Restoring Planetary Health: Meet the Entrepreneurs Behind Disappearing Packaging

0:00Watch it early on the High Performance app. Available now, Roman Kemp, the broadcaster, opens up a powerful conversation on success and mental health. Hiya, my name's Jake Humphrey and this is From Startup to Stand Out, a series from High Performance in partnership with Lloyds Bank. Here are some numbers I need to share with you guys before we start this journey. 60 % of businesses fail within the first three years. 20 % of those businesses fail in the first year. and just 42.5 % of new businesses make it. The truth is that running a business is hard and in this series, I'm going to meet fellow entrepreneurs and fellow founders to uncover the truth behind entrepreneurship, particularly sharing the stories of those hard first few difficult years.

0:47On this episode, I'm going to visit a business called Notpler who are using, would you believe, seaweed as an alternative to single-use plastic packaging. 8 million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean each year and Nopla believes the solution lies in the oceans themselves. So they've designed a packaging solution from seaweed that decomposes in just seven weeks compared to the 750 years that it takes for plastic to decompose. And look, I am personally so excited about the conversation today to meet the team. Nopla are also backed by Lloyds Bank, who provide holistic business support as well as amazing advice on how to start, grow and build a business.

1:24So we're about to meet Pierre-Yves Pallier, the co-founder of Nopla, at the company's base in East London and get hands-on with this amazing technology. Pierre. Hi, Jake. Jake, nice to see you. Thank you so much for coming to NotFlap. Thank you for having me. You know, your business idea is right up my street, where you can run a business but also help the environment. And I'm looking at this and I'm already inspired. I need to know more. I want to tell you a lot more, but it probably happens in the lab. So shall we just put on a lab coat and go for it? I feel like a not-plus scientist already.

1:58All right, so we're in the lab. Wow, I've not been in a lab since I was at school, okay. So don't let me lose any of this stuff. I'm excited to see it, but before we get into this stuff, please tell me about NotPla. How would you describe it in a couple of sentences? So NotPla is a sustainable packaging startup that makes alternatives to singular plastics using seaweed. Actually, I started my career as a plastic packaging engineer. So I was making a lot of those plastic shampoo bottles, cream jars, and realized that it was like indestructible material. There's really this problem with plastic that we use this alien material for everything and anything.

2:37Nature does not know how to deal with it. So I quit my job, wanted to do something different, realized that, study again, innovation, came to London for that, met my co-founder, and we had this really crazy kind of like first exploration. It was never meant to be a startup. What kind of packaging could we create that feels more like a fruit than something that comes out of a factory. We wanted to challenge a bit this idea that plastic is this very industrial-looking type of material. And of the many things we tried in our kitchen, one of them was seaweed. And we actually realized that there was something really magic about using seaweed for packaging.

3:19You've made my day with the phrase, can we think of some packaging that more resembles a fruit? Because it's not about taking something and moving it one place. It's about looking at something from a totally different angle. And I am a firm believer that entrepreneurs will change the world. It won't be politicians, it'll be entrepreneurs. And I'm so excited to see how this works. And we've got here, we've got a jar. Well, I would say there's a jar of seaweed, am I right? You've got that right. What else do we have here? So basically, let's demonstrate how we can go from seaweed to a plastic-like material that we can use for packaging.

3:53So seaweed, actually, we think of seaweed as like just one or two species. It's more than 12 ,000 species that are super different from each other. Like some species are more genetically different than between a mushroom and an elephant. And yet we call it seaweed. So lots of different stuff there. What we're going to do is basically like we're going to work with the gelatinous part of the seaweed, which we are extracting. And interestingly enough, when you extract and purify this, this is what holds seaweed together, but it's actually not brown or green. It doesn't smell. It really is just like gelatin, like a relatively kind of like odorless, colorless powder.

4:37From there, with those kind of like glue-like gelatin that comes from seaweed, we're picking different species, we're blending them into a bit of a pancake mix. And then with that kind of like special formulation, we can create a plastic-like material. So we'll do a little demonstration, if you will. Please. So when I rehydrate this extract with water, I get this very kind of like viscous, a bit like honey-like mixture. So let me just take a clear, the white powder in here is the extract from the seaweed. Exactly. So what we're going to do is basically just put a little bit here on the surface.

