Topanga provides software to drive reusable container programs in on-campus dining using the institution's existing mobile ordering app and ID card. Working with campus apps and transaction systems, it lets students check-out and return containers, cutting waste and saving money for the institution.

The software is live at 59 campuses across North America and has experienced significant growth in the past two years. Strong partnerships with food service providers including Aramark and Sodexo, continues to help drive adoption.

We have other exciting integrations that we're working on with Transact and other mobile ordering solutions going live in the next few weeks

“We do not manufacture the packaging ourselves,” says Page Schult, the company’s co-founder and CEO.  “We're completely agnostic, which allows you to use what you already have on hand, or we can help you procure new packaging for our manufacturing partners.”

Building the option to request reusable to go containers into existing mobile ordering apps is a great addition to the offering. The Topanga Grubhub integration is a popular option, and others are on their way.

“We have a couple other exciting payment card integrations that we're working on with Transact and other order ahead and mobile ordering solutions that are going live in the next few weeks,” adds Schult.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and welcome to another installment of Campus ID News Chats. I am your host Chris Corum, publisher and editor of Campus ID News. I'll be asking the questions today about an issue that I care a lot about. It's sustainability and environmental protections and issues on campus and how we can affect that, and specifically how our campus card programs, our apps on campus, can help dining services to redirect some waste from landfills.

To get to this topic and answer some questions is my guest, Page Schult. She's co-founder and CEO of Topanga, and her company helps campuses reduce and replace disposable to-go containers with reusable ones. So Page, thanks for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So let's start. Tell us about the importance of reusables and why specifically in campus dining environments this can make a big difference.

So campus environments and campus dining specifically are really interesting for reuse, and that there's kind of a lot of pressures driving towards sustainability.

For example, students are increasingly choosing campuses and schools that have sustainable practices, presidents and major stakeholders at universities are increasingly kind of pushing for more sustainable practices for impact reporting and to really show off these stats to incoming students.

And dining is where a lot of that waste and sustainability is so tangible.

Like it's very, very apparent when food is being wasted or when all the single use to-go packaging is filling up the trash cans across campus.

It's a lot less visible if your science building is running on renewable energy.

I think because of that, sustainability and dining gets a lot of attention because it's really easy to see the shifts.

And reuse specifically is awesome for campus environments because it's really high reuse rates in terms of it's a semi-closed environment.

So the students who are getting to go every day on campus are typically getting to go and then going within a mile radius from where they got that food packaging.

They're going back to their dorm, they're going back to the library to study, and then they're in a position where in the next day or two, they can drop that container off, it can be reused and sanitized just like any other dish, and then it can be ready for another student to get to go.

So that kind of turnover and that kind of built-in client base that's going to keep coming back for more really helps reuse thriving campus environments.

Okay, so what inspired you to start the company? Why this topic and then a few details like how long you've been around, how's it grown, how many campuses are you serving, those kinds of things?

So me and my two co-founders, we started this company in 2020 and it was actually very different.

Today we are a software company, but prior to being a software company, we actually ran a commercial kitchen in Los Angeles where we were packaging food in reusable containers and delivering it to customers like a milkman-style market.

This was an amazing experience because we had to go through the full kitchen certification process.

We were working day in and day out with dishwashing machines and three-compartment sinks and really understanding what it means firsthand to kind of reuse in a fast-paced commercial kitchen.

It was through this that we actually built our software. So we first built our software for ourselves.

That business was going really well, but we said, hey, if our goal is to make as big of an impact globally on reducing unnecessary waste from kitchens, we can do so a lot more effectively by taking the software that we've built and delivering it to other environments versus just continuing to do this ourselves.

So that's really when we made the shift to say what other types of kitchens and kitchen environments and dining programs can we support with this technology?

And through that is when we got connected to two of our earliest clients, Ohio State University and Boston University, and we had some great conversations where we understood that the problems that we had solved for ourselves through our software were problems they were experiencing, and huge pain points they were experiencing, and trying to launch reuse.

So that's been how we got into the campus space. It was accidental, but now it's amazing. It's been a wonderful space to work in.

We're live at 59 campuses across North America and really excited about kind of the growth we've seen in the past one to two years since we've been here.

