The problem with a burrito is that it is a cylinder of chaos, a structural engineering failure waiting to happen in your hands. The problem with plastic wrap is that it is a cylinder of polyethylene, a structural engineering success that will outlive you in a landfill. Tastee Tape, a Johns Hopkins chemical engineering spinout, is trying to solve both problems with a single strip of edible, plant-based adhesive film [Tastee Tape].
It is a disarmingly simple idea, born in a student lab and now backed by SOSV's IndieBio accelerator [IndieBio]. The patent-pending film is made from FDA-approved food-grade ingredients, is home compostable, and is designed to be eaten along with whatever it is holding together [Google Patents, 2024] [Rethinking Materials, 2026]. For founder Marie Eric, it is a wedge into the vast, stubborn market of single-use food packaging, starting with the messy reality of a lunch that refuses to stay rolled.
From dorm room to dinner table
The company's origin story is a classic piece of academic serendipity. The product began as a senior design project for a team of chemical and biomolecular engineering students, including Eric, who were simply trying to keep a burrito intact [Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering, 2022]. The resulting invention, a clear, tasteless, edible tape, caught a viral wave, landing features on The Tonight Show and in CNN Travel, before being named a TIME Best Invention of 2022 [TIME Magazine, 2022] [CNN]. That media blitz provided brand awareness, translating into a seed round from SOSV and a spot in the IndieBio program [Crunchbase].
The unit economics of a sticky situation
Scaling a novel biomaterial from a viral novelty to a pantry staple is an engineering challenge. Replacing even a fraction of the plastic wrap market requires winning on three fronts: cost, performance, and convenience.
- The performance wedge. Tastee Tape's initial use case is specific. It must stick to a tortilla through steam and condensation, withstand the pressure of a bite, and then dissolve without altering flavor.
- The convenience factor. The product must be as easy to use as tearing off a piece of plastic wrap.
- The price parity path. The goal is to get the unit cost of an edible film strip close enough to a piece of plastic wrap that the environmental benefit becomes a free bonus.
The company's public traction since its 2022 award has been quiet, with no disclosed sales metrics or major retail partnerships. The path from IndieBio demo day to supermarket shelf is long, and the silence suggests the hard work of scaling manufacturing and supply chains is underway.
The incumbent is a 10-cent roll of plastic
Every climate tech company has a Goliath. For Tastee Tape, it is not a direct competitor like Notpla or Loliware, which make edible cups and seaweed-based packaging. The real adversary is the humble, ubiquitous roll of Saran Wrap and its generic equivalents, a product optimized over decades for cost and performance.
The calculation is straightforward. If a 200-foot roll of generic plastic wrap costs about two dollars, that is roughly one cent per foot. A Tastee Tape strip that seals a burrito might use two inches of material. To compete on unit economics, the cost of those two edible inches needs to be measured in fractions of a cent, not dimes. That is the Everest of materials science and manufacturing scale the company must climb.