Tag Archives: packaging

When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging

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Most of us don’t give packaging a second thought. It arrives, we tear it open, and it goes straight into the recycling bin or, less nobly, the bin under the sink we keep telling ourselves we’ll sort through on a weekend. But every once in a while, a piece of packaging stops you mid-unbox and makes you think: someone really cared about this.

The Storey Battery by French solar tech company Sunology is a compact home energy storage unit, the kind that quietly stores power from your solar panels or the grid and releases it back when you need it most. It can run household appliances through an outage, reduce your electricity costs, and help you step a little further away from grid dependency. Plug-and-play clean energy, designed for the person who cares about both good design and their electricity bill. Swedish industrial design firm Propeller Design handled both the product and its packaging, and if you’ve seen the Storey itself, you already know this is a studio that doesn’t phone things in. The battery has soft, clean forms and an aluminum housing that belongs in a living room, not buried in a utility closet. It also won the BIG SEE Grand Prix 2026 Design Award, which feels entirely deserved.

Designer: Propeller Design

But the packaging is what I want to talk about, because the packaging is quietly extraordinary. The Storey weighs 30.5 kilograms. That’s serious weight for anything to withstand during shipping and freight, and for decades the default answer to that kind of engineering challenge has been foam, plastic, more foam, and maybe some more plastic just to be safe. Propeller went a completely different direction. The entire solution is fiber-based. No plastic. Not even a little bit.

They built the structure around strong honeycomb board, paperboard corner reinforcements, and paper straps. If you’ve ever seen honeycomb board in cross-section, you’ll know it’s deceptively capable. The cellular geometry distributes weight in a way that makes it genuinely strong, the kind of structural work that plastic foam has been quietly getting credit for all this time. The paper straps wrap around the battery unit like a considered branding detail rather than an afterthought, and one of them comes tagged with a small kraft card that reads “Reuse me!” alongside a clean line illustration of a cable. It’s a small gesture, but it signals the right values without making a speech about it.

I think what Propeller understood here, and what a lot of packaging designers still miss, is that sustainable materials don’t have to mean a downgraded experience. There’s a quiet assumption embedded in a lot of eco-friendly packaging that you’re trading aesthetics for ethics, that paper means compromise. This design challenges that directly. The unboxing feels deliberate and considered. The honeycomb cradles the Storey like it was made for it, because it was. The yellow straps against the pale, soft form of the battery are almost gift-like in appearance. It’s the kind of opening experience that justifies being filmed, which, in 2026, is not a small thing to say about any piece of industrial packaging.

The industry conversation around plastic-free packaging has been going strong for years, but execution still tends to lag behind intention. Companies announce pledges and deliver on them for products where plastic-free engineering is relatively manageable. Designing out plastic on a 30.5-kilogram product that needs to survive freight conditions across a global supply chain is an entirely different engineering problem, and Propeller actually solved it rather than simply worked around it.

The Storey battery is built for a future where home energy storage becomes a normal part of domestic life. It follows that its packaging should feel like it belongs in that same forward-thinking vision. Paper strong enough to carry 30 kilograms of clean energy technology is not a small design win. It’s a proof of concept, and one that the rest of the industry probably needs to study closely.

The post When Paper Does the Heavy Lifting: Sunology’s Storey Packaging first appeared on Yanko Design.

Bertolli Just Gave Alfredo Sauce Its Own Official Pantone Color

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Pantone has officially colored pasta night, and I’m not even slightly mad about it. Bertolli, the Italian food brand that’s been a pantry staple since 1865, just partnered with Pantone to give its best-selling Alfredo sauce an official “Inspired by Pantone” color. The shade? A creamy, off-white hue that’s as comforting to look at as it is to eat. And while some might chalk this up to a clever marketing stunt, I think the collaboration is actually doing something more interesting than it appears.

Let’s start with what Pantone actually does, because it matters here. Pantone doesn’t just slap its name on a color for fun. For decades, the brand has been the definitive authority on color across industries ranging from fashion to interiors to product design. When Pantone certifies a color, it assigns it cultural and commercial weight. It says: this hue means something. Giving that recognition to a pasta sauce is either absurd genius or genuinely inspired branding, depending on your appetite for that sort of thing. Personally, I lean toward the former.

