Why the Best Venues Serve With More Than Just a Show

There is a small moment, somewhere between the last song of the opening act and the first sip of a drink at the venue bar, when the whole night can quietly tip in one direction or the other. The lights are still low. The room hums. Someone hands you a cup, a straw and, without ever thinking about it, you form an opinion about the place putting on the show.

We spend a lot of time thinking about that moment. Because our biobased straws end up in a lot of hands during those in-between beats. And lately, the venues asking us about that experience have shifted in a way we didn't expect twelve months ago.

The shift: entertainment venues 

Park Theater Eindhoven has been serving guests with our straws since 2020 — one of the earliest theater partners to make biobased single-use their standard, quietly, without a press release. Their team saw it as basic hospitality: if you're asking people to trust you with their evening, don't hand them something that undermines the story your building is trying to tell.

This year the conversation has widened. Tivoli Vredenburg in Utrecht — one of the most acoustically ambitious venues in Europe — is now a customer. And at the Gastvrij Fair in Rotterdam last week, our team walked away with a notebook full of names of theaters, concert halls, festival organizers and multi-room venues actively looking for the next material step. It wasn't a curiosity trend anymore. It was procurement asking real questions: pricing at scale, food-contact certification, dispensing behavior at a packed bar, and what happens to the product after it's tossed.

The interesting part isn't that they want "sustainable." The interesting part is why. When you talk to the F&B managers at these venues, sustainability is no longer a moral add-on — it's a piece of the guest experience they're being judged on.

Being honest about what "continuing the show" means

We're careful when we talk about circularity in a venue setting. Biobased is not compostable magic. A wheat straw dropped into a mixed-waste bin in a busy foyer at 22:47 does not neatly return to the earth by morning. What it does do is start from an agricultural residue instead of virgin fossil plastic, keeps a difficult single-use category out of the petrochemical supply chain, and — with the right back-of-house waste streams — can be composted industrially.

That nuance matters, because venues we work with are also being asked hard questions by their own audiences and sponsors. Our job isn't to hand them a green sticker; it's to hand them a product that performs at a packed bar and a story they can defend on stage.

The venues moving fastest right now are the ones that treat their F&B service as part of the show, not a concession stand tacked onto the side. If that's the corner of hospitality you work in, we'd love to compare notes — the lab door in 's-Hertogenbosch is open, and there's usually a fresh batch of pellets on the bench waiting for someone to be honest about how they perform.

— The Cyclups team