Five Seasons Ventures leads €7M investment round in reusable containers start-up
Foodtech venture capital firm Five Seasons Ventures has helped to close a €7M seed funding round for the French start-up Pyxo, a start-up making reusable food containers for the catering and hospitality industry.
The firm led the funding round alongside French-based global investment group Eurazeo, small-business supporter Evolem, and Alliance for Impact, an organisation that supports entrepreneurs looking to bring positive societal and environmental changes.
Pyxo’s reusable containers are made with all natural products. These include reed flour, which is sourced from natural French wetlands in Vienne and Brittany, castor oil which is GMO and deforestation-free and grown in India, and talc powder which is taken from Ariège in Southern France.
The containers have a 10-year guarantee in the dishwasher and are also recyclable once they reach the end of their product life.
When a restaurant purchases their food containers, the QR code or NFC chip on the receptacles allows for Pyxo to track which companies in the industry are using them.
Pyxo also offers a service for dealing with dirty containers, by setting up cleaning centres across France which pick up used containers from restaurants at closing time and swap them with clean ones. The scanning system through the app makes it easy to keep track of what is being cleaned.
For take-away food being delivered and eaten at home, customers can also use the Pyxo app to find the closest collection point for the containers, rather than returning them to the restaurants they purchased the food from.
The company currently sells to a range of quick service food businesses including Sodexo, Ripayon, McDonalds and Naturaliste.
Pyxo’s launch in 2018 came at a good time. In a bid to minimise waste, France passed a new law in 2020 making it compulsory for restaurants to only use reusable food containers by January 2023.
With the new funding, Pyxo intend to increase their points of sales within the hospitality industry to around 2,000. They also plan to take on 70 new employees.
Five Seasons Ventures’ other sustainable food-related investments include This, Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.
