After Earthshot: What's next for sustainability stars Notpla after winning top award - and how is the RSC helping?
The coronation came on 2 December 2022, courtesy of a royal decree of sorts. Crowned as the sovereigns of sustainability as the winners of one of Prince William’s Earthshot Prizes, Notpla’s world changed immediately as they garnered global acclaim for their team's environmental efforts.
When former England football hero David Beckham read out the company’s name at a star-studded ceremony in Boston, BBC cameras were in place to capture the team’s delirious dancing on the balcony of a London hotel. The celebrations came with the satisfaction and sense of vindication and validation that comes with external assurance, especially when it arrives on behalf of a future king.
The Earthshot victory, which came in the ‘Build a waste-free world’ category, capped off a meteoric five-year rise for Notpla. Using seaweed and plants, Notpla has unlocked the capabilities to replace plastic in many single-use applications, while still allowing consumers the convenience of plastic that we have all become used to.
Now operating at an industrial scale, these solutions can effectively 'drop in' and be manufactured on the same machinery and in the same facilities as traditional plastics. Notpla's products range from water-encapsulating bubbles that are entirely edible, through to seaweed-lined takeaway food boxes, films and even paper.
They have partnered with major brands including Heinz, Just Eat and Lucozade, working with the latter to hand out Ooho edible bubbles at the 2019 London Marathon. Their products even appeared at the recent Champions League final in Istanbul. Now, research director Louise Anderson believes the business is well placed to make another huge leap forward.
“That next day [after winning the award], I think everybody was just euphoric,” she says. “We're all just really amazed and then when we got the validation, it was like, ‘wow, this is the biggest tick in our box ever’. Our website views just exploded.
“Everybody in the business was just delighted at the reach that we got from that award ceremony, it was pretty huge. The buzz just continued because it then gave us the opportunity to really consider the plans of scaling, which is where we are now, and allowed us to open doors that hadn't previously been open so commercially it's enabled us to take off quite a bit.”
A princely reward
The award is both ‘the Nobel Prize for the environment’ and a ‘Royal seal of approval’, adds chartered chemist Louise. The latter comment is both slightly tongue-in-cheek and arguably true. As well as receiving £1 million in prize money, Notpla has benefitted from assistance from the Prince of Wales himself – which has come at an opportune time.
“We were having a discussion about how, had the Earthshot Prize happened years before, we wouldn't have been set up to deal with the inbound inquiries,” Louise adds. “When the award hit, it was almost like ‘okay, now we go’. In essence, it has given us the opportunity to go after the big customers that we were trying to engage with, particularly in the food service industry.
“Prince William has been particularly engaged in dropping our name in different scenarios. He essentially asked: ‘if there was like one name you wanted me to talk to or one introduction you wanted me to make, who is it?’ And he's been doing that for us. So since then, we've expanded our commercial ambitions.”
Laying the foundations for growth
Notpla has enjoyed a rapid rise with its sustainable products generating attention even before December’s victory. In 2017, co-founders Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez produced Ooho, which attracted viral interest – and generated £850,000 of crowdfunding investment in three days. Collaborations with Imperial College chemical scientists, major commercial deals, and rounds of VC and seed funding have followed since, catalysing further growth.
The Royal Society of Chemistry has also played a part in helping Notpla along its journey. The company was part of EnterprisePlus, which has now evolved into Change Makers, and has received other RSC funding.
“They've always been there as a support arm for Notpla, and I myself, as a chemist, have always known the RSC to be there in case I needed anything,” Louise says. “We actually had funding from the RSC for one of our first chemists to join the team as an intern in 2019. [Océane] is still with us and kick-started one of our products with a few other team members.
“We always used to get emails – ‘there's this grant’ or ‘there's this session happening’. It was just having that presence there and having somebody, especially from the chemistry perspective, bringing things to our attention.”
Exploring opportunities and building relationships
Notpla is working towards securing Series B funding as the company continues along the business lifecycle. Contact with our Enterprise Impact Programmes team remains useful, and while their needs have changed, the collaborative relationship the two sides share is still as important as ever to the Notpla team.
“I think as long as we have an R&D team, we'll have a need for a relationship with the RSC. I think it would be great to see what opportunities there are out there for getting our team more involved in outreach,” Louise explains.
“We are thinking about the chemists that are in our team, how we train them and make them the best they can be. One of the things the RSC is really strong with, I think, is training opportunities.
"We're still facing a lot of the challenges technically, as we were in the beginning, in terms of trying to move things along the technology readiness scale. Anything that they can offer – in terms of training or support or people to talk to – can help us through those challenges.”
Change Makers, which was launched in February, offers deep tech start-ups and scale-ups support in a wide variety of forms. For a business like Notpla that relies so much on chemistry to achieve its sustainability goals, the scheme ‘goes a step beyond what EnterprisePlus was’.
“I think there's definitely a need for something out there that supports technical businesses,” Louise adds. “It's interesting the approach that the RSC is taking in terms of networking and having a peer-to-peer support because a lot of the challenges you face in a technical role or as a technical team within a startup are very different to like a commercial team or any other type of startup so it's good that there's this pool of other people we can talk to.”
Planning for the future
Around 15% of Notpla’s 70 staff are chemists and chemical scientists, adding that the company would probably not have been able to achieve what it has without knowledge from this field. For her, one of the big short-term goals is getting more of her staff professionally accredited.
“It's good for the person's career and also for us to be able to demonstrate that actually we've got people in our team who tick all the boxes for an external validation for how good a scientist they are,” she noted.
After surviving and thriving in the early stages of life as a deep tech SME and now more than half a year on from winning the Earthshot, Notpla is ready for more. Ambitious plans for the next 12 months include getting more products into the market, increasing R&D capabilities, improving facilities, and advancing and scaling up new commercial technologies.
“If everything goes well, hopefully we'll reach profitability in terms of our products, be able to demonstrate recurring revenue and that for us will mean more and more Notpla products out there in the market replacing plastic with our technology,” Louise added of the short-term company’s objectives.
“One of the big things for us is being able to say we've replaced this much plastic at the end of the year, to really be able to go out into the world and be able to see our solutions being used in place of others, I think that's when we know we'll have been successful and hopefully that will happen within the next year, especially with a lot of the packaging distributors we've got on board.”
Learn more:
- Read more about Notpla by visiting notpla.com
- Find out how Change Makers is boosting deep tech chemistry SMEs at changemakers.rsc.org
- Learn about the RSC’s professional qualifications at https://www.rsc.org/careers/cpd/practising-scientists/
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