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September 14, 2018 – With consumers embracing increasingly eco-conscious lives, breakthrough innovation specialist Cambridge Consultants today announce their latest partnership, which is set to transform the business of BeeBee Wraps, a UK-based start-up on a mission to reduce our reliance on single-use plastic food wrapping and cut down on food wastage.
BeeBee Wraps has developed a reusable beeswax food wrap that is a sustainable alternative to single-use plastics. Cambridge Consultants has designed a bespoke manufacturing process that enables production to be accelerated by a factor of 30, while remaining consistent with the sustainability principles that guide this fast-growing business.
The brainchild of entrepreneur Kath Austin, who cooked up the idea in her kitchen in 2017, BeeBee Wraps has enjoyed remarkable growth. Starting life as a busy grassroots operation, this technology innovation hit the national press in January 2018 and has since found a loyal community of customers and advocates. The materials used are sustainable and ethically sourced and at the end of their life can simply be composted. But with an uncompromising approach to sustainability and product quality, continued expansion required a breakthrough in production methods.
A natural partner to the ambitious, Cambridge Consultants applies vision, insight and science-led innovation to transform markets. The project team quickly established that off-the-shelf solutions would not be suitable with a difficult organic matter such as beeswax. Instead the team used sustainability-led mechanical design and process improvement expertise to build a unique, energy efficient production system that improves the quality and consistency of the BeeBee Wraps product, whilst radically speeding up production.
The new process enables one person to produce a day’s worth of material in just 15 minutes, around 30 times faster than the current method. This ability to scale up ensures BeeBee Wraps is future-proofed and able to fulfil rising customer demand in the foreseeable future.
“This is the sort of project that really energizes our team. It’s an opportunity to deliver a solution that really makes a difference to a growing business,” said Cameron Watson, project team leader at Cambridge Consultants. “In keeping with the sustainability credentials of our client and their product, we also wanted to ensure that the resulting process improvement would not only be efficient but also improve quality, a vital measure for a product designed for conscious re-use.”
“BeeBee Wraps began as a kitchen-table enterprise and has experienced enormous growth in a short span of time. Scaling production to meet growing demand meant working alongside experts in the field to guarantee we hit the ground running,” said Kath Austin, founder of BeeBee Wraps. “The chance to work with Cambridge Consultants was like standing on the shoulders of giants. The team delivered meticulously tested results consistent with our environmental mission and we’re looking to the future with confidence, with an efficient, sustainable and rapid manufacturing process.”
Notes to editors
About BeeBee Wraps
BeeBee Wraps manufacture sustainable, plastic-free food storage used as a clingfilm and plastic replacement. BeeBee Wraps are made using organic cotton infused with a beeswax, tree resin and jojoba oil formula. These natural, compostable ingredients are easily shaped around food using the heat of your hands and create a seal allowing food to breathe and stay fresh for longer, compared to plastic.
CEO and founder, Kath Austin, started BeeBee Wraps in her kitchen in 2017 and has since seen fast growth in an emerging “eco-market”, responding to public concern over plastic pollution. The company is built on sustainable and ethical principles which run throughout the business from cotton grower to the BeeBee Wrap used in your kitchen, and its mission to reduce plastic pollution and food waste sits at its heart.
For more information:
BeeBee Wraps
Kath Austin
CEO and Founder
T 01223 778816 M 07971 498937
Kath.austin@beebeewraps.com
About Cambridge Consultants and Capgemini
About Cambridge Consultants
As the deep tech powerhouse of Capgemini, Cambridge Consultants (CC), is a global team of 800 bright, talented people. We are united by the ambition to turn brilliant ideas into technologies, products and services that have never been seen before. And which will transform business, society and the planet. Deep tech is a mindset; a bold strategy that harnesses radical science and engineering to achieve things no-one else can. It enables our clients to gain unassailable commercial advantage from defendable technology that they own. We are trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands and most ambitious start-ups to realise their critical technology-based aspirations – and we’ve been doing it for 60 years. Cambridge Consultants is part of Capgemini Invent.
About Capgemini
Capgemini is a global business and technology transformation partner, helping organisations to accelerate their dual transition to a digital and sustainable world, while creating tangible impact for enterprises and society. It is a responsible and diverse group of 340,000 team members in more than 50 countries. With its strong over 55-year heritage, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to unlock the value of technology to address the entire breadth of their business needs. It delivers end-to-end services and solutions leveraging strengths from strategy and design to engineering, all fueled by its market leading capabilities in AI, cloud and data, combined with its deep industry expertise and partner ecosystem. The Group reported 2023 global revenues of €22.5 billion
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