The startup that wants you to eat the packaging
It began as a wobbling bubble of water in a student kitchen. A decade later, a London company is quietly replacing plastic in stadiums, takeaways and sandwich shops with seaweed.
The first time most people met Notpla, they drank it. At the London Marathon, runners were handed small, wobbling spheres of sports drink wrapped in a clear membrane. They bit through the skin, swallowed, and either ate the wrapper or dropped it, knowing it would break down within weeks. There was no bottle, no lid, and nothing to recycle.
That little bubble, called Ooho, made the company famous. But the real story is what two former design students built after it.
A packaging engineer with a guilty conscience
Pierre Paslier trained as an engineer in France and went to work as a packaging engineer for L'Oréal in Paris. One of his projects stayed with him: redesigning a face cream jar from glass to plastic, a change that meant around 30 extra tonnes of plastic being produced every year. He had helped make the problem bigger, and he wanted to work on the opposite.
Rodrigo García González, from Spain, had studied architecture and industrial design in Sweden, and had spent years making sculptures and furniture out of plastic waste. The two met on Innovation Design Engineering, a joint master's programme run by Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art, and graduated in 2014.
Learning from fruit
García González had become fascinated by a simple observation: nature already packages liquids beautifully. Fruit, eggs and cells all hold water inside thin, natural skins that break down when they are no longer needed. Using seaweed extracts in a kitchen, the pair started making fragile, edible membranes around water.
They called their company Skipping Rocks Lab, after a trip to New Zealand, and made a surprising early decision: they published a video showing anyone how to make Ooho at home. It went viral, with one version watched around 20 million times. Giving the recipe away cost them nothing and made them known around the world before they had a real product.
They gave away the recipe for free, and it made them famous before they had a product to sell.
From party trick to product
An edible water bubble is a brilliant demo but a difficult business. It is fragile, has a short shelf life and suits only a few occasions, like marathons and festivals. So the founders pointed the same idea at a much bigger problem: the plastic hidden in everyday food packaging.
Most takeaway boxes that look like cardboard are actually lined with a thin layer of plastic to keep grease and liquid in, which makes them hard to recycle. Notpla developed a coating made from seaweed and plants that does the same job without plastic. The company renamed itself Notpla, short for "not plastic", and launched its seaweed-lined takeaway box in 2021.
In 2022 it won the Earthshot Prize, the award founded by Prince William to back solutions to the planet's biggest environmental problems, worth £1 million. For a company that started with bubbles, it was a sign that the idea had grown up.
Where you will find it
Today Notpla makes more than 50 designs, from burger boxes and chip trays to cutlery and sandwich packs with a clear seaweed window. Its packaging is used at stadiums including Tottenham Hotspur, Twickenham, Aston Villa and the O2 Arena, at IKEA's Oxford Street restaurant, and by partners such as Just Eat and the catering giant Compass Group. By 2025, it said it had replaced more than 21 million single-use plastic items across Europe.
Investors have followed. Notpla raised £10 million in 2021, then a further £20 million in 2024 from backers including Horizons Ventures and the Schmidt Family Foundation, bringing its total to around £35 million. The new money is aimed at expanding into the United States.
The strategy: become the Gore-Tex of packaging
Notpla's cleverest move is that it asks almost nothing of the person at the end of the chain. The chip tray still holds the chips. The box still keeps the noodles warm. Nobody has to change their habits. The difference only appears after it is thrown away, when it can go into compost, recycling or general waste without leaving plastic behind.
That makes the real customer the business in the middle: the stadium, the restaurant chain, the caterer. For them, plastic is becoming a regulatory and reputational headache. The European Union's rules on single-use plastics keep tightening, and in 2023 testing by the Dutch government reportedly found Notpla's material to be the only plastic-free alternative that met the rules. Regulation is doing part of Notpla's selling for it.
The long-term plan is even bigger than boxes. Rather than only selling finished packaging, Notpla wants to supply its coating to the companies that make paperboard, so its material ends up inside other people's products. Its team talks about becoming a household ingredient brand, like Gore-Tex in jackets or Tetra Pak in cartons. It aims to replace a billion units of plastic by 2030.
What has to go right
Plastic is extraordinarily cheap, and supported by decades of factories built around it. Notpla's material needs to get close enough on price that switching is an easy decision, not a sacrifice. Seaweed supply has to grow reliably, from farms in places like France, Spain and South America. And a coating business depends on persuading large, cautious manufacturers to change how they make things.
Why it matters
Most sustainability stories ask people to change. Notpla's asks nothing of you at all. If it succeeds, you will eat a burger from a seaweed-lined box at a football match and never know. That invisibility is exactly the point: the best solutions are the ones nobody has to think about.
Would you eat your packaging?