I have seen some stats about putting in perspective the amount of savings and things that that's been across the campuses. They're pretty impressive to me. Any comes to the top of your mind, I'm sure you know them by heart.

Yeah, there's a lot of different stats that I could throw at you, but I think one that's probably particularly interesting to focus on is one of our campuses like Boston University, where we've been able to show there that this program, the Reuse Pass program, has reached over 90% of the undergrad campus, so it has huge reach across the types of students who are using this.

They've seen in the past year over 78% reduction in disposables, so not just our people trying this program, but they're truly using it day in and day out, and they've seen about $274,000 in program margins versus like just if they were going with single use as they had before or a reused solution without this kind of track and trace system of accountability that Topanga's Reuse Pass program provides.

So that's obviously like a huge school with a huge retail footprint, but the reality is that those kind of stats on how broad of reach we can get on campus and how many kind of single use transactions we can replace with reuse, those are really kind of the crux of what goes into understanding the ROI opportunity for your program, and I will say throughout our sales process, it's really important to us that we're working with schools that believe that there is an environmental and an economic opportunity for reuse, and we'll walk through all of that math and all of that modeling from the get go to make sure we're setting these programs up for success.

Can you walk us through in detail the student experience with the system? You know, I'm going in to get my food in the dining hall and then I can …

So there's actually a few different ways that this can come to life kind of depending on the campus setup, the environment, and what kind of card and mobile ordering providers that they're using on campus.

The simplest form is, you know, it's a non-integrated experience.

Students go to the web app, app.reusepass.com, they sign up using their cell phone number, and then in their Apple Wallet, they kind of get their reuse pass QR code.

And this is a lot like checking out a library book.

Every time they go to, you know, get takeout from their residential dining hall, they show their Apple Wallet QR code, the operator will scan that QR code, scan the QR RFID code on the container, and that kind of completes the checkout experience.

So that's like the most straightforward just out of the box.

That could be live within a few weeks on a campus.

And then we also have a few different layers that we can add on to support more complex and more diverse dining environments.

So for example, like the Boston University school example that I mentioned, they're a huge Grubhub school. We've integrated with Grubhub mobile ordering systems to create an even more like seamless student experience that allows you to kind of order ahead.

You as a student, you go through the Grubhub ordering flow like you normally would, you select that you'd like a reuse pass container at checkout.

At that point, our system is connected with Grubhub, and we kind of get your student ordering data, and we process that so we can see what your reuse pass QR code is.

That same QR code that you see in the Apple Wallet, Grubhub passes us back of house.

And then the team that's fulfilling your order sees that QR code on the chip that prints out, they scan the QR code, scan the QR code on the container, and your order is ready at the pickup shelf where it's already been checked out to you.

So we have a couple other kind of exciting payment card integrations that we're working on with Transact and other order ahead and mobile ordering solutions that are going live in the next few weeks.

So I would say that integrating within the systems that campus are already using is really important to us to ensure that it's a seamless student experience, but also a seamless operator experience.

I was curious, like, you know, we get that level of app fatigue where, you know, do you want to have, you know, the more that can be integrated and partner offerings so that we're not having to download specific apps for a million different things, I think for everybody, even students can be a benefit. So those partnerships are great. I suppose it makes it easy to work with a Grubhub campus or down the road Transact or whatever others it might be, the work's already been done. So the deployment then for that, for a campus that partners with them, you know, the hard work was done on the first one and now the rollout goes more quickly.

Yeah, absolutely.

Having these kind of channel partners and being able to work in a space like the College of University dining space where everybody is really keen on like peer-to-peer learning and just like spreading learning from each other makes it so much easier to kind of continue to iterate and improve our programs as we build.

So that's the student side of things. How about the campus side of things? So I'm watching this, I'm a campus, I've wanted to do this for a long time or I like the idea of it. What do they do?

So from a kind of like, you know, getting in touch and how we could start a perspective, again, like we, we love working within the campus space, we have great partners with Aramark and Sodexo and all of the great service providers.

And so like kind of getting in the weeds and figuring out what type of program you're likely have is really important to us.

We're really keen on setting up potential new clients with existing client partners and having them do like site visits and tour our campuses environment as is possible.

So you can see firsthand what this program looks like and what type of program you want to build.

