Reducing Food And Packaging Waste With Occo's Recyclable Packaging

Gone is the dusty spice jar with muted flavor, color and scents crammed in the back of the pantry. Occo's recyclable packaging are sleek card decks that come neatly packed with eight single-serving portioned spice pods which are grouped and placed into cardboard cards that look akin to birthday cards or tiny books - making storage, reference and recovery easy peasy!

The card decks are 100% curbside recyclable, with the cards made from paper and the pods from aluminum. The Fuseneo team also kept in mind that since most aluminum recycling plants are primarily designed for cans, the Occo pods were designed so they don’t (literally) fall through the cracks. The empty pods are intended to be easily crushed and dropped into an aluminum can and simply tossed into your curbside aluminum recycling bin.

Occo is committed to reducing both food and packaging waste through fully recyclable packaging, usable portion sizes and consumer education. With the pre-measured micro portions, food waste is greatly eliminated. Waste is the greatest contributor to climate change, and Occo’s sustainability efforts include reducing waste at every step. While it’s great to use reusable containers whenever possible, if you aren’t able to use up what’s inside the container before it goes bad (like a big jar of spice), you end up wasting something that requires energy to grow, harvest, process, and ship across the world.

Occo’s packaging opens the door to spices one may not normally be willing to buy a full jar of. When needing only a pinch of a spice to make a dish, one should not be required to buy an entire jar. Occo’s innovative packaging offers an excellent way to discover new dishes without waste or added expense. The packaging of the spices is also curated in packets that can be nicely blended together, encouraging experimentation and discovery of new recipes without commitment or worry of not wanting to make the dish again. Each card deck comes printed with a QR code which when scanned with your smartphone will give you detailed (paperless) spice descriptions and recipe cards immediately at your fingertips.

Fuseneo’s sustainable design of Occo’s unique packaging offers not only efficiency and ease of use, it ensures exceptional preservation of each spice. Oxygen, light, heat, and humidity (common occurrences in a kitchen) cause the essential oils in spices to oxidize and decay which result in losing their flavor, color, and aroma. Occo’s spice pods are sealed without oxygen, slowing decay down significantly which dramatically extends both quality and shelf life. A gas-flush process combined with an all aluminum structure was created for an optimal gas barrier which keeps the spices fresh indefinitely.

Fuseneo’s team of industrial designers and packaging engineers designed the ideal solution for the form-fill-seal process of the miniature walled aluminum pods. A hemmed edge on the stamped aluminum pods was designed to give additional structure to the lightweight shell. In addition, the easy-to-peel label/seal was designed for the bottom of the pod to lay flat on your counter with color coded labels on both top and bottom.