Who it is for
Not for a single restaurant, and not for consumer to-go. inolarity is built for the operations that move food between businesses every day — where the volume is large enough that a cycle costs real money, and where PPWR does not ask for 40%.
Why this segment
Most PPWR summaries lead with the 40% reuse target for transport packaging. For this segment that is the wrong number. From 1 January 2030, Art. 29(3) requires transport packaging used to deliver products to another economic operator within the same Member State to be reusable within a reuse system — with no percentage attached. Art. 29(2) does the same for movements between an operator’s own sites and with linked or partner enterprises.
A supplier delivering into a hospital kitchen, a staff restaurant or a care caterer in the same country is doing exactly that. Cardboard boxes and flexible formats in direct food contact are exempt under Art. 29(4); reusable crates, trays and containers are not.
That is why this segment needs a pool that works, not a pilot that looks good. And a pool that works is a working-capital decision before it is a sustainability one.
Three buyers
Contract caterers, fresh-food logistics, wholesalers and processors that deliver daily into hospital kitchens, staff restaurants, schools, care homes and canteens. You carry the Art. 29(3) obligation, and you carry the containers.
What you get: what one delivery cycle costs you today, how many containers the route actually needs, and whether a pool of your own beats joining someone else’s.
Hospital groups, care and education caterers, staff-catering operators and university refectories moving food between their own sites and receiving it from suppliers. Art. 29(2) and (3) both touch you, from opposite directions.
What you get: one cost-per-cycle model across sites, the return-time and loss assumptions tested against reality, and a written operating model your suppliers can be held to.
Whoever ends up owning the containers and the balancing. Sometimes that is one of the two above; sometimes it is a separate venture, an asset owner or a lender behind one.
What you get: an independent read of the unit economics before the capital goes in, and the ongoing management if you would rather not build the function yourself.
Whether the size fits
As a rough orientation: a pool becomes worth managing properly at somewhere around 5,000 meals a day across the sites it serves — about 150,000 cycles a month, which is the volume the public sample model runs on. Below that, the honest answer is usually that you should join an existing pool rather than build one, and we will say so. Above it, the question stops being whether to reuse and becomes what a cycle costs and who carries the containers.
Sample cost modelThirty minutes, no charge. If the volume is not there yet, we will tell you that instead of selling you a project.