Bad News Boba Lovers
- Angelina Adventa
- Aug 9, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 25, 2020
Who doesn’t know BOBA?
It is a drink that popularly known by the asian people, and especially in my country. We can find thousands of company in Indonesia, starting from foreign company to small business. Even a close friend of mine just started an innovative boba product that not always consumed by drinking but used in cuisines.
The picture above is a great presentation of development in boba product. Those can be a different ingredient, taste, unique packaging, and an aesthetic property for instagram photos. For most people, not having a boba in a day will loose their day. There is always surprises in every bite of pearls. With this brilliant idea, many new companies are appearing and supplies many new job opportunities.
The sales of BOBA predicted to have a promising future. Speaking a little bit of history, boba introduced for the first time in 2000 with a company called Quickly
The company now labelled as a "legend" and it still firing up until now for it's originality. But the selling trend grew sharply from October 2018 to 2019 with two small dip in January and July. Not enough of that, Business Today also predicted the yearly market growth will rise to 7,3% in 2017 to 2023. Nevertheless, based on sales statistic from GrabFood in average Indonesian people consume boba three to four cups per week.
With it’s rapid number of growth, many health consultant concerned by the effect on society health by the sugar and calories level in each cup. But not much people noticed the effect on environmental aspect especially on amount of plastic waste used for product and bag packaging for delivery service. Only coffee products and company have used sustainable material for the packaging such as Starbucks. They also promotes no plastic day with tumblr day which they also produced.
It is true that changing material for beverage company can bring a big challenge. Cited from Fastcompany article, in 2008 Starbucks company struggled to design a new recycle-able cup because not every city had enough capability to conduct the program, which they spend about $10 million on development. But each time they succeed to produce recycle-and-compost-able coffee cup, the process was not compactible to other country than US in cause of different waste management. After a long discussion, they decided to made a bold move such as replacing material for cups, straws to milk container and in-house recycling. Although plastic use for cold beverage is still irreplacable, they solved it by using less plastic material which is reducing 45 percent less greenhouse gas on production. But without their-well-developed brand, product, marketing, and waste management, they won't survived and mantain a good status for their company until now.
Looking back to my country there is one company that managed to implicate zero-waste concept, which is Fore Coffee. With enough investment and mantaining good quality coffee, they provides reusable plastic strawless-design-cups which has thicker and solid consistency, recycled paper cup and lid, and paper bag for deliveries. But there is no enough resources about how they manage material flow from customer. I believe they don't give any hand on waste management in-house or even out-house. It completely depends on how customer really "reuse" the cups and use it responsibly, and relies fully on how recycle company manage their "environmental friendly" material, which in my country is still undeveloped and not facilitated well (this is true, for instance this waste bank company that i researched on my final college assignment payed their employees below the Regional minimum wage and totally unfair looking at how many energy and time they spent).
In case of many new business appearing, it is time for us to make a change to contribute more companies on managing plastic waste solution. Especially to support small business company, there must be some way so they can also takes action on environmental issues. There are some solution that i can suggest.
First, we need more government support. In money, they have to give fee waivers for recycle companies, which are specialized for beverages packaging. They can also use one of business strategy to reduce the selling price for the beverage companies. Beside money, they have to support on human resources to conduct research and development team on designing a proper-more-environmental-friendly packaging.
Second, we should create a whole new company that not only responsible on producing recycled product, but also on the registration and material flow so there is a proper cycle that delivers material from company to company and from producers to companies.
This way, more people can buy more BOBA and buy as many as they can without the guilt feeling of affecting the environment.
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