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Refill System Set to ‘De-plastic’ OTC, Pharma Packaging

Startup Cabinet Health offers reusable packaging and a refill system for the healthcare market that it says has the potential to transform the industry.

Cabinet Health products in sustainable packaging for CVS
Cabinet Health’s portfolio of OTC products, including allergy, pain, cold and flu, digestive, and sleep remedies, recently launched at retail in 700-plus CVS pharmacy stores nationwide.

In every CPG category and market, efforts are underway to eliminate single-use plastic packaging when and where it makes sense. One area that has traditionally lagged behind, however, is the healthcare market, primarily OTC and pharmaceutical packaging. However, startup Cabinet Health has come up with a solution that it says has the potential to transform the industry, making it more sustainable—“from retail and pharmacy aisles to medicine cabinets and homes.”

Founded in 2018 by Achal Patel and Russell Gong, Cabinet Health: The Sustainable Healthcare Co has developed a reusable and refillable packaging system whose components include a stackable, shatter-resistant and reusable glass bottle paired with refills in a compostable pouch. Its initial products, a line of OTC meds under the Cabinet brand name, first became available via D2C. In May, the portfolio, which includes allergy, pain, cold and flu, digestive, and sleep remedies, launched at retail in 700-plus CVS pharmacy stores nationwide.


   Read about another company providing refillable, reusable packaging, above & beyond, which has begun its journey toward a ‘refillable universe’ with lip balm products.


Gong shares that he and Patel came up with the idea for Cabinet while they were working abroad running a social innovation program for a consulting group that focused on identifying mission-driven and sustainable startups and helping them scale as businesses. “We saw firsthand the impact of the plastic crisis and saw other industries coming up with innovative sustainable packaging solutions, but no large healthcare players were successfully tackling this issue yet,” he says. “We combined our backgrounds in sustainable startups and medicine [Patel’s grandfather built one of the first acetaminophen factories in a small town in India] to reimagine people’s medicine cabinets.”

Reflecting on the scale of the plastics crisis, Gong shares that more than $194 billion plastic medicine bottles enter landfills each year. Furthermore, studies show that humans consume nearly 5 g of microplastics each week, which is roughly the size of a credit card. “The plastic waste crisis is a public health crisis,” he says.

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