Fika with Richard Milton of Huskup
From adversity comes opportunity. Huskup® is here to disrupt our single use coffee cup culture and become a symbol of change
Richard founded Tread Light in 2017, when he realised the environmental impact of single use packaging in big business. Although we’re all familiar with the double-wrapped single-use cardboard coffee cups headlining our high streets, less obvious is the single use coffee cup explosion inside the workplace. Reports of operational supply chain initiatives are much less sexy in a Shareholder report than heartwarming tales of ‘giving back’ and ‘green investment’ goals. But they shouldn’t be. Disposable coffee cup usage in the UK has reached staggering levels with the House of Commons Environmental Audit calculating that approximately 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups are used in the UK each year. That’s 7 million a day, which when lined up would wrap around the earth 5.5 times.
Waves of positive change
He began his career at Planglow, the food labelling & compostable packaging people providing caterers with industry-leading eco-products. First as their Key Account Manager, then heading up Marketing & Design. His clients were commercial caterers looking for ways to elevate their offering in the face of hospitality retailers such Pret-a-Manger popping up on every street corner, tempting workers away from their desks, eschewing the in-house canteen.
Pret-a-Manger were the high street leaders of card-based packaging in the late 80s, prompting large employee-based business to up their in-house catering game.
From adversity comes strength and opportunity
After Planglow, Richard went on to become co-founder of a business offering bespoke packaging solutions for brands in the ‘grab & go’ market. The end of this chapter came with its challenges but without these challenges Huskup® would not exist. Huskup® raises the bar. His complete pivot from single-use packaging to multiple use coffee cups from a waste product helped lighten the load. He designed a catering-based solution that enables businesses to align with their environmental goals.
You see, recycling should be the last resort according to the waste hierarchy. Single use should always be last choice. In retrospect having the time to develop a better solution, full control of his current business, and a slow growth strategy, Richard reflects that he’s in much better position to have a positive impact than he might have been otherwise.
Tread Light is the embodiment of poacher turned gamekeeper. Instead of trying to create and sell more unnecessary waste, the ethos is all about reduce.
The single use coffee cup problem
In the UK, we throw away a staggering 2.5 billion paper coffee cups every year. Of those, only 6% are recycled. The rest end up in landfill where they produce an annual carbon footprint of over 152,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent of the carbon dioxide produced by 33,000 cars each year. And while paper cups are recyclable, it’s a complicated and costly process as the plastic coating inside has to be removed before the paper can be broken down into pulp. The environmental cost becomes even clearer when you consider the 1.45 billion litres of water used in the process. The cradle to grave cost of a paper coffee cup requires significant energy, contributing to environmental degradation.
Change is not easy
Remember when Waitrose launched ‘Bag for Life’ which was soon followed by the Plastic Bag Levy. Plastic bag usage has reduced more than 95% and £180m raised for good causes from the revenue. Today most would rather balance and juggle the grocers than face the shame of a plastic bag purchase. With legislation, consumer behaviour has been successfully changed.
Throwing a better party
But Richard has a great point that, in the words of a well-known frog ‘it’s not easy being green’. It’s still not seen as sexy. And this is where his design skills come to the fore. Huskup® is a design led brand for a reason. With his past rooted in making sexy-looking labels to sell more sandwiches, he knows that presentation is everything. So, if he’s throwing a better party than the rest, they will come!
How business can benefit
So, Richard is throwing the best party ever. What does that mean for business. He shares an example. A well-known banking provider uses 1.5M paper cups a year in their nearby head-office. Provided so that staff can take coffee from the machine to their desks. It costs around £300,000 to buy the cups before they are paid to be taken away and burnt. By working with Huskup®, the company would not only be making a visible declaration of their environmental intentions to staff, the would be able to divert funds to social impact projects and live out their ESG policy.
He is quick to recognise however, that Huskup® will not change the world, but a Huskup® is a symbol of change, and a design-led way to raise awareness and prompt conversation. We agree, that small, and seemingly insignificant iterative changes that do make a collective difference.
We quickly touch on Bath Rugby. Richard is a staunch supporter, has played rugby throughout his life and still meets with his old school-parent network every week for a spot of touch rugby, to keep both his body and mind sharp. Socialising over a pint in a reusable glass afterwards, this same group have ‘created billion-dollar businesses and cured the worlds social problems’ Richard jokes. Back to Bath Rugby and the seeming back-step from reusable to recyclable cups on match days.
The public announcement on their website makes no sense to Richard and indeed many other supporters. A quick google search reveals that a reusable plastic cup has a lower carbon footprint than a recyclable plastic cup. Not only that, but for 10 years the club has been educating young fans on good environmental practice. There are calls for the club to follow the example of Forest Green Rovers, the greenest football club or The Green Gazelles Rugby Club, an eco-focused rugby club in Wiltshire, considered one of the greenest rugby clubs in the world. It's a PR opportunity up for grabs, in the wake of headlines announcing the closure of the last coal-fired power station in the UK last month.
Where did the idea from Huskup® come from?
When he was living in Australia, he came across KeepCup. Founded by café owners Abigail and Jamie Forsyth in 1998 in response to the growing use of disposable cups and immediately people recognised KeepCup as the solution to a problem they were concerned about - single-use packaging and the volume of waste entering the environment. It stayed with him. So, when searching for an alternative that could be customised he found a brilliant by-product of the rice milling industry.
Strong with short, tough fibres that are naturally resistant to moisture, rice husk is a great substrate that is both functional and lends itself to customisation. The proprietary blend of natural starches is used to help the product keep its shape without fossil fuel plastic.
The opportunity to penetrate both B2B and B2C markets is vast, with ‘lots more places to expand’ and with the amount of plastic in the world set to double by 2050, there is also opportunity to be THE leading green reusable alternative. Compounded by innovation in reusable tech, Richard has some exciting growth plans for Tread Light.
Traits of entrepreneurship
When asked where his entrepreneurial spirit originated, Richard explains that while he towed the line at school and excelled at sport, he was always interested in finding better ways to do things. And on a whim, his parents sold the family home to set up a BnB in Cornwall, which might have added to his attitude to risk.
He impresses that ‘the main driver to launch his business was not the lure of riches’, rather to do the right thing. Be a great role model to his children and live a good story. The lessons learned in co-founding and exiting his first business have certainly made him a better businessman. In it for the positive impact, the long-haul, for societal not personal gain.
Well-researched, passionate, driven and focused are words I would use to describe Richard. Not answerable to investors, he is free to tread his own path and follow his instincts. His success lies not only in his resilience and curiosity, but his ability to bring people together in the room and to tell the right story.
We end our fika with a line from his favourite poem ‘if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same’. A fitting finish that reflects Richard’s calm outlook on life as he sets about leaving his legacy.
Richard and I met for Fika at Dexters Coffee Shop on Bathwick Hill, Bath. Stockists of Huskup® and good coffee. The pain au chocolat are some of the finest in Bath. Always guaranteed of a warm welcome from Claire and her team, it’s pooch-friendly too.