The biggest issue that faces any start-up company is how to position themselves, how to create a buzz, generate awareness that they exist. This is particularly hard if the company is developing products from a high-tech background as often in the early stages the translation of what the complex science will do for an individual is hard to articulate. The stats are very much against success without being able to make an impact – 80% of start-ups that fail do so not because of their product, but because of lack of sales.
CuanTec have known this from the outset and have been more than usually focussed on working with newspapers and industry journals to explain our ambition of making compostable antimicrobial bioplastic from food waste that makes your food last longer. It’s a great story to be telling, it is tangible in terms of the outcome and it has been wonderfully positive and engaging generating a lot of interest and discussion.
Then came the Christmas 2017 launch of Blue Planet 2 and the image of the turtle caught in plastic pollution drifted across our large screen TV’s and straight into our home. Unavoidable evidence that there needs to be change, that everyone is damaging the environment with our throw-away lifestyles and disregard for “what happens next” when we use plastic.
The reaction to that one short segment on one single TV show has been phenomenal, and I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone in Scotland that hasn’t modified their plastic consumption behaviour in 2018 either as a direct or subliminal reaction. Reusable coffee mugs, less plastic wrapping, reduction in usage of plastic straws. Children are involved as much as adults. This is no longer a “green” thing, or a “tree-hugger” thing. It’s everyone, everywhere, pitching in as the global community awakens to the damage that our previous selfishness has caused.
For CuanTec this provides both an opportunity and a problem. Our Twitter and Facebook accounts have significantly more followers and we are regularly contacted by companies across the world wanting to know when they can access our bioplastic packaging. We are very definitely in the right place at the right time. A sweet spot in marketing terms that few get to experience. However, the downside of this is that we are still in the development phase, our packaging, with its wonderful eco-credentials, created through a revolutionary new process that really could change a 200-year-old established process – but we don’t yet have product available. We need to be very careful about setting expectations and making sure we can deliver on promises.
We’ve seized the opportunity with both hands. Just before Easter we created a social media pushed crowdfunder to raise our profile. We blasted Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with as much information about plastic pollution, about the dangers of microplastic and how CuanTec could help to provide a solution to both ocean plastic pollution and food waste. We’ve become acknowledged by external bodies as thought leaders around food packaging and pollution and circular economy solutions and are regularly invited to attend International meetings and put forward our thoughts and ideas. We’ve built on that tidal wave of publicity to get the attention of investors and are working hard to finalise a business plan that will take us forward with our ambition to become a global leader in this market area.
Sometimes you can shape events, sometimes you have to just ride the waves – but what is happening now for the bioeconomy area is utterly amazing not to take the most of all the potential that it offers would be very large waste!
