As businesses across the foodservice sector look to reduce waste and adopt more circular systems, making sustainable choices practical at scale remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges. In this interview, Saxon Wright, Chief Sustainability Officer at BioPak, discusses why reuse systems are reaching a critical tipping point, how initiatives like Borrow by Huskee are helping make circularity mainstream, and why the future of sustainable packaging depends on designing solutions that remove friction for both businesses and consumers.
- You've spent years advocating for a world without waste. Now, as BioPak's first Chief Sustainability Officer and with initiatives like Borrow by Huskee gaining momentum, do you feel the circular economy is finally moving from niche concept to mainstream reality?
A: Yes and no. The conversation has absolutely shifted. Five years ago, I was spending a lot of time explaining why circularity matters. Today, the challenge is less about awareness and more about making circular solutions practical and accessible at scale. What we're seeing with Borrow by Huskee is that reuse becomes mainstream the moment it stops asking anything extra of the customer. And that’s what we are seeing as the tipping point: not when people choose to do the right thing, but when the right thing is simply the easiest option. We're closer than we've ever been, but the next challenge is building the infrastructure and systems that make circularity work at scale.
- As BioPak's new Chief Sustainability Officer, you're stepping into a role focused on protecting and advancing the company's sustainability legacy. In a market increasingly crowded with environmental claims, how do you ensure BioPak and Huskee continue to demonstrate genuine impact rather than simply adding to the noise?
A: The honest answer is that you earn trust through transparency. Anyone can make a claim; far fewer will publish the data behind it, the legitimacy of the claims, the rigour behind certifications and where they're falling short. For us that means measurable, third-party-verifiable outcomes – and playing a role as educators, advocates and learners. For example, understanding the cups in circulation, recovery rates, diversion from landfill - rather than vague or ambiguous language. BioPak and Huskee have spent years doing the hard operational work required to turn ambition into impact. My role is to bring the full BioPak Group portfolio to market and focus on solutions for customers, rather than just product supply. In a crowded market, the antidote to noise is specificity.
- You've helped build businesses around the idea that waste is a design flaw. As CSO, what do you see as the biggest opportunities, and risks, in maintaining that vision as the company continues to scale globally?
A: The opportunity is leverage: a circular system gets better the bigger it gets, because reuse logistics, washing infrastructure and return points all benefit from density. The risk is the opposite failure mode — scaling the volume without scaling the rigour, and quietly drifting back toward single-use convenience because it's easier. My job is to make sure "waste is a design flaw" remains a decision-making principle across the business as we grow into new markets with different waste systems and regulations. Good single-use is still circular, if the full lifecycle is managed, like we see with compostable foodservice packaging products.
- Circularity is often discussed from a systems perspective, but ultimately, it's customers who determine whether solutions succeed. How is customer feedback shaping the next generation of products and services across BioPak and Huskee?
A: Constantly, and often in ways that challenge our assumptions. The most useful feedback is the friction - where a return point is inconvenient, where a lid doesn't seal, where a café's dishwasher can't cope. Customers don't tell you they want circularity, they tell you when reuse isn't convenient, and that's the signal we design against. At BioPak, we often talk about the need for a systems reset, and that starts with understanding how products, infrastructure and people interact in the real world. The next generation of products and services will be shaped by operational realities and measurable outcomes, not assumptions, because that's where meaningful and scalable change happens.
- Many businesses want to embrace reuse but worry about operational complexity. What have you learned about designing circular solutions that fit seamlessly into the realities of hospitality and foodservice operations?
A: The biggest lesson is humility about how thin the margins of time and space are in a busy venue. A circular solution that adds significant time to a transaction will fail, no matter how good its environmental story. So, we continue to design and adapt around the operator's existing workflow rather than asking them to change it. It's once again about removing the friction to make reuse is convenient for customers and the end user.
- Some still view commercial growth and sustainability as competing priorities. How do you respond to that perception, and how can business growth become a catalyst for accelerating circular economy outcomes?
A: I'd challenge the assumption that growth and sustainability must always be at odds. In a traditional linear model, growth often means greater resource use and more waste. In a circular model, growth can strengthen the system by increasing participation, improving recovery rates and creating the scale needed to invest in infrastructure. When sustainability is built into the business model itself, growth becomes a powerful catalyst for environmental outcomes rather than a barrier to them.
- As demand for circular solutions increases, what indicators do you look at to measure success beyond revenue, particularly when it comes to waste reduction, material recovery and long-term behavioural change?
A: Revenue tells you people are buying; however, it doesn't tell you whether the system is delivering environmental outcomes. We look at metrics such as reuse cycles, recovery rates, contamination levels and the volume of material kept in circulation. We're also interested in longer-term behavioural change. The real measure of success is whether circular behaviours become embedded and self-sustaining over time.
- There are plans to more closely integrate Huskee and other brands within the broader business. What opportunities does that create for expanding the reach of circular solutions and engaging new audiences in reuse?
A: Bringing the four BioPak brands – decent packaging and Bygreen in addition to BioPak and Huskee - closer together means a customer no longer has to assemble their own circular solution from separate pieces. We can offer the packaging, the reuse system and the recovery pathway as one coherent offer, which dramatically lowers the barrier for a venue to participate. It also lets us reach audiences who'd never have sought out reuse on their own but encounter it because it's built into the broader BioPak relationship they already have.
- Consumers increasingly expect sustainability to be embedded across the entire customer experience. How does bringing brands like Huskee more fully into the BioPak ecosystem help deliver on that expectation?
A: Consumers have stopped treating sustainability as a separate feature. Rather, they expect it to be integrated into the products and experiences they choose in the same way they expect those products to simply work. Bringing Huskee and BioPak closer together creates an opportunity to connect more parts of the circular system. From the packaging solutions businesses use through to the reuse experiences customers interact with. Sustainability shouldn't rely on individual effort alone, it needs to be designed into the way products and services operate. With that being said, although I think it’s important that sustainability is baked in and not an 'extra' cost, the environment has been subsidising us for so long, so ultimately everyone needs to accept that perhaps there's a small price to do the right thing. We have to minimise and manage that transition to create a sustainable future.
- The launch of Borrow by Huskee at Carriageworks Farmers Market marks a significant shift from asking customers to opt into reuse to making it the default. Why is that distinction so important, and what does it tell us about the future of reusable systems?
A: This is the most important shift we're working towards. For a long time, reuse has relied on the conscientious minority; the people willing to remember, to plan ahead and to go out of their way to make a better choice. That approach has a ceiling and it doesn't scale. The opportunity with Borrow by Huskee is to change the experience entirely and make reuse the easiest option, not an extra effort or an extra cost. The future of reusable systems is about designing environments where reuse becomes the normal way things are done.
- With around 1,500 reusable cups circulating across Single O, Reuben Hills and Colombian Connection Coffee, Carriageworks is testing reuse at precinct scale rather than within a single café. What key lessons are you hoping to learn from the project, and what would success look like after the first year?
A: What's exciting about Carriageworks is watching a whole venue go completely single-use-free, not just one café trialling it in isolation. That gives us real data on what happens when reuse is the default across an entire, closed-loop site - looking at return rates, how many times each cup actually circulates, where cups leak out of the system, and how customer behaviour shifts over time. Success is when customers stop noticing the system altogether and reuse simply becomes part of the normal experience.