Sustainable competition for gorillas

The start-up Alpakas focuses on sustainable packaging, environmentally friendly transportation and organic instead of fast.

The three founders of Alpakas still have the term "Stealth Mode" in their LinkedIn profile - this stands for start-ups that try to avoid the public eye. Nevertheless, there is a hint of what the trio of Antony Roczek, Tomy Eitner and Simon Chorzelski are up to: sustainable. Together, the entrepreneurs are founding Alpakas, a delivery service for unpackaged food, as Capital reports.

Alpakas could therefore become a sustainable alternative to delivery services such as Flink and Gorillas, which focus primarily on speed. Alpakas wants to focus on sustainability. An electric cargo bike will be used to make same-day deliveries for orders placed by 5 pm. Orders over 25 euros are free of charge.

The Berlin start-up has already completed a seed financing round: A double-digit million amount as a convertible loan comes from venture capitalist Food Labs and the Blue Capital fund, which is owned by Tier Mobility founder Lawrence Leuschner, among others. Business angels such as entrepreneur Markus Windisch and Hellofresh COO Nils Arne Herrmann are also involved.

All products are to be packaged sustainably, for example in glass. The start-up collects the empty jars. The 500 products so far do not yet include meat or fish, as the company is still working on sustainable transportation.

The target group is certainly small and the concept is first being tested in Berlin. "We believe that the unpackaged approach works better in the delivery business than in stores," Chorzelski tells Capital.