Well, would you look at that – our Schulz Organic Dairy Milk in Glass project is celebrating its third birthday. They say time flies when you’re having fun, and for the team here at Schulz fun looks like keeping as much plastic out of our business as possible!*
(*More on this later…)
Our Milk in Glass story started back in October 2017 when we first started providing milk in returnable, refillable glass bottles at our Farmers Markets. Why? Well, as our founder Simon Schulz said at the time: “I'm mindful of how bad single-use plastics are for our environment and I feel really uncomfortable that as a business we contribute to the problem.”
“I trialled glass-bottled milk at our stand at Farmers Markets,” he recounts. “We accepted returns of these same glass bottles to clean, refill and resell them. On our first week we sold out within thirty minutes, and the demand just kept growing.”
So you could say we were onto a good thing.
In August 2018 we launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the equipment needed to release 3000 glass bottles a week to our retailers. We overshot our funding target, and voila! Milk in Glass was released to the world. We had a wonderful cohort of founding retailers join us from day one, as well as many loyal customers who quickly converted to the new way of buying (and returning) their bottles of milk.
The challenges of Covid have meant that bottle return rates have slightly dropped over the last three years – the average return rate is currently 74% – but we also know that there’s a lot of love out there for our bottles and they are somewhat of a collectors’ item! For those of you who are regularly returning, congratulations on your cleanliness and preparation. For the best results, we need your returned bottles to be sparkling clean and free from lids and collars. More often than not, this is what we receive – thank you.
In 2021 we upped the environmental ante when we introduced a pilot partnership with Rethink Recycling Co-op to help recycle the plastic lids and collars. Although our lid collection collaboration with Rethink Recycle is currently paused due to to a processing issue, stay tuned for the next phase of the pilot program. We also won a whole bunch of awards last year – some for the milk and some for the glass – which reminded us just how valued this product is by both consumers and the industry.
But while all the awards are nice, it’s the plastic-saved results that really do the talking: over the last three years we have diverted 26.8 tonnes of plastic from landfill. That’s the equivalent weight of two massive farm tractors, or 60 Jersey cows!
Thank you to EVERYONE – customers, retailers, staff, supporters – who have helped us build to this result. It’s a brilliant effort, and it is still only the beginning of what we can achieve. Onwards and upwards for Schulz Milk in Glass!
So, what are we doing next? Well, with Milk in Glass flourishing we’re hoping to add more Victorian retailers to our stockist list in 2022. And our drive towards packaging innovation certainly hasn’t stalled, as we’re about to launch a brand new product in fully compostable packaging!
Keen followers of our social media accounts will know what we’re talking about… and for everyone else, stay tuned for a tasty new Schulz Organic Dairy product that is due to launch very soon!