Dispatch Goods

Dispatch Goods is a reverse logistics company that builds reuse infrastructure for food businesses, allowing restaurants, food delivery services, caterers, grocers and on-site food service operators to offer reusable packaging without managing collection, cleaning or redistribution themselves. The company supplies stainless steel and silicone containers, returnable bags and other durable packaging, then handles collection, sorting, commercial cleaning, quality assurance and redistribution back to the customer — a model the founders describe as a recycling-like system for reuse rather than a single product.

Two distinct offerings are described in the sources. In direct-to-consumer meal and grocery delivery, brands either select products from the Dispatch Goods catalog or use their own; delivery drivers retrieve used packaging at the next drop-off and return it to the distribution center, where Dispatch Goods collects, cleans and palletizes it for return. In on-site food service, operators order packaging by the case as they would disposables, diners return items to collection bins on campus, and Dispatch Goods collects, washes and fulfills the next order, with water, carbon and return-rate metrics reported through an online portal. In earlier restaurant deployments, consumers scanned a QR code on the container to schedule an at-home pickup or dropped items at a return bin. The company also recovers and resells the gel freezer packs shipped with meal and grocery deliveries, and has begun designing and manufacturing its own low-cost durable packaging.

Founding story

Founder and CEO Lindsey Hoell became focused on plastic pollution after living near the coast in Hawaii, where she and her husband hiked to a remote beach whose sand was colored by microplastics. In 2016 she helped launch the Surfrider Foundation's Ocean Friendly Restaurants pilot program, which helped restaurants meet sustainability targets and later gained nationwide adoption. Concluding that businesses could not switch to reuse without shared infrastructure for collection, sorting, cleaning and logistics, she set out to build a recycling-like system for reuse, moved back to the Bay Area and, while enrolled in UC Berkeley's MBA program, started Dispatch Goods with co-founder Maia Tekle, who had worked at Caviar and then DoorDash after its acquisition.

Business model

Dispatch Goods sells reusable packaging together with the logistics service that recovers it, positioning its offering at cost parity with single-use and compostable alternatives and without deposit or loss fees for the end customer. Business customers order packaging much like disposables; Dispatch Goods retains the recovery, sanitation and redistribution layer, capturing residual value from each container across multiple use cycles. A second line recovers freezer/gel packs from meal-kit and grocery deliveries, cleaning and selling them back to businesses.

Revenue comes from business customers who buy or subscribe to reusable packaging and the associated collection, cleaning and redistribution service, priced to match single-use and compostable alternatives with no deposit fees; the recovered freezer-pack line is sold back to businesses as a second revenue stream.

Traction

By September 2020 the seven-person company had recorded more than 7,000 container uses and was adding roughly one or two restaurants a week, working with San Francisco restaurants including Greens, Mixt, Voodoo Love and Zuni Cafe. It removed 250,000 single-use plastic items from the waste stream in 2021, and at the December 2021 seed announcement had partnered with DoorDash, Imperfect Foods and 50 Bay Area restaurants. By the time of the October 2022 podcast it had replaced over 1 million pieces of plastic packaging, and its about page states over seven million items kept out of the waste stream. Customers cited include CookUnity, Thistle, Misfits Market and Hungry; Misfits Market measured a 34% lift in average order value in zip codes using Dispatch Goods packaging.

Latest developments

An NBC Bay Area feature published in November 2025 reported that the company now runs both its container and freezer-pack recovery services and has begun designing and manufacturing its own low-cost durable packaging. Hoell said Dispatch Goods was funded primarily through venture capital rather than grants, noting that federal grants have been more available to decarbonization businesses than to circular-economy companies, and that climate venture capital has become harder to raise under the current administration.