Boo-Boo Snafu

Hello Future Fit Food fans,

Did you hear about the launch of Future Fit Foods' soups?

Please support the Future of Food by becoming one of our fabulous customers and enjoy a tasty, instantly fresh, nutrient packed convenient plant based soups.

Your purchase has or will allow us to take the next step in our shared adventure. We are truly grateful for your support!

There have been many twists and turns in our journey to the future of food and we have learned the hard lesson of Murphy's Law or "Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than is expected. And if anything can go wrong it will at the worst possible moment."

We have endured setbacks in nearly every aspect of getting our impact start-up off the ground including a global pandemic, food development issues, production issues, and just prior to launch packaging issues- truly at the worst possible moment.

When we conceived Future Fit Foods' soups, we wanted to avoid single-use packaging that would end up in landfills adding burden to the planet and harming our precious ecosystems.

We learned this would not be easy almost immediately in early 2020 including Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirements related to food safety, the need for packaging that creates longer shelf life when working with natural whole foods while avoiding preservatives to avoid food waste, transportation issues to protect the integrity of the food and the lack of recycling and industrial compositing in many municipalities across the United States.

So rather than give up, we started investigating possible solutions to these packaging problems. We had many conversations with possible suppliers, sustainable packaging experts, academics, and other stakeholders over six months that led us in a few exciting novel directions.

We met an amazing constellation of organizations that provided a solution that would be industrial compostable, provide a multiple barrier film to extend shelf life, and met food safety requirements that to us was groundbreaking so we then developed all the artwork, nutritional information, product shots, and moved forward.

A week before our initial launch date, after receiving all the completed packaging and packaging Future Fit Foods' soups for over twenty hours in Lincoln, Nebraska, we held a virtual meeting with the various teams involved in making the pouches for our soups, and then Murphy's Law reared his ugly head and our jaws dropped.

We learned that the packaging was not exactly what we had ordered. A long painful story short, the packaging is made from ASDM D6400 and BPI certified industrial compostable materials, but the complete package has not yet gone through the industrial compostability test, and the tear function is also not working properly. Put your own expletive here ______________!

A big harry problem and our values were twist-tied. We had a long think about the issue at hand and decided to keep the packaging rather than throw it out as the energy has already been used to get the package to us and then to you and we would do more harm than good by tossing it away.

You will see some sexy industrial compostable stickers on the back of the pouches covering the QR code that would have taken you to a video of what we thought explained the revolutionary packaging. Ugh!

We are offering that you send the packaging back to us and we will find a solution for proper disposal. We are providing you a stamped envelope to send your soup packs back to us. Please insert the pouches flat into the envelope.

What's on the horizon?

We’ve been working with Repack to provide our customers the option of delivering products and taking back empty pouches via Repack, a reusable shipping packaging solution that replaces the standard shipping box and can be used many times to reduce CO2 by up to 85% over the life of the shipping pack.

Due to Repack’s supply shortages, we were not able to offer this option at launch but we hope Repack will replenish stocks soon so we can offer all of you this option.

We are also inspired by other like-minded food companies with deeper pockets who are working together to crack this issue at the One Step Closer Packaging Collaborative. Please take a peek.

We continue to chase our vision of packaging that re-generates the planet and can be used in many cycles.

Take a moment to dream about the future we want... think of Japanese rice paper candy meets Mexican banana leaf tamale wraps.

We appreciate your understanding.

Paloma and Sean