🌿 (Seriously) Great Wrap by Jordy and Julia Kay
When most people spot a problem that gives them the shits, they just grumble about it and keep doing what they’re doing. But when Julia (talented architect) and Jordy Kay (delicious winemaker) grew frustrated with the endless plastic pallet wrap in their industries and cling wrap in their kitchen, they invented something new. Great Wrap, 100% compostable cling wrap, has just launched, and we can’t restock it fast enough.
The issue was the reams and reams of plastic used to wrap pallets in the winery, and everywhere. “Every industry sends stuff on pallets every day,” says Julia - an architect with Cox. “For a lot of businesses, especially food and beverage but also in architecture, cosmetics, mining and any manufacturing, the last plastic they have left in their businesses is pallet wrap - they’ve been able to eliminate it everywhere else, but there was no alternative out there.” The Kays realised there was no one trying to mend this niggling, serious problem, and after Jordy had to write off picking 2020’s entire grape crop thanks to smoke taint (yep, remember those pre-pandemic bushfires?) he and Julia found the space to get to work, formulating a 100% plant-based, compostable, marine-biodegradable, zero guilt cling wrap.
Safe to say, it’s blown up. The Kays have enquiries for their product, now made locally in Melbourne, from a huge list of industries, companies giant and micro, all looking to do better. “It’s a hilarious position to be in,” says Jordy. Hilarious and lucrative.
COVID threw a few delays on the pallet side of things - it’ll be ready soon - and so the first product to launch was a cling wrap for home kitchens, ideal when that’s where we’re spending so much of our days now. Soon, restaurants will be able to access commercial rolls of the stuff.
There’s a difference between compostable and biodegradable, even though both sound clean and green. Compostable (Great Wrap is the first truly compostable wrap on the market) means it disappears into soil in under 180 days, faster than orange peel, leaving behind zero toxins. Biodegradable usually means it’s just bloody plastic mixed with an organic matter, degrading into tiny micro plastic particles which stick around for hundreds of years. Gross.
For Jordy, whose grapes are grown organically in the Upper Goulburn Valley in Victoria, creating something that not only doesn’t harm his soil, but enriches it, was non-negotiable. “We’ve always had multiple compost piles around the winery and good soil is so integral to good winemaking,” he says. He didn’t really expect success to look like so many emails featuring cling wrap melting fast into the home compost heaps of happy customers, but here we are.
If it’s pallet wrap you’re after, because you need to move something, anything, from one location to another safely and securely, look out for this product launching soon. For now, clean up your kitchen and keep that half avocado / bowl of leftover noodles / knob of parmesan fresh with a 30m roll of Great Wrap compostable cling wrap.