Coca-Cola launches sustainability venture capital fund with packaging circularity focus
13 Jul 2023 --- Coca-Cola and eight of its leading bottling partners have created a sustainability-focused venture capital fund. The $137.7 fund will target investments in packaging and decarbonization to reduce the beverage giant’s environmental impact.
Greycroft, a seed-to-growth venture capital firm, will manage the Greycroft Coca-Cola System Sustainability Fund. The fund is the first of its kind for Greycroft, which invests in enterprise and consumer solutions across life cycles and industries.
The Coca-Cola system’s carbon footprint is a major priority for the fund. It will focus on five key areas with the most potential impact: packaging, heating and cooling, facility decarbonization, distribution and supply chain.
“This fund offers an opportunity to pioneer innovative solutions and help scale them quickly within the Coca-Cola system and across the industry,” says John Murphy, president and CFO of Coca-Cola. “We expect to benefit from getting access to emerging technology and science for sustainability and carbon reduction.”
Commercialization support
The fund will seek to invest in companies at the point of commercialization. For Greycroft, partnering with the Coca-Cola system presents an attractive opportunity to help scale innovations alongside some of the top bottling operations in the world.
“The market for sustainable supply chain and manufacturing technology has continued to grow as consumer brands rise to meet the demands of environmentally conscious customers,” says Dana Settle, co-founder and managing partner at Greycroft.
“Greycroft has an ‘invest anywhere’ approach that allows us to identify promising startups with climate tech solutions ready to scale.”
Coca-Cola’s circularity investments
Coca-Cola claims to have a long history of investment in sustainability-focused projects that continue to make a difference in issues of global importance, including:
- In Latin America, Coca-Cola and Arca Continental invested in recycled PET processing company PetStar, while Coca-Cola FEMSA has invested in Imer and a high-tech PET recycling plant, Planeta.
- In the Philippines, Coca-Cola Beverages Philippines and Indorama Ventures invested in PETValue, “the largest” PET recycling plant in the country.
- In Indonesia, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners (CCEP) and Dynapack invested in the Amandina PET recycled content production facility, while in Australia, as part of a cross-industry partnership with Cleanaway, Asahi Beverages and Pact Group, CCEP invested in PET plastic recycling and production facilities.
- In Europe, Coca-Cola provided Ioniqa with a loan to help develop technology to transform mixed-color, partly contaminated PET waste into clear, food-grade PET.
- CCEP has invested in recycling start-up CuRe Technology, which uses polyester rejuvenation to target plastics that cannot be recycled by mechanical recycling methods and prevents them from being incinerated, downcycled or sent to landfill.
- Coca-Cola HBC has invested in in-house recycled PET (rPET) production in Italy, Poland and Romania while implementing a transition to 100% rPET portfolios in Switzerland, Italy and Austria. Similar transitions in Romania and Ireland are planned for later this year.
- Several system bottlers have issued green bonds, including Arca Continental, Coca-Cola FEMSA and Coca-Cola HBC.
- Swire Coca-Cola invested in establishing the first food-grade ready plastic recycling facility in Hong Kong.
Coca-Cola aims to make 100% of its packaging recyclable globally by 2025 and use at least 50% recycled material in its packaging by 2030.
Edited by Joshua Poole
