Quick Take
Wonderfil has partnered with UC Santa Cruz, Whole Foods and others to allow customers to refill bottles of soap, detergent and shampoo in their containers of choice in a fully automated process.
Single-use plastics, like soap and shampoo bottles, fill landfills around the country, and many efforts to increase recycling have fallen flat. California’s waste agency, CalRecycle, found that just 5% of colored shampoo and detergent bottles are recycled, and as much as 3 million tons of single-use plastic is sold annually in the state. Santa Cruz startup Wonderfil has set its sights on helping reduce reliance on single-use plastic bottles by making it easier for consumers to refill bottles for products like shampoo, laundry detergent and hand soap.
The solution: special refill stations that allow users to use the containers of their choice, fill them up with soap products and pay by the ounce — just as easy as buying gas at the gas station. The Wonderfil stations, about the size of an office desk, are installed in grocery aisles and college campuses. Users don’t need to weigh the container they’re using; everything is fully automated. They simply slide their debit or credit card into the card reader, pick the product they want, hold the bottle under the nozzle and pour as much as they want. They’re then charged by the ounce. It’s kind of like one of those pour-your-own-beer places or the water bottle refill stations at airports, except with soap.
It’s the brainchild of two childhood friends, Amanda Eichel and Shiloh Sacks, who first started building a prototype in their Santa Cruz living room during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since those first attempts, they’ve partnered with Whole Foods stores and college campuses to install their refilling stations. Just last week, the team installed a refill station outside its offices in the Westside’s Old Wrigley Building that’s open to the public to purchase soap and shampoo by the ounce using a bottle of their choice brought from home. They’re also setting their sights on expansion: In February, Wonderfil became the first nationally certified, container-agnostic, low-volume dispenser, which means the company can now take its refill stations nationwide and to Canada and Mexico.
Eichel had been studying demand for fossil fuels as part of her capstone project at Lewis & Clark College, and as part of that, became interested in solutions for reducing plastic usage. She found there was a lot of interest in refill and reuse infrastructure for liquid and cream products, but many existing solutions were still complicated or difficult for stores and consumers to use. Some require specific bottles that customers had to purchase and remember to bring back; others require store clerks to weigh a consumer’s container before they could use it, which can be time-consuming during busy shopping periods. There’s also the issue of needing to keep track of inventory and refill dispensers, a task that can easily fall to the wayside when a store is busy. At the time, Sacks was finishing her electrical engineering degree at UC Santa Cruz, and the two friends began talking about a possible collaboration. Eichel moved to Santa Cruz, and with help from university grant funding, the pair started working on a prototype of their first refill machine.
College campuses seemed like the perfect testing ground, to provide an easy way for students to purchase shampoo and laundry soap without having to go to a store and without contributing to the single-use plastic problem. Their first stations were installed at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, and the feedback they received helped them refine their design. They got in touch with soap company Dr. Bronner’s, which was impressed by their concept, and became a supplier for their stations. That eventually helped lead to an agreement with Whole Foods in late 2024 to install refilling stations in some of the retailer’s stores.
Wonderfil’s stations are now located in five Whole Foods stores in San Francisco and the South Bay, at two locations on the UC Santa Cruz campus (including one in the Porter/Kresge Dining Hall), and on the UC Berkeley, Cal State Monterey Bay and Pomona College campuses.
Meanwhile, the Wonderfil team has grown to seven, established offices in the Old Wrigley Building and is working to build as many as 150 new refill stations in the coming year. Fundraising is also on the agenda as the company moves forward.
Key to Wonderfil’s efforts is making sure that the process of refilling bottles and restocking the filling stations is easy and seamless, both for customers and store employees. It’s also important for companies that manufacture and sell soap and detergent products, especially as they strive to comply with California’s Senate Bill 54, the most stringent plastics recycling/reduction law in the U.S., which legally requires manufacturers to reduce plastic at the source. Working to make refills easier is just one way companies can work to achieve that goal.
Feedback so far from store managers and campus employees has been really positive, said Sacks and Eichel.
“I think it’s important to provide options that are more systemic [and less focused on just putting the onus on individuals],” said Sacks. “My focus has been making the eco-conscious option the best option.”
Wonderfil’s inventory tracking is fully automated, eliminating the need to have employees (at the locations where the stations are located) worry about checking how much product is left or changing out products when one is empty. Wonderfil’s refilling stations use large pouches that are filled with the soap products, then loaded into the machines. Once emptied, the pouches are cleaned and reused; the Wonderfil team takes care of that for some locations, while Dr. Bronner’s and other co-packers do it for others. The company estimates it has already prevented almost 100,000 single-use bottles from going to landfills.
“That’s really how we’re kind of tracking our impact – by tracking how many times we reuse those pouches,” said Eichel. “It’s been really successful, and it’s a scalable alternative on the supply-chain side to filling single-use plastic containers.”
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