Visa and Uber Eats Team to Offer Restaurants Green Packaging

Visa has teamed with Uber Eats to help restaurants offer sustainable packaging.

The partnership will give qualifying Uber Eats restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Madrid access to a $1 million fund for green packaging, the companies said in a Monday (Jan. 16) news release.

“Single-use packaging is used in nearly every takeout order worldwide — with Visa and our restaurant partners we can work towards reducing waste and helping small businesses thrive,” said Pierre-Dmitri Gore-Coty, Uber’s global head of delivery.

The partnership is happening as consumers scale back on their restaurant orders, according to recent PYMNTS research.

The December edition of PYMNTS’ Restaurant Digital Divide study, The 2022 Restaurant Digital Divide: Restaurant Customers React To Rising Costs, Declining Service, found that, across generations, a majority of consumers have made changes in response to rising prices.

Eighty-eight percent of millennials and Generation Z consumers, 87% of bridge millennials, and 85% of Generation X diners reported making such changes.

The study found that the age group least likely to alter their dining habits were seniors and baby boomers, but even three-quarters of these consumers reported making some changes.

The most common change for diners to make in response to economic challenges was cutting down on the frequency with which they buy from restaurants. Forty percent of baby boomers and seniors, 36% of Gen Xers, 28% of bridge millennials, 23% of millennials and 27% of Gen Z consumers reported doing so.

These findings lend credence to Visa and Uber’s argument that small restaurateurs want to offer sustainable packaging but find it difficult to do so because of cost and supply chain issues.

Yet the transition is happening in the food industry, Martin Davalos, partner at FoodTech-focused Czech investment firm McWin, told PYMNTS last year.

“Single-use plastics will disappear pretty soon in Europe,” Davalos said, and plastic-free food packaging will be key to that change.

Fueling the movement are a number of companies experimenting with a variety of biodegradable packaging alternatives made from renewable resources.

Among them is Germany’s Arekapak, which developed a line of packaging solutions made from sun-dried palm leaves, and London’s NotPla, which uses seaweed and plant and mineral extracts to create plastic-like films that can package food and dissolve in water afterward.