GO Box

Go Box is a system that provides reusable food and drink takeout containers which eliminates the need for single use plastic disposables. 

Throw away packaging litters oceans, piles up in landfills, and contributes greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Usually the takeout food containers/boxes are made out of plastic.
Go Box functions out of love for food carts, hate for waste, and desire to disrupt and improve the status quo — tens of thousands of single-use food containers passing from vendors to consumers to landfills.

The company connects food vendors, customers and private businesses around a sustainable, easy to use solution that keeps harmful toxins out of our environment: Go Box has partnered with mobile and traditional restaurateurs to make the reusable takeout food container commonplace in Portland. In a nutshell, Go Box functions as follows: 

• Individual customers purchase an annual subscription to Go Box through which they receive tokens that they provide to vendors in exchange for receiving their meal in a durable, reusable takeout container. 
• The customers then exchange their used, post-meal container for another token, which they can do at any of Go Box’s designated drop-off sites. The cycle is repeated as customers exchange tokens for containers and vice versa.  

Food truck vendors don’t have dishwashing facilities on their vehicles, while health regulations prohibit people from simply bringing their own reusable containers to food trucks. That’s where Go Box comes in.
For a one-time annual subscription of $21.95/credit, $30/2 credits (more options availables); customers can buy a reusable Go Box container when they get their meal at a participating food truck. Once the food is gone, food truck vendors can return their containers to a Go Box receptacle — and get a token in exchange. The next time a food truck rolls by, customers can use the token to get their meal in a Go Box. Go Box takes care of the pick up, professional cleaning, and redelivery of the reusable containers to the food trucks. GO Box containers are made from BPA and BPS free #5 plastic and durable enough to be reused up to 1,000x. Each container is thoroughly cleaned in a commercial kitchen to sanitize them before their next use.

Go Box has partnered with over 80 vendors in Portland, with 3500 subscribers and has helped avoid over 250,000 single use disposable containers from ending up in landfills or local waterways. GO Box has been one of the finalists of the 2017 Game Changer Award at OEN Entrepreneurship Awards.