5:15and with this apparatus I'm actually just going to spread it across so this is just to make a thin layer so you see how it's just kind of like making it a little bit more and now I'm going to spray a little bit of like the salty water that you find in the ocean which is like abundantly available to seaweed as it grows all around the world and what's kind of magic is that this goes from a liquid into a membrane oh my goodness And this material, you can actually touch it. It feels like plastic. It's transparent. It is quite resistant. It is. You put it in it. And with this, we can actually make all sorts of replacements for single-use plastics, from food takeaway containers to little sachets for cosmetic products and so on.

6:03And I thought this would stink of fish or the ocean. But it's odourless, colourless. Colourless. It's literally edible. Oh, you're eating it great. It is a little bit salty, but it is literally edible. And the idea that you could eat packaging, it shows that you're basically dealing with something that is completely natural, that is literally edible. It's not plastic, it's not bioplastic, it's not synthetic. It really is the way it exists in nature. And for people that are enjoying this conversation, they're thinking, well, do we really need this? How much of all of the plastic that's ever been created has actually been recycled so far?

6:43So it's about 9%. So recycling does not work. Wow. Basically, recycling is a really good story for the plastics industry to say, hey, we can keep the same products that we're using today because there's a chance that we could recycle the material and then we could keep on doing more of it. But we know that recycling alone is not going to solve this. We need all the solutions we have at our disposal. And one of them is going to be more reusable applications. But also, we need to have different materials. If you want to try, so this is our first product. We call it the OHO bubble. And basically, it's a little dose of, in this case, it's flavored water in the membrane that you've just tried.

7:24The idea is it's almost like a cherry tomato. It's going to pop in your mouth. Yeah. And so make sure you close your mouth because it could explode. and then you can see you can eat the whole thing completely edible no waste and cheers cheers it's actually lovely alright so in this case in the controlled kind of like manufacturing process we don't we don't have all the saltiness that you've just experienced what would that be used for? so we're filling these with energy gels for example for marathon when runners are kind of like running in like tens of thousands in the street I'm sure you've seen the photos after the event.

8:02Plastic cups everywhere. So when London Marathon used this, it was amazing. The station that we were in, it was completely clear. But this really demonstrates that the material at its core is edible. And so we're really dealing with something that even if you don't eat it, nature can eat it. And that's the basic principle is that we don't ever want to lose our materials in nature and create forever waste amazing the next question is how do i invest in your business uh but before that i think we can go meet some of your team find out a bit more about what goes on can i have one more of these yeah go for it what a guy it was great chatting to pierre and getting to play with the amazing products i couldn't believe what i was seeing when he sprayed the seaweed extract with salt water and it instantly turned into this plastic-like material.

8:57And that gel potty let me taste genuinely does start to drive home that there are so many different use cases a product like this could have. Honestly, I can promise you it wasn't even slightly fishy when I tasted it. Now, I really want to get under the hood of this company, though, and find out who else is involved in pushing Nopla forward. So I'm going to chat to Carline Siebel, their Innovation Director, and see what makes her tick. Well, Carline, thank you for letting me sit down in your office and talk about innovation here at Nopla, I want to start with finding out from you, what was it that made you think, wow, Nopla really can change the world?

9:31For me, it was this completely different approach towards tackling the plastic problem, like looking at a new format, looking at a completely new material, looking at something that is edible. And if it's edible, it means that it can be plastic. So that for me was the click moment. And I love seeing all the stuff on here. We've got like the burger box, and then we've got little forks and spoons. What I love about this is that this is kind of representative of your brain going, what can we do with this technology? Where can we take this technology? So what are you sort of most proud of that you've done in your time at Nopla, would you say?

10:07There's a lot of different things, but I think one of the things that was something that when I started was the seaweed paper. So one of the things that we looked at is how can we use different types of ingredients that come from the seaweed? so not just the the polymers but also how can you use some of the fibers and we started to look at like okay actually can we make a paper out of that as well um so that's one of the things that is like really nice of like how do we make this circle complete and use as much as possible from the source and is this still important because like i look at paper as already a sustainable product rather than plastic so this is still important to be able to do this it's still important because there is a lot of pressure on forest and deforestation.

