The story of Algramo dates back to 2012, when its founder José Manuel “Cote” Möller was a student of Management Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Cote lived with three friends in La Granja, a small village located south of the city of Santiago de Chile, one of the poorest areas in the Metropolitan Region of the capital city.

Being worker students, in order to meet the high santiaguina (Santiago-like) cost of living, friends were forced to buy only what they needed, day by day, in small quantities. Cote, who was in charge of the groceries in the household, realized that when he used to buy something at the district shop, he ended up paying much more than if he had bought the same products in bigger formats.

José Manuel, in order to find a solution to this problem, decided to found Algramo with the idea to create a vending machine for bulk products with wholesale-like logics and prices, but providing only the exact amount of product the client needed or could buy, thereby paying small and fair sums.

The name Algramo derives from the expression “al gramo”, ”, which actually means to buy “per gram”. These vending machines would have been installed in the almacenes de barrio – district shops – where the problem was much frequent.

At the time, no technology that could combine the price and the supply of an exact amount in one single vending machine existed, either in Chile or in other countries of the world.

The first challenge was therefore the design of the machine, which was initially developed thanks to a small fund aimed at backing up projects of students of the Catholic University, which has made it possible to make the dream of a twenty-year guy to come true.

Together with the vending machine, a resistant and reusable packaging was designed, with the aim to cut costs and reduce the impact of products’ containers.

At first they distribute washing powder first, and then food products such as beans, chickpeas, lentils, and rice.

The year after, Algramo was awarded with the Empresa B certification, thereby becoming part of a global movement (Certified B Corporations) made up of organizations promoting an economy that can create an integral value, starting from the well-being of the individuals and the planet, and taking responsibility in the short and long run, with a view to a truly sustainable development. Over the years, Algramo has won prizes and awards both at national and international level, coming to be one of most innovative companies on a global scale, alongside giants like Google, Apple and Samsung.

The goal of Algramo is clear: to fight against the “tax on poverty” (impuesto a la pobreza) which meets the most traditional business models, where a long chain of distribution mainly affects people who are forced to buy basic goods in small formats.

In addition to the fight for equality and social justice, which results in setting fair prices which everyone can have access to, with about 40% saving on the purchase of basic goods, Algramo also promotes purchases in small shops (which are currently more than 2,000 in the Santiago area) and supports the neighbourhood life around them.

Furthermore, the Algramo’s system of reusable packaging makes it possible to cut production costs and reduce the impact on the environment. Reusing the packaging avoids 2 kilos of waste per month per family and contributes to reducing carbon footprint.

Over the last few years, the “revolución de la compra inteligente” (the smart shopping revolution) in Algramo has not stopped and from the districts of Santiago, the Chilean company has started to spread its method to other Latin American countries, in particular in Colombia.
But the most significant breakthrough took place last year, when Algramo launched, in partnership with Unilever and Nestlé, an evolution of its system with the goal of promoting on a larger scale a consumption model based on the reuse of smart packaging, with the integration of a RFID chip which allows to monitor the number of reuses.

After creating an account on the website algramo.com and after associating the reusable packaging to the users’ profile, each time users use their own packaging to buy products, they will be awarded with a cash incentive that will accumulate in their virtual wallet and will be discounted in the following purchases, on the basis of a reverse-vending logics, a system designed to encourage recycling. In this way, according to José Manuel Möller, packaging becomes like a real rechargeable “payment card”, which we would hardly want to lose, or abandon, as unfortunately often happens with packaging after it has been used.