Nominee Name: Industry Disrupter Award: Kadeya
Award category:Industry Disrupter
About the nominee:Kadeya’s patent-pending kiosk for the first time ever washes, sanitizes, inspects, and refills bottles, combining a bottling plant with a dishwasher and a soda fountain in a unit the size of a vending machine. This model decentralizes the entire linear and inefficient beverage supply chain to the point of use, eliminating practices that are environmentally unsustainable while increasing access to safe drinking water to at-risk populations and improving unit economics for incumbents in the industry, all of which empowers an easy transition away from single use.
Kadeya provides the convenience of grab-n-go single-use water bottles with superior safety and performance outcomes, initially in industrial environments – think refineries, processing plants, military bases (they won a contract with the U.S. Air Force), and construction sites (first paying customer now a repeat customer).
The company offers a Hydration as a Service (HaaS) business model which charges on a usage basis. Generally the corporate will pay for flat filtered water ($0.27/bottle, on par with current single use pricing), which includes hydration data, anonymized and optimized for performance, heat illness prevention recommendations for the individual, and OSHA reporting. If the worker wants to add carbonation, flavoring, enhancements (electrolytes for eg), s/he pays directly. Kadeya owns and maintains the asset and retains all flavored beverage profits for a sub-1-year payback period.
By 2030, Kadeya aims to generate 110m metric tons / year CO2e reduction and create 1300 quality technical jobs in urban communities, initially in the Midwest. With Kadeya, health and sustainability are not only for the wealthy 1%. For manual laborers, hydration is critical to performance and productivity, but current access to water isn’t trustworthy, tasty, or temperature controlled. Kadeya’s health target is to deliver safe, clean, zero-waste water to 5.5M people/year by 2030.
Blue collar workers draw from communities with unreliable access to safe drinking water. Lead, PFAS, VOCs, microplastics, and other toxins present in highest concentrations to overwhelmingly low-income and under-served communities. These consumers distrust the tap and spend disproportionate time, money, and effort to purchase single-use products. Kadeya filters those pollutants, providing safe water verified with full supply chain transparency.
Considering the industry at large, Kadeya is designed as a platform business which minimizes disruption to the status quo supply chain, incentivizing incbuments to transition from single use with superior profit margins, optimized operations, and fully decarbonized products. They are not a beverage brand, but a decentralized bottling and distribution platform atop which all beverage commerce will flow. Think of Kadeya as the “liquid railroad.” This positions Kadeya to focus on managing a closed loop fleet of bottles, understand utilization and GHG improvements, and ultimately provide a supply of safe water and all beverages at scale.
Why they should win:1. Globally, humans consume 1.2 million plastic bottles per minute; 91% of these are not recycled and the carbon emissions of our plastic water bottle addiction are staggering.
2. Kadeya provides sustainable hydration solutions to the workforce that needs it most - construction, industrial manufacturing, military bases, and more.