Eco-friendly supermarket: Good Club founder Ben Patten aims to make household staples "truly sustainable and accessible to all"

He was once CEO of FarmDrop – the online grocer famous for delivering fresh produce to customers straight from independent producers – and now, Ben Patten has started a new environmentally-friendly venture.

Good Club is an online supermarket, currently selling sustainable products direct to consumers around the UK – so far, so straight forward. However, Patten has greater ambitions.

He wants the business to become the world’s first zero-waste online supermarket, one which operates through a closed loop system in terms of product packaging.

Thanks to a successful campaign on Crowdcube – which has, thus far, raised over £400,000 – his dream is now within reach.

Here, Future London caught up with Patten to find out how he sees his closed loop system working, and what happens now he has the green light to get started.

What is the concept of the Good Club?

Our aim is to make household staples truly sustainable and accessible to all, in terms of how products are made, used and disposed of.

Our latest development – and we are just finalising a round of investment on Crowdcube to finance the plan – is to create a ‘closed loop’ system, recovering product and delivery packaging for cleaning and reuse.

What makes your packaging innovative?

We don’t think recycling will ever be efficient enough to meet future demand and reduce pollution, so the fact that customers will be able to reuse packaging is a key innovation.

However, to help people adopt the service, we will need to be innovative throughout: with the design of the website, the packaging, marketing, the business model and more.

What happens to your delivery boxes and packaging after they've come to the end if their 200-use cycle – can they then be recycled?

The first goal for our packaging innovation is to ensure the process is efficient and convenient, but we are consulting packaging material experts and the end goal is to only use materials that have a low production footprint (e.g. low carbon intensity), high durability and high recyclability.

Single-use plastic is often used to prevent food from getting damaged in transit – how are your products protected?

We are looking at more hardy materials that we think will fare even better in transit.

There is a challenge with keeping the weight down, but volume is almost as important a consideration, and we can design packaging that can pack more efficiently by using customised delivery boxes.

Is there a criteria goods have to meet before you stock them?

That’s a really good question because sustainability is in the eye of the beholder to some degree. We will not list certain products to protect our customers from products we believe are not sustainably produced, but that will not be set in stone as we all have a responsibility to be open to developing our understanding of what being sustainable means.

We will also help customers better understand the different ways in which our products are sustainable so they can find the products that match their values.

Is your model the 'future of supermarket shopping'?

In more ways than one, we think. For a start, systems for reusable product containers are a necessary trend. You only need to see Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall picking out UK council's recycling from an illegal dump in Malaysia to see the limits to single-use product containers and recycling.

The impact of Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion point the way to a growing demand for sustainable consumption and the fact we're seeing legislation on these issues and leading Brexiteers are competing on environmental creds, tells you a lot about how quickly the debate is moving.

We also think online has only really got started in groceries. It’s at 5-10% penetration depending on who you listen to, but a future transition to online is inevitable.

You’ve successfully raised £400k. What happens now?

This is the fun part. We are working with a range of experts, initially to do some very small scale testing. The plan is then to have 5-10% of our customers participating in a closed-loop trial from the autumn, before rolling it out to all customers next year.

We asked our customers who wanted to be one of the first 50 to participate in the initial trials, over 100 responded in less than an hour.