Will 2025 be the year edible cutlery gets its seat at the table?

Marseille-based edible cutlery startup Koovee has announced a partnership with French supermarket giant Carrefour to provide their durable cutlery, made from wheatflour, to customers in 600 Carrefour locations around France.

Edible cutlery is an idea that has been around for quite a while, but is yet to quite take off. Plastic cutlery has long been known to bring serious environmental harm, as they fragment into microplastics which can contaminate just about every ecosystem on earth.

Estimates of how many plastic utensils are used each year vary wildly, but at a bare minimum we’re talking tens of billions of plastic knives, forks and spoons in the US alone.

EU regulations drive the needle

European consumers will be familiar with the wooden utensils common across the continent now, thanks to EU regulation a few years ago banning the use of many kinds of single-use plastics.

Wooden cutlery comes with some of its own problems, however, as it is typically unrecyclable, there is limited regulatory oversight on its manufacture, and the porous materials used can become fertile breeding grounds for bacteria.

Edible cutlery made from organic materials promises to take recycling and post-meal use out of the equation entirely. While the idea has been around since the early 2010s, however, there have been hurdles to its adoption, not least consumer reticence to changing cutlery type and indeed ‘swallowing’ the idea of eating their cutlery at all. It is, to put it simply, a little weird.

"Win-win situation"

There are signs, however, that 2025 might be the year edible cutlery breaks into the mainstream. Koovee, founded by Tiphaine Guerout and Johanna Maurel, was spotlighted at the recent SIAL 2024 global food business conference in Paris, and the deal signed with Carrefour – which will see the chain carry Koovee’s cutlery in more than 10 percent of its stores across France – is a strong endorsement from a major player in the food industry.

"It's a win-win situation: Carrefour increases sales of salads and pasta boxes, consumers will enjoy Koovee cutlery, and the planet will benefit from less waste,” wrote Impact angel investor Filippo Della Torre on the day of the announcement. “A great collective success and one more step towards a sustainable future!"

At the same time, there is some evidence the market is widening for edible cutlery, as the imperatives of waste-reduction ground themselves more firmly in consumers mind, and the idea of eating your knives and forks gets more familiar.

A report out late 2024 from Allied Market Research estimates the global market for edible cutlery made from organic ingredients is going to see “astonishing” growth in the next few years, more than doubling from around €24m in 2018 to around €55m in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of more than 11 percent.

The report attributes this growth, among other things, to health concerns over the use of plastic utensils. A similar report from USD Analytics echoes these estimates – emphasising sustainability concerns as the main driver – and highlights that while Europe and North America remain the dominant markets, there is significant growth potential in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

The report does highlight continued obstacles to further growth, including cost of production and scalability, as well as issues to do with the taste and texture of edible cutlery, and the above-mentioned hesitance of consumers.

Alongside Koovee, other major players in the European edible cutlery sector include Kulero and Spoontainable in Germany and Ecoware in Belgium.