Cauli Ltd. was founded in 2019 by Jo & Ming, two foodies who enjoyed the vibrant street food scene around their offices in London and saw the constant piling up of food packaging in their street and office bins. Even restaurants who had started using compostable packaging were lacking the infrastructure to ensure their packaging would not end up in landfill with general waste. They soon found out that around 11 billion pieces of packaging waste are produced every year from food-on-the-go; the delicious takeaways they loved came with a hefty environmental price. Realising there was no available solution, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

They started grabbing after-work drinks and meeting for weekend brainstorming sessions to design the solution. Countless hours of ideas later, they had it! Armed with 20 lunch boxes, a clipboard and the dream of London's first reusable lunchbox scheme, they marched over to a food market to recruit members for the first trial. From there, a 10-person trial snowballed into a 250-strong membership scheme with over 10 participating vendors in an extended trial with Westminster City Council, looking to expand to all street markets in the borough. That was in 2019!