Season 4, Episode 158 : Sylvia Garvin

Will Richardson 00:04
Hi and welcome to the Green Element podcast, where we talk about sustainability in business. With each episode we hope to inspire you on your sustainability journey. I'm your host Will Richardson today we're interviewing Sylvia Garvin, the founder of a London based business, The Juice Round. They make juices, smoothies, and shakes using traditional methods and serve them in reusable glass bottles, which are collected, cleaned and refilled for reuse. Sylvia, welcome.

Sylvia Garvin 00:36
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Will Richardson 00:37
So Silvia, let's start by asking you, what drove you to start The Juice Round?

Sylvia Garvin 00:44
So for me, from a personal perspective, I guess there was a number of different drivers. Prior to COVID, I was very much involved in providing bespoke drinks for businesses and offices. And over time, as I as our orders grew, I found more and more, I was more and more alarmed, I guess, by the amount of packaging that was passing through our doors and couldn't get out of my mind, the extent to which the drinks took a long time to make by hand. We took great care and attention in providing our products in our clients choice of packaging, there's a lot of effort going into the personalization of our drinks. And then with the objective really, of people finding them delicious and delightful and consuming them very rapidly. And then the packaging that they're in would be sitting there and floating around in the environment for a long time afterwards. So I think I just saw as, over time, more and more of - I guess, I was more conscious of the scale of packaging that was passing through our doors and felt an increasing sense of responsibility as a drinks producer to find a different way of handling that and really focusing on reuse as a solution. There, then we started building on that concept working with corporates in London, who were interested in having business office catering in reusable glass bottles. So we built up a nice client base over time providing that service, which was called The Juice Round. And then the pandemic happened, people stopped going to offices, people stopped attending events. And I really saw an opportunity to perhaps pivot that idea and offer it more widely to consumers through retail outlets.

Will Richardson 02:45
How did the pandemic affect your business?

Sylvia Garvin 02:47
Oh massively, massively. So pretty much everything that we were doing prior to pandemic relied on social contact. So my background, for the last 15 years is providing bespoke drinks for high profile events and business clients, which we still do. Thankfully, post pandemic, we've really seen that side of the business pick up again. But primarily we had to rethink our whole business model. We were involved to some extent, with the first wave of COVID as part of the relief efforts helping the NHS frontline. That keep kept us very busy for the first few months, really from just the charitable perspective, helping frontline staff with drinks to keep them refreshed and boosted and essentially at work without needing to change out of their PPE to go to the canteen which might be closed. So initially, we're very much focused on the relief efforts. And then once that subsided, the realisation that COVID was something that we'd have to live with and would need a long term rethink, not just a sort of quick pause. So it massively affected us.

Will Richardson 04:01
And what impact does your business model have on food waste?

Sylvia Garvin 04:05
That's a very good question. So we have really with The Juice Round as a service, we've really focused on minimising food waste in many ways. So initially, the way that we set up our order system is very much based on a just in time ordering system. So we have a weekly ordering arrangements with our retail partners, which means that we produce essentially to order we don't over produce, we don't have stock sitting in a warehouse somewhere, which means additionally, that our products are really fresh, but that means it's very low levels of wastage because essentially we're making what has been sold for want of a better description,

Will Richardson 04:50
Right

Sylvia Garvin 04:51
And also from a customer perspective, we offer maximum flexibility in our ordering so that our retail partners can literally choose right down to the individual bottle, how many drinks of each flavour they're looking for, which means that they have little waste as well. So the whole supply chain is all based around trying to minimise food waste by purchasing what we need, and by our retail partners, essentially purchasing from us what they know they're going to sell. So it's all about kind of low flexible ordering.

Will Richardson 05:26
How has your business been received by the public and the hospitality sector?

