Unlocking Curiosity: Regenerating Business from the packaging up with Jo Chidley of Re and Beauty Kitchen

02/01/23 • 60 min

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Jo Chidley is one of those forces of nature, unconstrained by the way things are usually done. As the co-founders of Beauty Kitchen, she and her partner refused venture capital, keeping their business free to become a B-Corp and to put people and planet ahead of profit. She's dedicated to producing the best outcome for the people who work for her as well as for the people who buy her products. And in the process of finding the best ways forward, she came across the horror of single use packaging and the devastation it's causing both in terms of the extraction and the post-use pollution. So Jo founded 'Re' to find ways to bring 'reuse' back into the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' triad. Now, she's invited to Davos to speak about the way this could transform the vast global packaging industry.

So in this week's podcast, we talked about why this is essential to transforming our world, and how it could work. Jo has ideas that seem (and are) innovative now, but ten years from now, will be the way things are done. With enthusiasm, integrity and a great deal of humour, she offers solutions to the meta-crisis that rely on each one of us changing behaviour - and she's devoting her life to making it possible - indeed inevitable - that we do.

Bio:
Jo Chidley is a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen and Re.

Founded in 2014, Beauty Kitchen is the highest scoring B Corp in the UK beauty industry and it's changing the face of the beauty industry with its aim to create the most effective, natural, and sustainable beauty products in the world. Jo went on to found Re, a company devoted to reducing the mountains of waste from our global $1tr annual single use packaging industry. As one of the pioneers of sustainable beauty, Jo and her company have accelerated the transition to Reuse through sustainable innovation by implementing Cradle to Cradle design into Beauty Kitchen’s circular approach. Jo's been instrumental in developing the world’s first closed-loop solution for beauty packaging and powered the service behind the ground-breaking Re programme which is resuable packaging for personal care brands & retailers. Beauty Kitchen is recognised on the UK’s 50 Most Disruptive Companies list and has won numerous industry awards, including ‘Who’s Who in Natural Beauty’.

Jo has won multiple industry awards, including the Natwest Everywoman Award in the Brand of the Future Category and was recognised as one of the 10 most influential people in Natural Beauty in the UK. She’s been featured in the likes of ELLE, Woman & Home magazine and BBC News and is a founding member of the Global Advisory Board for Sustainable & Natural Cosmetics. Jo was voted Nr 2 in the 2018 Who’s Who of Natural Beauty.

The Beauty Kitchen https://beautykitchen.co.uk/
Re https://www.rereworld.com/
Jo on Linked In https://www.linkedin.com/in/jochidley/
wet uplink https://uplink.weforum.org/uplink/s/
The Ethical Consumer https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/

Bio:
Jo Chidley is a circular economy expert, chemist, herbal botanist, and co-founder of Beauty Kitchen and Re.

Previous Episode

Stop eating Chicken! - The future of food with Rob Percival, author of The Meat Paradox

Rob Percival is a writer, campaigner and food policy expert with The Soil Association. His commentary on food and farming has featured in the national press and on prime time television, and his writing has been shortlisted for the Guardian’s International Development Journalism Prize and the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Food Sustainability Media Award. He works as Head of Food Policy for the Soil Association.

The Meat Paradox is his first book, and goodness, it's been a world changer - since its hardback publication, Rob's become a global superstar: invited to speak to groups across the spectrum of industry and culture about the nature of our relationship with the food that we eat. We left our first conversation each feeling that we'd just begun to scrape the surface of possibility and it would be good to talk again.
We had scheduled another podcast for later this year, but I saw that the book had just come out in paperback and that coincided with our having a total technological crash in this week's interview. So Rob really kindly agreed to fill in at super short notice so that we could talk more about life and death and food and the nature of the meta-crisis.
There's so much to this that really cuts to the core of who we are and where we're heading as a species, and we ended - again, feeling that there was more to say. But in the meantime, we explored the nature of the food system, the concept of precision fermentation, what makes 'whole' foods and how we might feed the world without industrial agriculture. Rob gave his one big suggestion for moving things forward - stop eating chicken.
At the end, we opened another huge topic and began to explore the nature of death, and who our fear of the unknown leads us to denial of the meta-crisis and, in the end, denial of death itself. So we'll be back when Rob's next book comes out, but in the meantime, here are more thoughts on the social, political, practical and moral aspects of how we take in the building blocks of life.

Radio 4 Book of the Week https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hf27
Rob's website https://rob-percival.com/about/
The Meat Paradox in paperback https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-meat-paradox-brilliantly-provocative-original-electrifying-bee-wilson-financial-times/9780349144573
Rob on Twitter https://twitter.com/Rob_Percival_
Previous Episode https://accidentalgods.life/the-meat-paradox/
Green Alliance https://green-alliance.org.uk/
GA Report https://green-alliance.org.uk/publication/shaping-uk-land-use-priorities-for-food-nature-and-climate/

Bionutrient Food Association https://www.bionutrient.org/
Global Governance Futures podcast that refers to how we cope (or don't) with the inevitability of our own mortality https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/global-governance-futures-imperfect-utopias-or-bust/id1548522280?i=1000590656384

Next Episode

Living in a Post-Carbon, Post-Capital, Post Urban world - with Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

Chris Smaje is a social scientist by training and a small-scale farmer by occupation. For the past 19 years, he has co-worked a small farm in Somerset, in southwest England. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surry and the Dept of Anthropology at Goldsmith's College. HIs focus was aspects of social policy, social identities and the environment. Since switching focus to the practice and politics of agro-ecology, he's written for various publications, such as The Land, Dark Mountain and Permaculture Magazine, as well as academic journals such as Agroecology and Sustainable Food systems. He blogs at Small Farm Futures and has previously been a director of the Ecological Land Co-op.

His latest book, A Small Farm Future, forms the basis of this conversation - in it, he lays out Ten Crises of our times, which, put together, create the Wicked Problem of this moment in history. From there, the remaining three parts of the book explore the ways in which rural localism can offer a way for humanity to see itself through the numerous crises we currently face both in the richer and poorer countries.

In the podcast, we take the book as our starting point (really, you should read it) and look less at the why, of rural localism and more at the ways it might happen and how it might work. We delve into the ways humanity has organised in the past (with deep passing references to Graeber and Wengrow's brilliant book, The Dawn of Everything') and how we might self-organise in the future. We look at the future of energy, at our conceptions of prosperity, the ways small farms can feed the world - and the absolute insanity of the 'precision fermentation' model of feeding eight billion people while enabling them to flourish free of corporate capture.

Chris's blog https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/
Chris's book https://uk.bookshop.org/books/a-small-farm-future-making-the-case-for-a-society-built-around-local-economies-self-provisioning-agricultural-diversity-and-a/9781603589024
Chris's response to Monbiot's Regenesis https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/?p=1978
Article on The Land updating the book https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/commons-and-households-small-farm-future
Chris on Twitter https://twitter.com/csmaje
Graeber and Wengrow - The Dawn of Everything https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-history-of-humanity/9780141991061
Simon Michaux https://www.simonmichaux.com/
Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell http://www.rebeccasolnit.net/book/a-paradise-built-in-hell/
What your food Qte https://uk.bookshop.org/books/what-your-food-ate-how-to-heal-our-land-and-reclaim-our-health/9781324004530
The Agricultural Dilemma https://uk.bookshop.org/books/the-agricultural-dilemma-how-not-to-feed-the-world/9781032260457