The Concept combines sustainability, recycling, food waste and hygiene into a smarter, lighter meal tray.
By Catherine Mazy
There’s a saying that you can’t fix what you can’t measure. An Abu Dhabi start-up is helping airlines identify and measure food waste using smart trays. Those trays are made from recycled plastic bottles and are up to 30% lighter than traditional trays. The International Air Transport Association estimates that 20% of the $15 billion spent on global in-flight catering (pre-Covid-19) is untouched food and drink. Reducing waste isn’t just good for the bottom line; it’s good for the planet. But the founders’ first aim was stability, not sustainability.
Muhammad Rijal Hikmatullah, Yadhushan Mahendran and Maria Sobh were in their final year of university in 2017 when they heard about a contest—come up with a good idea in aviation and win AED 50,000. The competition was sponsored by Intelak, a Dubai-based incubator founded in 2016 to promote innovation in aviation. Hikmatullah was in aeronautical engineering at Emirates Aviation University in Dubai, where Mahendran also attended, but in business. Sobh was in interior design at American University of Dubai. “We made a perfect trio,” Sobh says. “Business, engineering, and design.”
They brainstormed. Mahendran was on a flight where turbulence made his meal tray move so much that he had to pay more attention to it than to the movie he was trying to watch. The humble airline food tray needed a redesign.
“The companies that have been making trays have been ruling the market for 20-30 years,” Mahendran says. “They were not innovating. We were 21-year-olds, with a passion for sustainability.”
Instead of using traditional melamine, which was cheap and strong but heavy and not environmentally friendly, they chose recycled PET plastic—the kind in plastic beverage bottles. The bottles actually are gathered from airline cabin waste, creating a circular economy in the airline sector. Thanks to the plastic and a new streamlined design, they cut the tray’s weight by up to 30%, which adds up to considerable savings over time for airlines. Airlines can customise the trays, too—colour, shape, size. Then the trio looked for what else they could innovate—and decided to embed sensors in the trays to collect data about food served and food waste.
Yadhushan Mahendran, Maria Sobh and Muhammad Rijal Hikmatullah, co-founders of The Concept.
“The companies that have been making trays have been ruling the market for 20-30 years. They were not innovating. We were 21-year-olds, with a passion for sustainability.”
Some airlines do weigh their flight waste, but that offers limited opportunity for improvement. Airlines have little or no information about how many meals were served, or of the meals served which were popular—was it the chicken or the pasta?
“The first 30 meals served indicate the popularity,” Mahendran says. Knowing that, say, 83% of passengers on a certain route tend to ask for the chicken would help the airline both please passengers by having enough chicken meals and also improve sustainability by reducing waste that occurs when there’s no more of the meal a passenger prefers and the passenger doesn’t eat at all. Not only is the food tossed, but it’s weight the plane has carried for nothing.
The Concept’s Neos Fly+ trays have sensors that collect the data on board each flight, keeping the data in the airline’s hands, without involving the maze of flight catering centres at myriad destinations. The trays can be washed and reused—airlines have different standards but usually around 300 wash cycles, something else that the sensors can track accurately. The composition of the trays is calibrated so they can be recycled after their life cycles.
Their tray survived the shortlisting from some 600 entries and eventually won the competition. The three friends launched The Concept as a company before they even graduated, with two trays: the lightweight Neos Fly and the Neos Fly+, which is the same tray but with the embedded smart technology. Mahendran is chief executive officer, Sobh is chief design and creation officer, and Hikmatullah is chief executive engineer. The Concept is currently raising its seed round of investment to further develop the Neos Fly+ and scale up production. Its early backers include a UAE angel investor and Mubadala Investment Company’s The Gothams-Hub71, which helped lead to a partnership in April with Etihad Airways. Etihad gives the start-up complete access to the airline, Etihad Engineering and Etihad Flight Catering Services in order to develop the product and test it, and will allow The Concept to do live Proof of Concepts onboard Etihad flights.
The Concept embedded sensors in the trays to collect data about food served and food waste.
The Concept participated in three programmes with Sharjah Entrepreneurship Centre, or Sheraa, which provided $25,000 in equity-free grants. “They’ve been instrumental in helping us build a business model and understanding the financials,” Mahendran says. “We had no clue what a start-up was. They helped turn us into something serious.”
Even after graduating from the last Sheraa programme in 2019, “they still support our journey,” Hikmatullah says.
The Concept’s business model is based on an investment reaping big savings for the customer. A case study found that an airline would be willing to pay one-eighth of the cost of its waste in order to reduce that waste by half—that is, pay $1 million in order to cut $8 million of waste to $4 million—the airline comes out $3 million ahead.
“We charge airlines in terms of data per tray per flight route,” Mahendran says. “On average, an airline would pay a maximum of $50 for access to complete data of a full flight of, say, Abu Dhabi to Los Angeles. It’s definitely under $1 per passenger. The word ‘sustainability’ always brings up higher prices. We ensure that even though we’re introducing sustainable products, ours are competitive or cheaper than existing choices.”
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, The Concept was just launching its first product, the lightweight trays made of recycled plastic. It quickly added silver-ion technology, which provides anti-microbial qualities. Nobody knew at the time that Covid-19 wasn’t transmitted on surfaces, but silver-ion technology works against many other germs and fungi that are spread by touch, and everybody is conscious of hygiene these days. The anti-microbial aspect “helps airlines show they are protecting passengers and crew,” Mahendran says.
The Concept already has tenders with four airlines for commercial orders of $10 million. It is looking at deploying its trays in many other food-service settings, such as hospitals and schools, where they could track nutritional values. But as a product design house that focuses on designing sustainable products, The Concept isn’t just a tray company. “We work with companies that have a lot of waste and we bring in our design expertise to up-cycle their products or convert waste into second-life products,” Mahendran says. “We’re also working with the space industry on waste management for long-distance missions.”
Photos courtesy ofThe Concept