Sylvia Garvin 05:31
It's been really positive. Actually, initially, I was I was a little bit unsure about, I guess the viability of the refill model in a more mainstream context. So I could, I could, you know, understand within an office, an office context that reusable packaging makes great sense because our customers are consuming their drinks at the desk, they just pop their bottles in a crate within a kitchen area, it was a sort of contained environment within which to consume our drinks. And from a business perspective, there's that cost of recycling, packaging is reduced, because essentially it's not part of the waste stream that that business generates. So it made perfect sense within a business context. I was initially, I guess, intrigued to see how it would be received by retail partners. But the response has been absolutely fantastic in the sense that they've really got behind the environmental agenda have been really keen to promote it, in terms of in store marketing. And then in terms of engaging with consumers, we've really been pleasantly surprised by the levels of bottle returns that we were seeing, it's been really positive.

Will Richardson 06:48
That's great. And how do you work with your trade partners to ensure you get the bottles back?

Sylvia Garvin 06:56
Using our background, I guess, in personalization, and bespoking, which is something that you know, we've come at this from - given our background in the corporate drinks world. And we have created personalised marketing for the stores so that they feel that their point of sale information is going to fit their premises needs, suit the layout of their drinks fridges, really speak to their audience in terms of encouraging them to return the bottles. The other thing that we have is a refund on that bottle. So there's a small financial incentive for consumers to return their bottles. And the retailer then is "rewarded", in inverted commas, for that bottle collected in the form of a discount off their monthly invoice. So the idea is, with it being a bottle that we don't need to buy, we pass on that benefit down the line. And some of our retail partners have expressed that in the form of a 10p refund per bottle for the customer. Alternatively, some of them have really got behind local charities and basically made a donation to the customers behalf for that bottle that was returned so it's sort of an additional win. We leave it very open to our retail partners to decide what's going to work for them operationally. But essentially all working to a common cause.

Will Richardson 08:29
That makes sense. And it's quite nice that you actually leave it up to the retail outlets to decide what they want to do, as opposed to you say what it is that you want them to do.

Sylvia Garvin 08:37
Absolutely, because they know what works best and what fits in.

Will Richardson 08:40
And also means that - you know how some people will just come up with some really crazy ideas or mad ideas and then you're like "oh, that's actually a good idea". I don't know why no one else thinks of that, you can pass that on to other people.

Sylvia Garvin 08:52
Exactly. We've got one retail partner, coffee shop chain, Jorge coffee, and they are very much involved in tackling homelessness in South London where they're based. So the bottle refunds is essentially are donations that they make on the customers behalf to the homeless charities that they support. So I think it's got to be flexible for each partner to really configure the bottle return scheme to make it as much of an incentive as it can be to the consumer, but also to them as a business.

Will Richardson 09:30
What challenges do you foresee with providing reusable bottles?

Sylvia Garvin 09:35
I think there's huge challenges in the sense that - I don't - to be able to do this at scale will require a much larger infrastructure. So at the moment, we're really focused on London because that's where we're based and in terms of reducing delivery miles, it makes sense for us to have a sort of a localised model of production and delivery. Being able to do that on a system wide scale, we'll need much more flexibility in terms of having delivery partners that can handle the delivery in collections for us. In terms of just being able to scale, a bottle return system that would work within mainstream grocery. There's a lot of work to be done and a lot of thinking to be done to be able to achieve this on on a national scale.

Will Richardson 10:29
Yeah. And are you looking at moving more UK wide?

Sylvia Garvin 10:34
We'd love to over time. Absolutely. So my vision is very much about creating a juice round in every major city where there has been a demand for all types of products, but preserving the, I guess, the local production model. And the ability to work closely with retail partners to minimise food waste, to minimise delivery miles, I think that would need to be done on a sort of, as I said, a sort of a localised model, as opposed to the prevailing approach of sort of centralised production, which could be overseas and then shipping it all over in big containers. The UK we're very much the polar opposite of that and we're all about being close to the customer, both the consumer and our retail partners.

