Pull a recent invoice from your disposables supplier. Now pull one from last summer. The cups look the same. The lids look the same. The price doesn't.

Most operators I talk to have noticed packaging creeping up but can't put a finger on why. Their rep mentions "regulatory costs" and moves on. The number on the bottom of the invoice goes up by a few quid, you sign it off, life carries on.

That quiet creep is Extended Producer Responsibility - EPR for short - working its way through your supply chain. Here's what it actually is, what you're paying, and the three swaps that pull the number back down.

What EPR actually is, in plain English

EPR is a UK scheme that makes the people who put packaging on the market pay for what it costs councils to deal with it afterwards. Bins, kerbside collection, sorting, the lot. The fees launched in 2025 and the first round of "modulated" rates - where harder-to-recycle packaging costs more - kicked in from October 2025, so FY26 is the first full year operators are feeling it in their numbers.

You're not directly liable unless your business turns over £2 million and handles 50+ tonnes of packaging. So for the vast majority of independent cafés, EPR isn't a bill you pay HMRC. It's a bill your packaging supplier pays, and then passes through to you in their unit prices.

That's the bit most people miss. It doesn't land as a line called "EPR fee." It lands as a quietly higher price on the same cup you've been buying for years.

How it actually gets onto your invoice

Your disposables supplier - whoever that is, big national or local wholesaler - gets charged a fee per tonne of packaging they place on the market. The fee is different for every material. Plastic is expensive. Fibre is cheaper. Composites (a paper cup with a plastic lining, for example) sit awkwardly in the middle and have been hit hardest by the October 2025 modulation.

The supplier doesn't absorb that. They build it into their pricing. Sometimes it's transparent and shows as a separate line. More often, it's baked silently into the unit cost of the cup, the lid, the bag, the box.

If you're a CostingBrik user, you can spot this on the supplier price tracking - the unit cost moves but the pack size and product haven't changed. That's the tell. If you're not, the manual version is the same: pull two invoices from the same supplier six months apart and compare line by line. Our pattern-learning invoice processing catches these silent unit-cost drifts automatically, but a spreadsheet and twenty minutes will do the same job.

What a typical café is actually paying

I've looked at our own numbers across the Hunters sites and compared notes with a few operators running similar volumes. Here's roughly where it lands:

Small café, 80-120 takeaway drinks a day, mostly hot, paper cup and PE lid: roughly £25-40 a month in EPR pass-through. About £300-480 a year.
Busier independent, 200-300 takeaway drinks plus food-to-go bags and boxes: roughly £50-80 a month. About £600-960 a year.
Small group, 3-5 sites with strong takeaway and brunch boxes: comfortably into £200-400 a month when you total it.

These aren't headline numbers. They're not going to close you down. But they sit alongside everything else hitting in FY26 - the April 2026 cost cliff of NMW, NICs, business rates, and supplier rises - and they don't go away.

Three packaging swaps that cut both EPR and unit cost

The good news: the same swaps that reduce your EPR exposure tend to reduce your unit cost too, because lighter and simpler packaging is cheaper to buy. This is one of those rare overlaps where doing the right thing for the bin lorry is also doing the right thing for your gross profit.

1. Lighter paper cups

A standard 12oz double-wall paper cup weighs around 16-18g. A modern single-wall with a recycled-fibre cup sleeve weighs 9-10g and uses sleeves only when needed. EPR fees are charged per tonne, so halving the cup weight roughly halves the EPR component, and the cup itself is usually 10-15% cheaper at the same quality.

The catch: you need to be honest about which drinks need a sleeve. Flat whites going to a customer who's drinking on the walk to the car park, no. A 16oz latte going on a 30-minute commute, yes. Train your team on the call and the maths works.

2. Single-material lids

Composite plastic lids - the kind with two different polymers fused together - have been hit hardest by EPR modulation because they're a nightmare to recycle. Single-material PP lids (one polymer, clearly marked) sit in a lower fee band. Fibre lids sit lower still.

A move from composite to mono-material PP typically cuts the per-lid pass-through by a few pence on a base of, say, 14-18p. On 200 takeaway drinks a day, that's a few hundred quid a year on its own. Ask your supplier specifically for the mono-material spec - they have it, they just don't always lead with it.

3. Reusable cup discount programmes

The cheapest cup is the one you don't buy. A 25p discount for customers bringing their own cup sounds like it costs you 25p, but you save the cup (12-18p), the lid (14-18p), and the EPR fee on both. Net, you're usually 5-10p better off per reusable cup, and the customer feels rewarded.

Run it for a month and check your sales mix in MenuBrik. If reusable-cup transactions are sitting under 5% of takeaway drinks, the discount isn't working hard enough or your team aren't asking. If they're above 15%, you've found a real margin tailwind.

How to spot the EPR pass-through on your invoices

Three quick checks, none of them clever:

Compare same-product unit prices six months apart from the same supplier. If the unit cost on a SKU you've bought for years has moved by 3-8% and the pack size hasn't changed, that's largely EPR plus general supplier rises.
Ask your supplier rep for a written breakdown of how their packaging prices have moved since October 2025 and what's EPR-driven versus raw material or freight. A good rep will tell you. A bad one will fudge it - which is also useful information.
Watch the composite items hardest: paper cups with plastic linings, foil-lined bags, lined sandwich boxes. These have moved most because they were hit hardest by modulation.

If you're already getting hit by supplier price increases more broadly, bundle the EPR conversation into the same negotiation. Don't accept "regulatory costs" as a one-line explanation. Make them show you the breakdown.

The takeaway

EPR isn't a headline cost, and it won't be the thing that makes or breaks your year. But it's a real, structural rise in your packaging-as-input-cost that compounds quietly month after month, and most operators are paying it without realising.

The fix isn't to fight the scheme. It's to design lighter, simpler packaging into your operation, and to make sure the cup you don't sell is worth a little more than the cup you do. Twenty minutes with your last six invoices and a chat with your supplier rep will tell you where you stand. From there, one swap at a time.

Ed O'Brien has run Hunters Cake Company for 17 years across cafés in Witney, Burford, and a bakery in Carterton, Oxfordshire. He's building Brikly - modular tools that give independent café owners the same data the big chains have, without the big chain price tag.