10:48And at the same time, if we can use the little of virgin materials as possible, that is the best. So it's like utilizing a waste product in a new way. So let's imagine that we're having a conversation about the future of Noppler, right? As the head of innovation, what would you love the future to look like? I would love my biggest challenge to crack is water barrier so one of the things that is a big challenge when you work with such natural ingredients that we do is that nature loves water so how can we tackle the next generation and really like scale up even further and tackle more plastic packaging problems by unlocking this water barrier challenge explain that in more detail to me so for example to in order to unlock the to make something that holds a hot beverage like a coffee cup for example where there's a lot of plastic inside at the moment that is a really difficult thing to i guess replace with our materials just because our materials they love water in general nature loves water and it is a really that's the thing that plastic does a lot of like it creates these barriers around products and to keep it for a long shelf life and the more we can actually tackle some of those barriers the yeah that's going to be the the dream and when you look at these products are you optimistic about the future for our children and our children's children i mean you have to be optimistic and i think i i am in terms of like the the challenges that we're overcoming and what we're working on i think is really it's really exciting to work also in the team that is so driven and like so interdisciplinary So for these challenges to be tackled is really about this multidisciplinary collaboration from the engineers to the scientists to the designers to get these solutions out there because you need to have this like general approach towards it.

12:37And that's, I think, is really exciting of this collaboration to achieve things together. Can you just give our audience a bit of advice about being innovative? Because I think that anyone listening to this that runs their own business, they know that they need to find time to be innovative. but so often you're busy running the business that you can't find time so have you got any any tips or advice for how you can sort of put innovative thinking at the forefront of what you do it's about thinking a bit like being actually always looking out for i would call weak signals so it's things that are interesting and then trying to look a bit into that and then exposing yourself to a lot of different things going to museums or reading articles and things like that that will bring you in terms of like these little puzzle pieces and then at some point you're going to walk somewhere and you come up to a problem and you're like that puzzle piece is going to solve this problem and this is a lot what we're doing I think in terms of like you need to have things that are coming maybe from a different industry or things that you don't expect right you need to almost create the space for the unknown to happen right you don't know yet until you you find out and discover so it's about this like openness I think to different industries and being very curious and at the same time having this approach of like trying things out of like oh like how you'll create an idea of like this we signal and i have this problem and making a quick prototype or something of like oh is that going to fix it or not and trying things out and a lot of like this thinking through making approach i think that that is really like what is exciting and that can help drive some of this innovation and tell me about the culture here as well because one of my other hats i wear is running a production business, right?

14:17And we sometimes have people that come into the business and they're innovative, they have great ideas and they can't believe that where they worked previously, they still had these great ideas but the culture didn't allow those ideas to become reality, right? Whereas I think we do. So in this business, how do you create a culture so that anyone in that room or anyone in any part of the business feels that they can help drive the direction or come up with a cool idea? I think it's allowing the space for people to take a bit of, authority and like to have the space to do things and propose things themselves and that's always the thing to to balance right you're saying of like at the same time you need to make sure that you have this focus and there's this like space that you need to create for experimentation that can be through setting out some play time in your calendar or it can be quite different for different people so i guess it's also like looking at like how can we tailor it for different people to work and some people work better at like let's get this done and like really like laser focus and to get things to scale and some people that work really well and like this more like creative more like ambiguous and less of like gen charge and organization and more of this kind of like free free flowing um so i guess it's like creating the different spaces for different people yeah and what works for you what is the one thing that you do that just fires your creativity i'm making i think making being in the lab trying things out this is when the ideas start to start to happen yeah as long as i'm in the lab there'll be something to try and something to do i think that's the most creative space for me amazing well look nopla needs creativity and innovation so the more of your time i take up the less you can do that so thank you so much for talking to me cheers thank you so much i'm going to continue my investigations all right thanks a lot thank you so much cheers carline bye-bye i love what carline said there about creating space for the unknown opening yourself up to different inputs whether that's through the arts travel nature i think it's so important when solving the puzzle of innovation.

16:17And look, not every entrepreneur can have an innovation director by their side, but we could all learn to just zoom out, I think, and stay open to the world around us when looking for answers. Right, let's head back to Pierre and quiz him about some of the challenges that he's faced bringing Knopla to life. You know, when I started this little film, I spoke about the fact that only 42.5 % of businesses get to five years. And I think it's easy for me to walk around here, see your amazing staff. And And I know your value is probably tens of millions of pounds. So let's talk about the hard stuff, the difficult early years.

16:48What was that first two or three year period actually like? Yeah, well, I think, yeah, of course, it's no overnight success. It's 10 years of showing up, doing the hard stuff and the enjoyable, exciting stuff. And it's all combined. I think that there's definitely a few moments where it feels like it was easy. but I think it's easy to remember just the good bits. In early days, you've got to do everything. You have no support. So that's really hard to prioritize your time, to know what is really worth investing in and what is actually a distraction from working on this. But I think at the heart of it, I was working on this with Rodrigo, my co-founder.

