I am Jean-Francois, a Frenchy in Brisbane! As a father of two young children, I am always wanting to provide healthy food to my kids. I am making homemade yoghurts and fruit purees. I am yet to find a suitable reusable, container for the kids’ lunchbox. I was therefore forced to reluctantly purchase food pouches from the supermarket.

I see 4 main problems with using single-use plastic food pouches.

• they are expensive. i.e. 6 times more for yoghurt ($17/kg instead of $2.5/kg for homemade),
• they are not recyclable (part of the 449,000 Tonnes of flexible plastic produced per year in Australia that end up in the landfill),
• they contain industrially processed food (contains higher amounts of sugar, and preservatives…), and
• It is a practice that is informing our kids that it is normal and ok to throw away single-use plastics everyday rather than being environmentally friendly.

I needed another option. I tried refillable food-pouches, but I found them hard to refill and to clean. Also, we had few accidents with the pouches unexpectedly opened in the kid’s bag.

I had an idea. I bought some large syringes and filled them with yoghurt. It was working fine. Easy to operate, easy to clean. I identified few improvements:

• filled syringes are cumbersome and too large for a kid’s lunch bag so we have created a foldable handle (patent in progress),
• we can design a self-closing cap.

koor was born.

We want to avoid the need for single-use plastic drink/food containers such as food pouches, festival and stadium cups, coffee cups, and yaourt cups.

Catastrophic environmental issues: Australians throw out 2.7 million single-use or disposable coffee cups every single day. This adds up to 1.8 billion cups thrown out every year [source Envisageworks (2021)]. The food pouches market is growing 6.5% per year [source Technavio].

Using single-use plastics is a practice informing our kids that it is normal to throw away things daily. I believe it’s not the right message to pass on to a generation that will need to make massive changes toward sustainability. Furthermore, these plastic containers are mostly manufactured overseas, adding supply chain issues and carbon emissions.

Koor is basically a modified large syringe. The plunger can folder over and clip onto the barrel to facilitate storage and transport. It can also unfold and be used as a normal plunger to push the drink/food out.

The tip of the syringe is ended by a self-closing valve. No need for a lid. No spills.

To refill: Connect the loader to the koor to suck the drink and food. Once filled-in, just remove the loader and voila: your koor is ready to be used.

Introducing koor is just the first step of our mission.

We have a bigger dream: circular economy.

We are developing an automatic washing and refilling station for koors. We have the vision that this station can be placed at supermarkets and will be used to refill customer’s koors directly from large food container. This container is then cleaned and refilled by the supplier with food/drinks. The stations can also be installed in festivals, train stations, airports… The wallet integrated in the koors process payment and record content, best-by date, sugar intake… Largely improving the user experience.

We hope this system could reduce the need of single-use plastics (i.e. yogurt cups, bottles, cans, food pouches) to zero. It’s ambitious. We know but we must do it for our future generations.

Contact us if you are interested, we always want to hear from people like us wanting to improve things.

Koor sounds like “cours” in french which means run. It’s a reference to the fact that kids want to eat quickly and go back playing and running. Koor allows them to do that!

We are so happy to see koors can help people in their lives. Visit our accessibility page for more.