The Udder Way: a café swaps single-use milk bottles for reusable kegs
CIBI Café, Melbourne, and The Udder Way. Prepared by Rawtec for Green Industries SA, as part of a series of case studies on changing procurement practices.
Summary published
In August 2022, CIBI Café in Melbourne stopped buying milk in 2-litre single-use plastic bottles and switched to 18-litre reusable kegs supplied by The Udder Way.
Eighteen months later the café had avoided about 4,300 bottles, roughly 215 kilograms of plastic. Every keg used in place of bottles saves around 450 grams of plastic, which is the weight of nine crushed 2-litre bottles.
A keg lasts eight to ten years, or 800 to 1,000 uses, before it leaves the system.
single-use bottles avoided in 18 months
of plastic kept out of the bin
plastic saved per keg used
uses from a single keg
How the switch worked
The keg replaces the bottle, not the supplier.
CIBI kept buying from its dairy. What changed was the container: 18-litre reusable kegs in place of 2-litre single-use bottles, with the kegs returned, cleaned and refilled rather than recycled or landfilled.
The dairy passed on a cleaning cost.
CIBI’s dairy charged an additional 15 cents per litre to cover cleaning the kegs between fills. That is the operating cost of the system, and the case study reports it plainly rather than netting it off against the plastic avoided.
The volume is what makes it work.
One keg holds the equivalent of nine bottles. A café going through enough milk to empty a keg before it turns is the business this suits; a low-volume site is not.
What it cost to set up
The figures below are the transition costs reported in the case study, excluding GST.
From $350 excluding GST.
The full document is available as a PDF.
Changing how your organisation buys?
This is one of a series of case studies we prepared for Green Industries SA on practical changes to procurement. If you are looking at reusable systems in your own supply chain, we are happy to talk.