Gathr: Bulk Buying Made Easy
Trevor Cobb and Anirban Ghosh
The Problem:
Many people living in the United States purchase food and household goods in single-use containers, and as a result, nearly 30% of all U.S. garbage is packaging waste.
Root Cause:
We believe people purchase goods in small quantities for three primary reasons:
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To ensure freshness
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Due to storage or capital constraints
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Out of convenience or due to lack of planning
Our Hypothesis:
Direct-to-consumer bulk grocery distribution could reduce packaging waste in the US by 10 — 20% in the next 10 years.
We believe this would be driven by mass urbanization, an increase in the number in multi-family units and an increase in online grocery delivery services.
Current Competition Benchmarking:
Introducing Gathr:
How Does it Work:
Smart bottles that would monitor the level of content in each bottle would be distributed to each apartment in a building. Based on the level of a particular item, the system would collate all the orders to secure bulk pricing. The item would then be shipped to a hub apartment (gathr'r) where the occupants of the other units can come and pick up their items.
Advantages:
We believe that such a system has a multitude of advantages over the current system:
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Cheaper cost of goods for the end consumer
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Reduced Packaging Waste
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Removal of "middle-men" from the system
Snapshots of the Prototype:
