Sip, return, repeat: What one city’s reusable cup trial taught Yum! Brands about sustainable packaging

Image provided by Yum! Brands.

In Petaluma, California, 32 miles north of San Francisco, Habit Burger & Grill and KFC team members recently swapped their signature red and white cups for bright purple ones. In place of their restaurant logos, the words "Sip, Return, Repeat" appeared on the cups, and as residents walked around the downtown area, they encountered 30 local and national chain coffee shops, restaurants and other vendors serving beverages in the same violet-hued cups. What's more, bright purple receptacle bins were along sidewalks and inside and outside restaurants, including bins at Habit Burger & Grill, KFC and Taco Bell.

"From August to October, if you set foot outside of your house in Petaluma, you saw the purple cups," said Habit Burger & Grill team member Lauren Lamster. "They were everywhere."

What residents lovingly called "the purple craze" was actually The Petaluma Reusable Cup Project, the United States' first city-wide reusable cup program, which was led by the NextGen Consortium, a collaboration managed by the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners focused on developing circular solutions for food and beverage packaging and recovery. Habit and KFC parent company Yum! Brands is a partner in the NextGen Consortium alongside other leading brands.

In Petaluma, the NextGen Consortium wanted to find out if customers would return their cups for reuse if it were made easy. The project replaced single-use cups with free, reusable cups as the default option across all participating restaurants, and installed over 60 return bins at restaurants, convenience stores, community hubs and public locations, making returning a cup easy.

Once returned, the cups were professionally washed, sanitized, inspected and then put back into circulation. Any cups that were no longer usable because they were damaged, cracked or misshapen were sent to be recycled with other household and commercial plastic items.

The cups were designed with a serialized QR code to direct users to a website, returnmycup.com, to learn more about the project and to find their closest return bin, but other than that, there was hardly any branding or additional instruction. This was intentional, says Yum! Brands Chief Sustainability Officer Jon Hixson, who cited learnings from a different market, KFC France, which provides reusable cups to its dine-in customers after a French law took effect in 2023 requiring restaurants to do away with disposables.

"In France, we used cups that were designed with Colonel Sanders' face on them, and customers kept them because they thought they were cool," Hixson said. "This time, we kept it simple. Sip, Return, Repeat - to the purple bins. It's that easy."

And it was easy for KFC and Habit team members to execute, too. Both brands trained their staff on what to say and how to serve the beverages, and because the same signage was placed in stores, restaurants and around town, customers knew what to expect. Some even came into restaurants asking for the purple cups.

"It was a nice, emotional connection," Hixson said. "The team members felt like they were part of something bigger than themselves - and they were. So many entities had to get on board for this project to happen: local officials - including the mayor - the recycling facility, state government, restaurant franchisees, mom-and-pops, the parent companies of these brands - like Yum!. This project was a culmination of several years of collaboration that's continuing through 2025 and beyond, and it was made free for customers."

That last part is key. Customers did not have to pay extra for the reuseable cups, and the businesses shared the costs of the signage or cup cleaning. As Hixson said, the entire Petaluma reusable cup trial was made possible through extensive public-private collaboration, led by the Center for the Circular Economy at Closed Loop Partners, with support and engagement from the city, Zero Waste Sonoma, Recology, community groups and local businesses.

By the end of the 12-week program, customers returned more than 220,000 cups, which the NextGen Consortium, together with its partner Yum! Brands, sees as an early sign of success. (Full findings from the project will be released in a report by the NextGen Consortium in early 2025.)

"We're excited to dive deeper into the data and learnings from Petaluma and how this is incorporated into our broader sustainable packaging strategy," Hixson said. "I think the key learning is that people are open to reusable cups and serviceware, as long as we keep it simple and make it easy for them to use."

Maybe the solution to a greener planet is in a purple cup. As Hixson said, it might be that simple.

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