Tesco’s Head of Packaging, James Bull, on results of the UK’s largest reusable trial as reported by ThePackHub

It’s from an exclusive interview we did recently with James Bull. James is Head of Packaging at Tesco and recently conducted the UK’s largest-ever reusable supermarket packaging trial! 

During our interview, James shared some very useful observations and insights. Here’s a short excerpt. 

“Our reuse pilots with Loop proved that many of our customers want to buy products in reusable packaging. As it stands, the benefits of reuse over recycling are not well understood by customers. Fixing this is the first step to encouraging the scale of customer behavioural change that’s required.  

As a starting point, retailers and brands can help by increasing the visibility and impact of reusable packaging by improved advertising and greater prominence in stores. Increasing public awareness of the positive impact of reuse over recycling is also a role for campaigners, experts, opinion formers and media. 

If rolled out to 400 stores across various retail chains, a prefill offer could be a viable business opportunity that replaces millions of pieces of recyclable plastic with reusable alternatives. 

Online shopping lends itself particularly well to prefilled packaging solutions because the retailer can be responsible for delivering and returning the packaging. This means that customers need to adopt fewer new behaviours. Other models of reuse like dispensing, will be better suited for shopping in store.” 

Read James’ full interview, plus detailed interviews with 9 other packaging industry leaders, in the Refillable & Reusable Packaging Compendium Vol 2.  

 You will also have access to an amazing 160 all-new market innovations, to equip you and your team as you plan for the months ahead. All this, along with ThePackHub’s in-depth vision for the future of refillable packaging.