Edible spoons a la "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" are now a reality.
A Telangana, India-based company, called Bakey's, makes edible spoons, forks, and chopsticks. Its founder Narayana Pessapaty was fed up with the some 15,000 tons of plastic waste that enters India's landfills every day, so he decided to something about it.
After selling more than 1.5 million pieces of cutlery since Bakey's started in 2010, he is now launching a Kickstarter to grow his operation.
Currently, Bakey's only sells spoons, but plans to distribute its forks and chopsticks with the Kickstarter funds. By summer, it will open a new facility that can produce 800,000 pieces of its cutlery a day.
The spoons come in a variety of flavors, including sugar, ginger-cinnamon, cumin, mint-ginger and carrot-beetroot. Made from rice, millet, and wheat, they all have a shelf life of two to three years.
Pessapaty, an agriculture researcher from Hyderabad, India, hopes that his edible cutlery will cut down on waste.
The world consumes about 110 million tons of plastic a year, most of which ends up in a landfill, according to the United Nations Environmental Program. Most plastic utensils are neither recyclable nor biodegradable. This means that after you use a plastic fork for 10 minutes, it eventually travels to a landfill where it sits for up to 1,000 years.
If it doesn't end up in a landfill, it ends up in an ocean — India ranks as #12 in the top countries that dump plastic into oceans, according to a 2015 study.
Bakey's wants to make a dent in that waste. The company currently only ships within India, but plans to distribute internationally soon. The spoons, which come in packages of 100, cost about $4.15. He aims to sell them mostly to takeout restaurants and food trucks, which largely use plastic utensils.
Another Kickstarter, the Edible Spoon Maker, makes spoons out of any dough at home, but it only creates a few at a time. There's also Foodie Spoon, but its edible utensils cost $55 for a set of 100.
Although the Bakey's Kickstarter is over 600% funded (it has raised more than $120,000), Pessapaty realizes his team will need to lower the spoons' price even more to compete with plastic cutlery. He hopes to cut the price in half.
"I realized my main competition was plastic spoons because they were cheap," he says. "If demand increases, prices will come down further."
