulose, for example, or starch, or in this case, proteins, are natural polymers or exist in nature. They’re in our bodies.”

Pervasive microplastics have given rise to terms such as the “plastic soup” of the oceans and the “plastisphere,” referring to the microorganisms that inhabit plastic debris in aquatic environments. “The world is in a plastics crisis,” an international research team warned last September in The Lancet. “Current increases in production are projected to continue, and in the absence of intervention, global plastic output is on track to nearly triple by 2060.”

When Rodriguez Garcia joined the Knowles lab in 2016, the scientists were focused on exploring the molecular features that enable certain natural materials to display amazing mechanical strength and flexibility, which plastic also has. This work later inspired them to develop materials that could help address the plastics problem.

“They’re natural and we’re not chemically modifying them,” Rodriguez Garcia says. If they leak into the natural environment, they are returning to where they already exist in large amounts. “It’s a completely circular material.”