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 Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences

Science prize for GATEWAY start-up

Start-up at the University of Cologne receives science prize from the EHI Foundation for a new reusable box system.

The VYTAL-founders Dr. Tim Breker and Sven Wytthöft with their Talkpartners Torsten Töller an Volkmar Schwenk

The start-up project "VYTAL" was awarded the "Best Start-up 2020" by the EHI Foundation with the Science Prize for Future Retail Topics. Since 2008, the EHI Foundation and GS1 Germany have been awarding this science prize to young academics, chairs and now also start-ups for excellent work and projects.

Anyone who has ever ordered food knows the enormous amount of packaging waste that is left behind. This scenario inspired the Cologne start-up "VYTAL" to make food orders more sustainable and to follow the principle "reusable instead of disposable". The founders Dr. Tim Breker and Sven Witthöft, with the support of WiSo-Professor Dr. Jan Recker (Cologne Institute for Information Systems (CIIS)), are developing electronically smart lending bowls for take-away and delivery offers at the Excellence Start-up Center GATEWAY at the University of Cologne. The prize is endowed with 50,000 euros.

For one year, the start-up will now be supported by the EHI Foundation within a programme of networking, coaching, communication and marketing activities. "Our next goal is to bring our reusable system into the pilot phase across all dealerships. The support programme will help us a lot in building visibility and contacts with retailers. This award is a great opportunity for VYTAL," says founder Tim Breker.

VYTAL's idea: to supply restaurants, canteens and supermarkets with containers in which customers can transport food. Later on, users can return the containers to the participating facilities, where they are cleaned and reused. This so-called "Packaging-as-a-Service model" (packaging as a service) without a deposit is based on recycling economy and is intended to reduce waste in take-away businesses.

Electronically smart labels on the reusable packaging make it possible to keep track of the invoicing and distribution of the containers. VYTAL wants to support the return process digitally: The returnable containers are linked to the respective customer accounts via an app.

The founders want to use the app to create individual psychological and economic incentives to encourage users to return the containers quickly and to adopt sustainable behaviour. The team of founders is supported in the aspect of so-called "eco-nudging" by Professor Recker as mentor.

The term Eco-Nudging describes the use of psychological methods to motivate people to make more environmentally conscious decisions. "The founders combine approaches from the fields of gamification and eco-nudging to offer a solution that can work not only economically but also ecologically in a sustainable way," explains Jan Recker. "In doing so, they offer an innovative, digitally-based approach to a more sustainable consumer society."

The prize for the best start-up in 2020 was awarded this year for the first time as a category within the Science Prize for start-up ideas that have been developed at German-speaking universities. The ideas should have a high potential for use in trade and the consumer goods industry. Since 2008, the EHI Foundation and GS1 Germany have been awarding the Science Prize to young academics, chairs and now also start-ups for excellent work and projects.

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