Last week we talked about packaging and how supermarkets adjust their logistics to the packaging to satisfy customer expectations. In one part of the class, we talked about water packaging, so I remembered one that was presented as an ideation example in a startup program I took two years ago. And that was an innovative edible, biodegradable and jelly-based package for water called Ooho.

If we take a deep look at Ooho’s idea, we can see that the package is coming from Skipping Rocks Lab, an innovative sustainable packaging company based in London. They are explorers in the use of natural elements extracted from plants and algae to create containers with low environmental impact. With this and all their products, they try to combat a real environmental problem, which is plastic pollution, substituting the arrival of 1 billion plastic bottles in the ocean every year and ending with the emission of 300 million kilograms of CO2. This type of packages not only can reduce the environmental impact of bottles but also can transform the whole logistic process for supermarkets and water suppliers as a new unit load support device.

Although it might be a possible alternative to plastic containers for some liquids (in my opinion, an awesome solution in terms of creativity and ideation), it looks like it hasn’t been accepted by customers and they face a supply chain logistics problem due to Ooho’s short lifespan. So as Bill Gross explains in the following video, this might be an example of one of the most important factors for startup/innovation failure which is bad timing but this doesn’t mean that in the near future we end up eating from jelly bags.