Cover Alterpacks’ food packaging
Alterpacks’ food packaging
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Alterpacks founder Karen Cheah is turning agricultural waste into plant-fibre materials designed to replace plastic in everyday products
Karen Cheah did not start Alterpacks on a factory floor or in a laboratory. Instead, the founder and CEO of the Singapore-based startup began in a small room in her mother’s home, turning it into a makeshift lab where she experimented with transforming agricultural waste into usable material. She would travel to the food manufacturing plants in Tuas to collect okara—the soybean pulp left over from tofu production—then spend days testing combinations of fibres and binders, trying to coax something stable from stubborn raw matter.
The process proved more difficult than expected. “When you’re working with natural materials, they don’t behave the way you want them to,” Cheah says. “Nature has its own rules.” For months, the room functioned as the unlikely birthplace of an idea still unproven: that waste could be transformed into a new material.
The idea for Alterpacks first took shape while Cheah was pursuing a master of science in innovation at the Singapore Management University. As part of the programme, students were challenged to develop a hypothetical startup addressing a global problem. During her travels, she began noticing the same issue everywhere: waste accumulating in public spaces, from the streets of Bangkok to Amsterdam, where a garbage workers’ strike had left rubbish piling up across the city.
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Above Karen Cheah, Alterpacks founder and CEO. Photo: Centre For Impact Investing And Practices
Karen Cheah, Alterpacks founder and CEO. Photo: Centre For Impact Investing And Practices
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“It made me think about how we define waste,” recalls Cheah, who previously worked in media before pivoting to materials innovation. “Why don’t we think of garbage dumps as recycling centres where waste goes in and a new material comes out?” That question became the starting point for Alterpacks, which she founded in 2019.
The breakthrough came when Cheah began looking beyond okara to agricultural by-products that could be processed more reliably at scale. Alterpacks eventually shifted to spent wheat, processed into a proprietary plant-fibre additive that manufacturers can incorporate into moulded products.
From that material came the company’s first commercial products: takeaway food containers. Today, the company works with manufacturing partners to produce food packaging used by hotels such as Como Metropolitan Singapore and Grand Hyatt Singapore, as well as restaurants including Culina at Como Dempsey. The compostable containers can withstand extreme temperatures—moving from freezer to microwave or even oven—without the plastic coatings typically required for fibre packaging. They are made entirely from recycled plant fibres and agricultural waste, with life-cycle analysis showing significantly lower carbon emissions than conventional plastic.
Yet the goal, Cheah emphasises, was never simply to make food packaging. “People think we’re a food container company, but those containers were just proof of concept,” she says. “We needed something real to show manufacturers and investors. What we’re really building is a materials company.” Early support from organisations including Temasek Foundation helped Alterpacks move beyond its initial laboratory experiments to manufacturing. Later, a grant from DBS Foundation marked what Cheah describes as a “seismic shift”, allowing the company to expand into new applications beyond food containers.
Alterpacks began working with produce distributor Freshmart to replace plastic trays. What started as a small trial packaging Korean paprikas soon expanded to organic apples, with more than 100,000 trays produced to date. The project demonstrated that the material could withstand the cold-chain conditions required for fresh produce while remaining durable enough for shoppers to carry home.
The company is also beginning to expand beyond Singapore. Distributors are already in place in markets including Australia, Thailand and Malaysia, with plans underway to explore Europe through a grant application to Enterprise Singapore.
Above Cheah speaking at the Innovation for Cool Earth Forum
Cheah speaking at the Innovation for Cool Earth Forum
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In healthcare, the company is piloting a redesigned medical cup with Tan Tock Seng Hospital, replacing disposable plastic cups with a plant-fibre alternative designed to improve nurses’ visibility of patients’ medication while improving grip for arthritic fingers and preventing the cups from tipping over. The material has also been tested in other clinical products, including kidney trays designed as alternatives to disposable plastic versions used in hospitals.
Yet translating such innovations into widespread adoption has not been straightforward. Building a materials company from scratch has required far more than technical experimentation. Cheah has had to learn how to navigate manufacturing ecosystems, secure funding and persuade businesses to test an unfamiliar product in industries where reliability and cost are paramount.
“You’re interrupting a system people are used to,” she says. “We didn’t have the 100-year head start that fossil-based fuels had.”
Above Cheah with the current Alterpacks product range
Cheah with the current Alterpacks product range
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Such experiences have also shaped Cheah’s approach to leadership. In the early years, she recalls, almost every day brought a new challenge that threatened to derail the company. “I learnt that this too shall pass,” she says. “Every day felt like a problem-solving exercise. Looking back, I would have given myself more time to pause and breathe.”
She also learnt when to turn opportunities down. “As a startup, there is this Fomo—or fear of missing out—because you don’t want to disappoint a potential distributor or client.” But saying yes to every request, she realised, could be more costly than pushing back. “Don’t be in a hurry to say yes or bend over backwards. Be prepared to say no, and face up to the consequences of saying no.”
At the same time, persistence remains essential. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs to get a prince,” she says. “But if you don’t open your mouth to ask, you’re back at square one.”
For Cheah, the ambition is ultimately larger than any single product. “What we want is for people to stop asking whether something is plastic or paper, and start asking instead: is it made from Alterpacks material?”
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Nafeesa Saini is the Features Editor at Tatler Singapore, where she shapes long-form stories on culture, business, philanthropy, wellness, and the people driving change in Asia. With a deep interest in storytelling that intersects meaningfully with identity and impact, she has profiled a diverse range of visionaries, from scientific pioneers in AI and health to creative trailblazers and literary minds.
Nafeesa’s writing includes cover stories and profiles that spotlight influential voices, alongside commentary on the trends reshaping our world.
Off the clock, Nafeesa unwinds with fiction, a good thrift hunt, and ‘brainrot’ TikTok scroll—while always keeping one eye on her next cultural getaway, usually to Indonesia.
