Big Potato Games Interview


Big Potato makes a promise to the planet


Dean Tempest, Cofounder of Big Potato sits down with Toy News to discuss its focus on keeping games fun and bringing families together whilst being educational and sustainable


Tell us the background of Big Potato and your mission statement? Big Potato started life as a little potato back in 2014. There were only three of us in a damp Victorian workshop in Shoreditch, London with two games in our portfolio. Fast forward to 2021 and there are over 40 human potatoes creating and selling 70+ games in almost 30 countries. We work very closely with Spin Master in the US and lots of other publishers across the globe. We love working with game inventors (about half of our games come from outside inventors) and we have recently launched the Big Potato Academy, which offers paid internships for young creatives from disadvantaged backgrounds. From the beginning our mission was


always to bring families and friends together by making games that are easy to learn, quick to play and really good fun. But we realised early that this positive mission had a negative impact on the environment. So we set in motion a plan to change that. We put together a team from all sides of the business (codenamed: Green Tatos) to see what we could do to become more Earth friendly.


Are people more interested in buying sustainably and protecting the environment? If they’re not, Greta will be having words with them, and quite rightly so. It’s incumbent on us all to do what we can, and the toy and game industry can certainly play its part. Some markets are further along the environment-friendly path than others. Change will speed up when customers turn away from wasteful products en masse. We’re not there yet, but the times are a changin’.


Has there been any further developments or product launches at Big Potato - could you tell us more about cards made of ocean plastic? We recently launched a set of premium playing cards made from ocean plastic. It took 16 months of R&D but working closely


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with Waste2Wear, who turn ocean plastic into clothes, we created a brand called MOOP (Made of Ocean Plastic) which turns bottles floating around in the sea into game cards. We didn’t just make this for us though,


we’d love to work with any other game publisher who would like to join us and make some card games out of MOOP! A lot of the work we’ve done has been inside our actual games. Step-by-step we’ve removed single use plastic wherever we can. By the end of this year over 60% of our games will be plastic free. We call this out on our games with a little whale logo on the box to let people know.


To do this we have… Binned shrink-wrap on the outside of our boxes, and now use plant based cellulose stickers to seal our boxes instead. Our cards are no longer wrapped in plastic, but


instead wrapped in paper belly-bands. Our inserts which used to be made from plastic, are now made from card. We’ve made our boxes smaller and less deep, so that we can fit more in a shipping container, which helps reduce our carbon-footprint further. And of course where we can we use ethically- sourced wooden components instead of plastic and all our paper is sustainably sourced too. It took a while to go backwards and fix


old products, but these steps have set the precedent for all our games going forward. Finally, on our website we make a “One Game, One Tree” promise. Working with a company called Ecologi, one mangrove tree is planted for every game sold on our website. Mangroves are particularly proficient at absorbing carbon and storing it in their roots. Carbon stored in mangrove forests is considered blue carbon, because it is stored on the coast. These forests also provide


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