10059927Let's go ZeroClosedCollaborative R&DISCF40% of plastic waste is from grocery shopping (UN, 2018). Major supermarkets like Aldi and Sainsbury's have committed to halving their plastic footprint by 2025\. But, despite making such commitments, plastic usage by the big grocers increased from 2017 to 2019 and the top 10 put 896,853 tonnes of plastic packaging on the market (Greenpeace, 2021). Consumers rightly want supermarkets to do more. 93% of people are concerned about plastic packaging. Most believe supermarkets have not made enough effort to reduce plastic in recent years (The Grocer, 2021). Zero is a circular supermarket that uses no throwaway packaging at all - preventing it from entering the waste stream. We are the first in the sustainable shopping space to offer a completely zero waste grocery service, with no plastic packaging. Every one of our ZEROWARE containers is reusable and made from 100% recycled materials (PP, RPET, ABS, borosilicate glass). Our containers last for 4 years before they are responsibly recycled by us. We send our clean containers to suppliers to fill them during the food processing stage and they are designed to fit within existing processing systems. Once in a local fulfilment hub, products are picked into customer orders and delivered to customers. Orders are set up as a flexible weekly subscription, with a small minimum order value (£15). Our model for a new kind of grocery shopping: * Circular groceries: all products requiring packaging will be in return-for-wash and re-use or compostable containers. * Local distribution: spoke and hub distribution model, using our own fleet of electric vans. Local sourcing policy. * Flexible subscription: variable frequency at product level. Late order edit cut off. * Online only: Real-time inventory, no product substitutions. Doorstep delivery. * Wide-not-deep range: from launch, across fresh and home care. Zero's one year pilot would see 249,350 pieces of plastic packaging prevented from entering the waste system (9,974 orders x 25 items that would normally be packaged), rising to 200m pieces over 5 years. The UK position in targeting a zero waste supermarket is nascent, as this is as yet an unestablished sector of online grocery shopping. We are proposing an 18 month industrial-research project that will take Zero's revolutionary grocery shopping innovation from TRL 6 to TRL 8 (market release Q3 2024). This project will allow final concept development to be undertaken for the service as a whole, as well as testing containers to verify our unique commercial proposition.