Great Wrap enters voluntary administration

Husband-and-wife-led material science company Great Wrap is in administration, with a reported $39 million in debts, citing a slump in demand as retailers and FMCG businesses began to recycle plastic in-house.

Great Wrap was founded in 2019 by Jordy and Julia Kay, a winemaker and an architect respectively. They launched their first stretch wrap product to consumers in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, and to positive media coverage.

The company received “hundreds of inbound corporate enquiries” following that, “had RFQs with the retailers and trials underway” and “the biggest FMCG companies begging for our product”, according to Jordy.

They targeted enterprise clients, raised $3 million through a seed round in 2021 and a $24 million Series A round the year after.

On Thursday, Jordy made an update on Linkedin sharing that the company’s story had finished, following a Herald Sun report earlier that day that the company is in administration with debts over $39 million. 

In his update, Jordy said that the company had managed to establish a “well-known brand and eventually a high-performing product that competed perfectly against decades of innovation from the petrochemical stretch wrap industry.” 

However, markets began to shift away from compostable packaging – which Great Wrap was making from “plant-based oils, agroforestry waste and pbat”, according to its website – and towards “vertically integrating their own plastic recycling operations.”

Jordy wrote: “This meant the pipeline slowly subsided and demand weakened. We pushed on and grew the business to hundreds of enterprise customers and distributors but that wasn’t enough to sustain the overheads of a plant to support a much larger vision.”

According to the Herald Sun report, administrators Rodgers Reidy found that Great Wrap “incurred losses in each financial year since it was founded in 2019, and had never recorded a profit”, with cumulative losses of $26.2 million. It entered administration on September 17.

It lists creditors including Seymour Finance Company, AAW Global Logistics, American Express, CCC Ingredients, KPMG and Monash University.

Jordy concluded his message with the words: “I will continue to support the administrators as we go through the voluntary administration process to sell all equipment and materials, and to do my best to have all creditors repaid in full.

“Julia and I went into this eyes wide open and swung for the fences to build something bold, but ultimately, we did not succeed. I hope our journey does not prevent others from trying in what can be a tough space, because if none of us tried, then we would live in a very dull world.”

Picture: credit Great Wrap  

Further reading

Great Wrap launches compostable pallet wrap

Great Wrap launches compostable catering wrap

Great Wrap, Voronoi, Good360 among winners at first Circle Awards

Wrapping it compostable with Great Wrap

Scientists from Monash milk microbes for tunable bioplastic blends

Great Wrap launches compostable plant-based cling wrap