Behind the Scenes at Bettercup.
Sam at the Australian Open
For those of you that don’t know us, welcome! My name is Sam, and I’m the co-founder of bettercup. You can see mine and my co-founder Christie’s story here.
I’m writing to you from bettercup’s wash hub in Keysborough, Vic. We recently got a Sustainability Victoria Grant to upgrade our washing and reusable cup manufacturing, and now we can wash and dry over 3,000 cups per hour, and manufacture 3,000 cups per day here in Melbourne.
Manufacturing Reusable Cups In Melbourne.
Our tumbler and taster manufacturing takes place 500m from where I’m sitting, our custom pad printing is 1km away, and our IML label printing is 30km away. We still need to get a few of our products from overseas due to lack of local options, but our focus is on keeping things as local as possible.
It’s not just to brag either - one of the best benefits of local manufacturing and washing is the quick turnaround and easy availability of stock. We don’t need to wait 30 days for a ship sailing from overseas, quarantining containers or port strikes - we can send you one box of cups fresh off the machine as soon as they’re finished.
That being said, we’re a small operation and when we’re manufacturing cups for one customer, we need to complete that run before we slot in the next one - there’s not 20 machines running thousands of cups per hour for hundreds of customers around the world!
Washing Reusable Cups in Melbourne.
You might be wondering about the wash hub, and whether it’s a good idea to be sending cups all the way back to us in Melbourne from events all around Australia- isn’t that increasing emissions, and shouldn’t there be local washing everywhere?
Well, yes and no.
In an ideal world we’d have wash hubs everywhere we operate, cups would be stored locally and reused all the time within a 100km radius of where they first arrived.
Unfortunately, it would be crazy expensive for us to set them up everywhere! Paying rent and infrastructure on all these different sites, making sure they were all stocked with enough cups, as well as overseeing them to ensure the washing is up to our quality standards, would be very tricky without huge investment.
There’s also the minor issue of parts of this country having a tropical climate - cups can’t just be washed and stored in those areas, because the climate is so humid that the cups will go mouldy in storage, even if they’re fully dried first.
So: we take back any cup that a customer needs to be washed, and we wash it here in Melbourne. That includes all of our rentals, and any custom cups that customers use year on year. All of our stock is transported around Australia by truck or rail - we never use air freight. This does mean the emissions are fixed and calculable, and we can compare our washer + travel to us against a customer’s often less efficient setup. If you want to see an example of this, please get in touch.
Since all of our cups are here, our full stock is available around Australia at any time.
For some customers there just isn’t a supply of water available, or there isn’t the infrastructure to wash a large fleet of reusables at a festival in a paddock 300km from the nearest city.
A core part of what we do does involve transitioning customers to managing their own washing. This means educating them on hygiene standards, water and power requirements as well as general layout, staffing and operational advice. We can’t be everywhere at once in peak event season, but we can give people the tools they need to do it themselves!
Cleaning Quality Standards For Reusable Cups.
A key issue with reusables is ensuring that the quality of cleaning is up to standard. Here in Keysborough, we separate the wash area into “dirty” and “clean” areas. There are rules for handling cups on each side, and workers switching between areas need to follow a standard hygiene process including hand washing & changing PPE.
Pretty much every cup needs to be checked for lipstick or garnish residue after it comes out of the washer and dryer, as anyone who’s worked in a bar will know. It can be a slow process, but until we get the money to invest in robot lasers that can scan cups, that’s what we need to do to ensure every cup is going out to customers clean and fresh.
The Most Important Thing.
The most valuable thing we can offer is trust. Events and venues need clean cups on the date they specify; that sometimes means we need to work late and hustle really hard to get everything done in time. There was a phase early on in our business where Christie and I kept manufacturing running overnight ourselves to produce cups in time for events, and in the past we’ve hired 20+ staff to help hand scrub dirty cups to ensure we hit an event deadline.
It’s particularly tricky when the lead times are short; event budgets and designs aren’t approved until the last minute- so our operations need constant attention to ensure we don’t put constant pressure on our own suppliers. They’ve still delivered us some amazing favours over the years and for that we owe them a lot.
The result is that most people who decide to work with us end up coming back, and that a huge amount of our business is from previous customers.
I wrote this blog post to address things that I usually find myself speaking about with people who ask about bettercup, so I wanted to write this for anyone who’s curious about who we are, how we run and why. While writing it, it occurred to me that I’m also pretty sick of seeing AI blog posts everywhere, and I thought this might be a nice read for anyone who feels the same! Of course, our General Manager Rachel will kill me if I don’t include a “call-to-action”, so: if you want to chat about anything I’ve mentioned above, drop me a line!
I look forward to hearing from you.