With a background in wine and design, these entrepreneurs aim to produce 1 million tonnes of marine biodegradable and compostable biopolymers by 2023. In the final of our series on FMCG industry start-ups vying for their big break, we talk with Jordy and Julia Kay, co-founders of Great Wrap. Inside FMCG: Who are you? Jordy and Julia Kay: We are the founders of Great Wrap. Jordy was a natural winemaker and I was an architect. We were both passionate about doing something meaningful in our past
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With a background in wine and design, these entrepreneurs aim to produce 1 million tonnes of marine biodegradable and compostable biopolymers by 2023. In the final of our series on FMCG industry start-ups vying for their big break, we talk with Jordy and Julia Kay, co-founders of Great Wrap.Inside FMCG: Who are you?Jordy and Julia Kay: We are the founders of Great Wrap. Jordy was a natural winemaker and I was an architect. We were both passionate about doing something meaningful in our past careers and it led us to think deeper about how we could make a more meaningful contribution to the world, for future generations. What do you do? We manufacture home compostable cling wrap, for home and industrial use at our solar-powered factory on the Mornington Peninsula. The majority of what goes into making Great Wrap is made from food waste.We take potato waste and ferment it down into our feedstocks to make our cling and pallet wrap. Our cling wrap is certified home compostable, meaning it will break down in home compost in under 180 days – that’s faster than an orange peel! We are also working with Monash University to create a marine biodegradable solution, which should be ready this year. Our team has focused on localising manufacturing for a product that is typically imported, all while running a factory on renewables, which we’re really proud of. Great Wrap founders Jordy and Julia Kay.It’s alarming that 150,000 tonnes of cling wrap go into Australian landfills each year, so we’re going to change that! We saw the problem that everything on a shelf today has once been shipped on a pallet and wrapped in petroleum-based plastic wrap, and decided to be the solution. We have worked hard to commercialise a solution to the plastic problem that will allow homes and businesses to function as they do currently. We are price competitive with conventional plastics, so there is no excuse not to use our compostable alternative. And by the end of 2023 we aim to be producing 1 million tonnes of marine biodegradable and compostable biopolymers. If food waste were a country it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after the US and China. Statistics like this drive the Great Wrap team to work hard. What’s your biggest achievement?At the moment every day feels like our biggest achievement. We have recently set up a manufacturing facility where we make our home compostable wrap on the Mornington Peninsula, and we’re surrounded by a beautiful team of staff. We’re very motivated by this.Where to from here?By 2023 we aim to be making 1 million tonnes of marine biodegradable and home compostable biopolymers, by then we’ll have started manufacturing other products, not just home and industrial wrap.