17:29We get along so well. So that really made us power through those hard-to-navigate moments. So was it just two of you at the very beginning? Yeah, so we basically started out of Imperial College, and it was really this slightly crazy idea. So it took a while for us to realize that we really would need to find a way to finance a team of chemists, engineers, designers to really start working on this. The first couple of years, we were just messing around. We didn't know business or anything, so it was a bit of a learning curve, but that was also interesting. I don't think we could have done it another way.

18:04And so did you take investment early on? So we failed. We actually kind of went, tried to raise funding, talked to the angels, the funds. And it was just like an interesting story, but no one was doing this. So he was not filling any boxes. People were like, I don't really want to be the first one to take the risk on this. So eventually, that was actually one of the hard moments. We gave ourselves a deadline with Rodrigo. It's like by the end of the year, we haven't signed any contract or investment or anything. That's it. we've put like a couple of years of our life in this and it hasn't turned into anything.

18:40I think we signed the contract on like the 4th of January so we kind of like kept on going. You cheats. But basically like we went all in. And I think at that point we were like holding back a little bit but we decided let's do like if investors don't want to invest in this let's do a crowdfunding campaign and let's just kind of like put everything we've got into this see if it works. The crowd backs us then we keep on going otherwise we'll just find another job. And after a year of struggling with investors, the crowdfunding campaign was completely day and night. We started the campaign, and in three days, we had raised double the amount we wanted from 900 people all around the world.

19:19The videos had got tens of millions of views. It was just incredible how that group got it and wanted to be part of this journey. And the maybe more traditional investors were like, oh, I don't want to be the first one to take the risk on this. And that launched us. I think it's so inspiring because all too often great success is just on the other side of what feels and looks like a failure at the time and it's getting through that period when 99 % of people would stop and I think that's probably what separates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs that they just keep going that little bit longer and it sometimes does still fail right but actually also sometimes it does what Nopla have done and I love that you said all in that's exactly what Steven Gerrard said was his definition of high performance all in and I think you have to be can I ask about doing deals though and changing people's minds because I know you've done some amazing deals with some huge brands like Tropicana, Lucozade, Just Eat like they have a way of working right so how do you how do you go about convincing an established business to change the way they think to suit your business?

20:23I think they've all been so different and yet there is one thing in common that always has been like equal to success it's a champion it's someone in the organization that gets it that wants change to happen that can navigate for you this relatively complex organization that is very big structurally like completely from different base to to what we are as a startup but that just wants it to succeed and like every time we've had a champion there's amazing things that have happened and sometimes it's not even like the typical company you would think would partner with not plot but it's the right person on the other side that was like i want my legacy to be this in this business i want to be able to tell to my kids that i was not just doing business as usual i was actually kind of like enabling that future solution to happen i love that doing it for your kids is important what about people who are at the start of this journey themselves i'm sure they look at you slightly enviously thinking oh i wish i was where Pierre is and they've got a big journey ahead of them.

21:24What advice would you like to offer them? Yeah, I think it's really hard because I don't think that I actually have figured out a secret sauce or anything. I think it's just a lot of common sense and a lot of going back again and again and again of the same problems. But I think the power of partnerships that is transformational. Sometimes I think we were a little bit tempted at the beginning to be like we've got to develop everything secretly on our own but it's impossible. We're not going to solve this on our own. We need to partner. We need to find ways of working together, take a bit of risk, like sharing things and just kind of like finding the right group that like solves all of this together.

22:02Brilliant. And listen, before I let you get on with your day and get on with letting you change the world, I'd love to know what your definition of high performance is. I think it's like basically like finding the combination of passion and excellent output. I think if you just focus on high performance for the sake of high performance, you're not going to last very long. So you've got to have that heart at the center of it. So for me, it's really that combination. Amazing. I'm so impressed by what you're doing. Thank you. It plays to everything I believe we should be doing with modern businesses.

22:39And I wish you all the very best of luck. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. I'll see myself out, because I know you're busy. Thanks. Thanks, Pam. See you. Well, look, I love that and I hope you did as well. And you know, I actually think that to me, NotPla is what entrepreneurship is all about. They're operating out of some nondescript building on an industrial estate in East London. You'd walk past it and not look twice at it. Yet they're changing our planet's relationship with plastic. It's incredible stuff. Look, good things are happening in British business right now. And Lloyds Bank are perfectly equipped with the ability and the expertise to support you on your business journey.

23:14thank you so much for listening to this episode of from startup to stand out i'll be about soon with another one and for more information just go to the lloyds bank business website thanks for listening

23:44Thank you.