From frustration to foundation
In early 2023, Alex Thornton was sitting in a windowless meeting room at a major UK food producer, watching a consultancy present a 47-slide deck to justify their £22,000 monthly retainer. The deliverable? A single CSV file for DEFRA. The process? Three months of data collection, manual entry, and back-and-forth emails with suppliers who never responded on time.
"There has to be a better way," Alex said to Maya Richardson, who'd spent six years leading packaging compliance at one of the UK's largest retailers. She'd seen the same broken process from the buy-side: suppliers drowning in spreadsheets, consultants charging by the hour to interpret regulations that should be codified in software, and deadlines that always seemed to arrive faster than the data.
That evening, over a pint in a Shoreditch pub, they sketched the first version of Repackd on the back of a napkin. The idea was radical in its simplicity: what if compliance software was self-serve, real-time, and priced transparently? What if suppliers could fill in their own data through guided forms? What if RAM assessments happened in seconds, not weeks?
Within weeks, they'd recruited Dr. James Okafor, a machine learning engineer who'd been building document extraction systems at a London AI lab, and Sophie Chen, a product designer who'd grown up in her family's packaging manufacturing business and understood the industry from the factory floor up.
Repackd launched its beta in September 2023 with 12 producers. Within six months, that number had grown to 400. Today, over 2,800 producers rely on Repackd to stay compliant, save money, and make smarter packaging decisions — without a consultancy on speed dial.