And I say that because exactly like, if you're just you want to launch a reusable to go program at like one of your residential dining halls, it's like medium to low volume and you really just want to get live and see what's happening.

That's great.

We can get you live in a few weeks and we can start small, really figure out what works and build from there.

Or there's other schools that they'll come to us and they'll say, hey, by 2025, we wanted to be completely zero waste campus.

We have like 10 residential dining halls, like 30 different retail environments, two different mobile ordering and card payment providers.

Like, can you help us get started? And that's where again, the answer is yes, but there's going to be a bit more lead time because you have to navigate those integrations.

What are the shifts in operator and student experiences across dining locations?

How are we going to operationalize like collections and returns these containers?

So it really is designed to be flexible and support you wherever you're at.

I would say the main kind of considerations are one, do you already have packaging or to procure packaging?

We do not manufacture the packaging ourselves. We're completely agnostic, which allows you to use what you already have on hand or we can help you procure new packaging for our manufacturing partners.

That's kind of like one of the big physical sides to getting a program live that will typically start in on right when we're working with a new partner and get those wheels turning.

From there, it's really kind of, again, the scope and the scale that you want to start with versus what you want to grow into.

Typically for some of our larger implementations, we'll come on site, we'll do a site visit.

Like I mentioned, a lot of our team has spent time working in kitchens and restaurants in the past and we're truly passionate, not just about the sustainability side, but also the dining side.

So we'll come on site and we'll help you kind of map out to a tee what this program is going to look like and what the flows are going to look like in your system to make it as streamlined as possible.

So you did mention this at the beginning, but I think that the point came up there when you were talking about you're really the app provider and the software provider, the intelligence and the reporting logistics, all the pieces like that, pardon me, rather than, you know, we sell bowls and lids and things like that.

So give us a little more detail on what's the beauty of the app? What more is happening there? What does the kid get out of it, but also what does the university get out of it or the campus get out of that from reporting and things like that?

I did kind of say this before, but kind of at its core, how the system works is it's like checking out a library book. So it's a one-to-one system of accountability. Each time a container is checked out, it's checked out to a specific student or a specific diner.

That diner then has a full record of kind of their transactions, so to speak, in their ReusePass app. So they can see how many containers they've checked out, from which locations, when and where they're due back, what happens if they're not returned on time.

Some of our schools will charge a late fee.

If a container isn't returned within a specific amount of time, that's where some of these payment card integrations like what we're working on with Transact really come into play to make that charging process seamless, and the student sees that real-time in their app.

In addition to the more fun stuff, such as what has their impact been and how many people are participating at their campus and kind of what is that gamification element that makes you feel good by taking this action to reuse instead of choosing single use.

So it's really kind of the crux of accountability.

Again, it's a web app.

So our goal is not just to have you download an app and have you glued to your phone, but we also have systems in place to kind of send you those proactive nudges and bring the program to life.

So for example, we have an SMS-based nudging program.

So first time you check out a container, you'll get a welcome text explaining the roles of the road, and then each time you have a container that's late or overdue, we'll send you a quick nudge saying, hey, don't forget to return this, click here to find your closest return location.

So in a perfect world, nobody's ever charged a late fee and everything's burned on time.

But we also know not everything's a perfect world.

So that's kind of why we have these systems built.

And then beyond the app, we also have a really robust campus ambassador program, which I think is something that we're really proud of because it allows us to like bring the dining organization's mission of sustainability, like they're doing this for a reason.

It allows us to kind of bring that to life through the students and they'll do tabling activations or they'll paint murals or they'll pick up trash in a local park.

All of these really cool ways to kind of build community around this great cause in real life and kind of bring reuse past to your campus in a way that's not just, hey, I'm checking out a container because the school says I have to, I have to, but it's really like, hey, this is an amazing initiative that campus is doing and it's great to be a part of it.

Awesome. I'm on board with anything we can do to help those kinds of kinds of issues. It was great, Page. I appreciate you joining us. Thanks for the great info and, and I, you know, we'll talk soon again.

Thank you so much.

And of course, thanks to all of you for listening in. If you have an idea for a future episode of Campus ID News Chats, shoot me a note at chris at campusidnews.com and we'll see you next time.