Will Richardson 11:25
So interesting, we had a wine company on and they are - it was about the labelling that they needed to put on, and then they track all the bottles, and then they're able to know exactly where they are. And then they go and pick them up and stuff. And they're looking at the US and coming over to the UK, so very much on a national level, something like that. Can you see that working for you?

Sylvia Garvin 11:53
Yes, I mean, that that would be, I guess that would be the dream to be able to have a model of returning packaging, that is almost not specific to a particular location, or even a particular customer that we would be able to return bottles in a really efficient way would be great. I mean we have a similar system in the sense that we've had to pay close attention to our labelling to make sure that the bottle labels are easily removable. So essentially, they are a peelable paper label, it's obviously got to be adhesive enough to be able to stick to the bottle when we need it to but equally, the ability to remove it when you need it to. So we've had to do quite a lot of work around that. But yes, I think just to have that sort of infrastructure support would be really beneficial and I think over time, there will be a sort of an ecosystem of suppliers or feeding into and supporting the reuse model.

Will Richardson 13:02
That makes sense. It's The Good Goods is the company I was just talking about for anyone who wants to reference it. Can you tell us a bit more about your partnership with the Crown partnership?

Sylvia Garvin 13:12
Yes, absolutely. So as part of, I guess, the pandemic, I really thought that given the uncertainty in the hospitality industry. For me, rebuilding post pandemic, it felt like a lot of responsibility and uncertainty to take on as a sole business owner. So I was fortunate enough to reach out to Crown as a potential business partner going forward. They've got a very unique model where they effectively invest in businesses that they have good synergy with. So through that partnership, I've been able to benefit from some shared services in terms of finance and marketing and all the kind of infrastructure that really is needed. And I think it's been invaluable, actually, because the bespoke drinks world is very niche, and it's something that we, as a business, we were able to trade very well in and have a great nieche in. But when we transitioned to the retail world or food and drink, that's a completely different ballgame. There is much more risk and much more investment required. So actually having Crown as a as a business partner has been a great facilitator of this this new phase.

Will Richardson 14:44
Is that still in London?

Sylvia Garvin 14:45
Yeah, so they are -. Yeah, essentially they have a number of different sites. As the sole cater for different venues within London, they have a main production area in Romford, so just London Essex borders. So yes, so not a million miles away geographically. But also I think I really enjoyed having a management team in the sense that, you know, many several heads are better than one. And also, some of the companies within the group are also internal customers for The Juice Round, which has been great to get to get going and to see that we've, you know, established proof of concept initially through having some internal customers and building out from there. So it has been really valuable. What are your future ambitions for The Juice Round? So, as I sort of touched on previously, I would love to see a Juice Round in every major city in the UK, I would like reusing and refilling packaging to be something that consumers embrace and feel comfortable with and feel is the norm, that it shouldn't feel onerous, it shouldn't feel unusual. So I would really love more of a, I guess, a mass adoption of reusing and re refilling. I think for me, that's sort of what really felt counterintuitive, is that glass recycles relatively easy, but the thought of kind of breaking it up and smashing it into a million pieces to then remake it seems so counterintuitive that I think more of an awareness of where packaging comes from. And that actually, it's a valuable asset, not just a disposable commodity, I think more of a sort of collective realisation around that would be very heartening, just from an environmental perspective. And equally seeing The Juice Round go from strength to strength. And working with other circular focus businesses as well, because there's lots of great examples in other sectors, like you've alluded to with the wine company you mentioned also within the beauty industry. There's companies like Circle are doing great things within London to provide sort of beauty and home products more sustainably. So yes, I think just forging those relationships as well so that we are, across the board, able to offer reusing and refilling easily and conveniently to customers would be the gold standard really [laughs].

Will Richardson 17:36
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting, you just touched upon the smashing up of glass, because the minute you get into actually recycling glass, then the carbon footprint is astronomical. You're much better off using plastics than you are glass in that respect.

