Gaeastar, a startup that makes compostable drinking cups out of clay, is officially launching its U.S. pilot with Verve Coffee on April 22nd. Verve, a Santa Cruz-based coffee chain with locations across California, will begin using Gaeastar’s coffee cups in three locations and will expand to other locations over time. The pilot launch comes after the two companies have worked over the past year to refine the prototype and integrate the cups into Verve’s business.
For those unfamiliar with Gaeastar, the company has developed a proprietary 3D printing process that makes cups out of clay. The idea behind the company came to company CEO Sanjeev Mankotia after walking around New Delhi in the mid-2000s with his cousin. According to Mankotia, after his cousin finished a chai ordered from a street vendor, she threw the cup on the ground, breaking it into pieces. Mankotia, who was born in India but spent most of his life in the U.S., pointed out that she was littering and asked her why she had done so.
“She said, ‘It’s made out of dirt, why do you care?’” Mankotia told The Spoon last year. “And I didn’t have a response to that.”
Mankotia began to think about whether these types of cups could be used as a replacement for single-use plastics. Typically, the containers in India were handcrafted by local artisans, who sourced clay from riverbeds and made hundreds of them per day to dry in the sun, but he knew this approach would need to be adapted for the Western market.
He realized it would take a 3D printer to produce these containers at scale. However, no printers on the market were designed for the high-volume output needed to make thousands of cups daily. Over time, he and a team of engineers developed a 3D printer and built the company’s first micro-factory in Berlin in 2022. Today, the company supplies a Zurich-based coffee roaster named V-Cafe.
For its launch in the US, Gaeastar built a micro-factory in the Dogpatch industrial district of San Fransisco. The micro-factory is roughly 7500 square feet and has four of the company’s 3D printers working to make cups.
To supply the California micro-factory, the company is sourcing the clay from Sacramento, which is slightly different from the clay they are sourcing in Germany, which leads to slight differences in the finished product. For example, the California clay has a much higher iron content, which results in a finished cup with a much deeper red than those made in Germany.
While he initially thought the company would want to standardize the process and the finished product, Mankotia says that he eventually realized that slight differences in the finished product resulting from hyper-local sourcing are one of the things that their customers would celebrate.
“That’s the uniqueness of it,” Mankotia said. “Each cup comes out slightly different and has its own fingerprint in some way, which we have been delighted to see the customers love.”
Today, Gaeastar prints the cups during the day and fires them in a kiln overnight, but is exploring ways to make the process quicker. One idea the company is exploring is to integrate automation to produce cups more quickly. They are also examining using pulsed energy to finish printed cups faster than traditional fire-heat kilns.
During this initial rollout to Verve customers, the roaster will offer Gaestar cups as an upgrade option for $2. In the long term, Mankotia believes that his cups could become the primary choice for a drinking vessel as single-use falls increasingly out of favor.
“This single-use concept will go away, whether it happens two or ten years from now,” he said. “What we have created is really a new category. It’s not your $40 Stanley mug. It’s not your single-use, disposable paper plastic cup.”
“We’re refining it, not only the product but also the business model. That’s why we wanted these pilot partners with us at the start of the journey. We want to develop this product for the customer, not to sit in the lab and try to sell somebody a commodity.”
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This post originally appeared on TechToday.