Compostables

The problem

A best-selling kit built from plastic that rarely gets recycled

Lunchables is grab-and-go and kids love it, but every kit is a #7 plastic tray and printed film that curbside recycling won’t take. It gets eaten in minutes and thrown away.

Research

Taking a kit apart

Following the Circular Design Guide’s Insides Out method, we bought a kit, took it apart, and weighed every part on a kitchen scale: a 10 g tray, a 1.42 g lid film, and 136.6 g of food. Those numbers became our life cycle inventory.

Lunch kits today, and why they fall short

The solution

The same grab-and-go kit, made to go in the compost bin

Kids open, eat, and throw away their lunch the same way they do today. We don’t ask them to change. We change what the pack is made of and which bin it goes in.

Name and identity

Compostables is a play on Lunchables: the same kit kids already know, now made to be composted. The tagline is “Lunch today. Soil tomorrow.”

The pack keeps Lunchables’ own red, yellow, and blue, set in Rubik Black and DM Sans, and adds one new color: compost green, used only for what goes in the bin.

Process

Where the kit goes, and where it can go wrong

We mapped the kit’s full path, from the factory to an NYC fridge to the compost bin, and followed a kid from fridge to lunch to bin to find the moments the design has to get right.

The design

Three parts, no plastic, one compost bin

We modeled the tray, compartments, and peel seal in Rhino and iterated on the renders. The printed lid doubles as the front label, and the film stays hinged to the tray so nothing gets separated.

Materials

The tray that fits both school and home compost

We compared a bagasse tray from World Centric with Notpla’s seaweed-coated kraft board. Both are PFAS-free and cost about the same per tray, but bagasse only breaks down in commercial composting.

Kids eat at school and at home, and Notpla is the one tray made for both bins. Its trade-offs are a custom molded order for four compartments, and shipping from the U.K.

The chilled seal: our biggest risk

Meat and cheese need a lid that is airtight around every cell, blocks oxygen and moisture, peels for a six-year-old, and composts with the tray. We compared four lidding options and flagged the tests still needed.

End of life

Making the right bin the easy choice

Only about 5% of U.S. food waste is composted, and 56% of curbside programs surveyed don’t accept compostable packaging. So the label is designed to the strictest rules, Washington and California, and a QR code points to local rules and the nearest drop-off.

Impact

What switching would change

We ran a cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment in Sustainable Minds for one kid’s school year of lunches, 180 kits. Swapping plastic for fiber cuts manufacturing emissions by 39%.

The red flag is shipping empty trays and lids from the U.K., the one stage that gets worse. If Kraft Heinz made them in-house in Avon, NY, as it does its plastic trays, the cut grows to 32% less CO₂e.

The campaign

That’s the Lunchables effect. Now it grows.

Kids already know “That’s the Lunchables effect.” The campaign keeps the brand’s biggest asset and gives it a sustainable twist: kids cheer when the kit comes out, and cheer again when it goes in the compost.

It borrows Lunchables’ own cafeteria energy, bouncy type, and bright red and yellow, then adds compost green and kraft brown for the ending: the bin, the soil, the sprout.

The Lunchables Compost Cup

Most kits are eaten in cafeterias, so the campaign puts the message into action where kids throw lunch away. Like Box Tops for Education, families already understand it: buy the product, help your school win. Counting kits also tells us how many really get composted.