Sylvia Garvin 17:57
And that was a real change actually post sort of in the post Blue Planet world. I really saw very quickly how we were getting much more demand for glass packaging, but it was being treated like it was plastic, which you know, going back to your previous question about what drove me to create The Juice Round. And it's that sort of frustration that here we were handling packaging that's a lot heavier, more expensive, more resource intensive to make and yet it's being treated like it's disposable. Just seems so logical.

Will Richardson 18:32
Do you find you have to educate your customers on that journey and talk to them about glass and the carbon footprints? Are there - I mean, have you done a carbon footprint of your analysis?

Sylvia Garvin 18:46
It's something we're working on. So we are working with a specialist consultants to first of all map the carbon footprint of the ingredients we use. Because I think that's one of the challenges is that inherently with this type of initiative, you'd want to source as locally as possible, to keep your ingredients UK focused. But experience has shown me that's not always what the consumer wants in terms of flavours. So there's a tension there in terms of being able to offer flavours that are really great and creative and unusual and perhaps different to your mainstream juice and smoothie brands. But at the same time wanting to have enough of a UK ingredient base to be able to feel confident that we're providing an improvement on the mainstream, so to speak. So one of the things we do is we work closely with a fruit farm in Kent, for our apple juice and to be able to produce that. There are some ingredients that we have tried and tried but we can't get away from in terms of local sourcing orange juice being the primary one. There's just some ingredients who just, you know, just don't lend themselves to the UK climate. So there's a real tension there actually, in terms of being able to provide flavours and recipes that have have mainstream appeal yet deliver on some of what we're trying to do around delivery miles and the footprint of our ingredients. It's a constant debate.

Will Richardson 20:32
Yeah, I remember going to a restaurant in the Langdale valley in the Lake District, it's a National Trust. And they had CO2 on their menu. So their CO2 equivalent, and I immediately saw it, and then immediately went for the least environment, but not the least environmental, the least co2, on the menu for the main for what I was eating, and I was chatting to my other half about it, and I can't literally choose anything else, I now would feel guilty if I choose anything else. And so we ordered, we ate, and I went up to them when I was paying the bill, I asked the bar manager if most people ordered what I ate. And he said interestingly, no. And most people didn't see it. But I wonder this was about three or four years ago. And what you're doing, I'm just wondering that as people become more educated and more knowledgeable about this space, I wonder if you, you could end up with the you know, the carbon footprint on your juices, and the more popular ones would be the more local ones? Also the more - potentially I don't know - the least carbon footprint?

Sylvia Garvin 21:56
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a really good point that over time, as consumers we'll want to know more about where our food and drink comes from, and the journey it's made to get to us. Absolutely. And I think over time, I imagine that a bit like we have with food, traffic lights, traffic lighting on food packaging, in terms of the health or unhealthiness of that particular product, I imagine something similar will evolve for the carbon footprint of that particular item. I guess a bit like I imagine that we have with energy efficiency on appliances, and all of that, it will become sort of part of that mindset really that consumers will want to know and to make choices based on that information and that it should be transparent and invisible. So yeah, I can really imagine that being on the horizon.

Will Richardson 22:59
Brilliant. It's been really, really cool talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

Sylvia Garvin 23:03
My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me and for the opportunity to talk about The Juice Round and what we're doing in terms of sort of refilling and reusing and yeah, stay tuned for more businesses and to learn more about how other organisations are approaching sustainability. And we can we can swap ideas.

Will Richardson 23:26
Where we find out more about you?

Sylvia Garvin 23:28
We are online at thejuiceround.co.uk on social media at Juice Round, and that is the sort of the best place to find out more about us and what we're up to. On the bespoke drink side, that business of that brand is called Sejucied. So sejuiced.co.uk is the other side of what we do.

Will Richardson 23:51
Awesome. Thanks for being on the show. Take care. And thank you for listening. And please don't forget to join our post podcast discussion at sustainability solved or a special online community where you can share ideas, views and comments, that sustainabilitysolved.org