Designer: Bertolli x Pantone

The campaign introduces the creamy off-white as Alfredo’s defining visual identity, with limited-edition Bertolli jars wrapped in Pantone-inspired branding that puts the color front and center. The familiar Pantone square appears on the jar packaging, with a transparent cutout so the sauce itself becomes the swatch. It’s a clever design choice. You’re not just looking at the color, you’re looking through the label to see it in its most natural state.

The brand also ran a sweepstakes giveaway with cookware and kitchen accessories curated in the same creamy off-white palette. Think: a stand mixer, pots and pans, a Dutch oven, cooking utensils. All in Alfredo. The fact that Bertolli thought to extend the color story beyond the jar itself shows real creative confidence. A kitchen dressed in Alfredo white is, objectively, a mood.

Now, is this a bit of a marketing flex? Yes. Absolutely. But brands claiming colors as their own is nothing new. Tiffany Blue has its own Pantone number. UPS brown is officially trademarked. Owning a color is a legitimate form of brand identity. The difference is that Alfredo sauce has always had an identity problem. Tomato sauce gets the cultural spotlight. Marinara is the classic. Arrabbiata gets the personality points. Alfredo, despite being wildly popular, tends to get lumped into “the other one.” Rich, creamy, beloved by practically everyone who has ever sat down to a bowl of pasta, but rarely celebrated on its own terms.

This is Bertolli’s argument that Alfredo deserves its own moment, its own aesthetic language. And credit where it’s due: using Pantone to tell that story is a smart move. Color is one of the most immediate, emotional forms of communication we have. When Pantone named Viva Magenta the Color of the Year, people talked about it for months. Attaching that same institutional gravitas to a sauce most people have in their fridge right now? That’s a cultural bridge worth crossing.

The campaign also encouraged people to “Take the Alfredo” through social media activations and influencer partnerships. The phrase is a little clunky, but the intention behind it is clear: they want Alfredo to feel like a statement, not just a side dish.

I do think the success of a campaign like this lives or dies by whether it earns its concept, and this one mostly does. The visual execution is clean and considered. The product and the partner make intuitive sense together. Pantone’s “Inspired by” series has previously drawn from art and culture, so extending it to food isn’t much of a leap when you think about how central color is to the way we experience appetite. We eat with our eyes first, and that creamy off-white carries its own quiet appeal.

Bertolli has been feeding people for over 150 years. Getting Pantone to officially say the brand’s signature sauce has a color worth naming? That’s just a long overdue introduction.

The post Bertolli Just Gave Alfredo Sauce Its Own Official Pantone Color first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Mooncake Tin Box Turns Into A Chinese Lantern Once You’re Done Enjoying The Sweets

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Back in the 90s, every packaging was a craft project. Milk cartons were turned into pen-stands, Pringles cans into kaleidoscopes, Coca-Cola bottles into backyard rockets… and that approach made a lot more sense than throwing packaging into the waste bin. We’d go out of our way to repurpose these objects, giving them a (sometimes unintended) second life. We don’t do that anymore because for the most part, brands don’t believe in fun packaging anymore. However, Yanlun Wu’s trying to reverse that approach.

A winner of the A’ Design Award, Wu’s packaging for traditional Chinese mooncakes looks like your standard tin box. With cultural elements evoking the beauty of the Mid-Autumn festival, this box forms an integral part of a ritualistic gifting experience, where you visit your loved ones with mooncakes, wishing them good health and prosperity. The packaging for a mooncake plays a simple dual-purpose role – it encases the cakes for safe transport, but it also serves as a visual signifier of quality – a good packaging is indicative of a well-thought gift. However, that dual-purpose role ends once the moon-cakes are consumed. Wu’s packaging, however, turns the lid of the mooncake box into a traditional paper lantern, giving it life even after you’ve consumed the dessert.

Designer: Yanlun Wu

Lanterns form an integral part of the Mid-Autumn festival too. Apart from eating mooncakes, gazing at the moon, and bonding with family, people also light paper lanterns which are either hung outside houses, or sent cascading into the sky. Wu’s design aligns with the former. Each food-safe tin box comes with a lid that has a foldable lantern pressed into it. Once you’re done with the mooncakes, simply unfold the lantern and you’ve got a traditional keepsake that allows you to enjoy Wu’s packaging well beyond its original purpose.

That’s the beauty of what Wu’s trying to achieve here – giving the package a third purpose and a second life. Each lantern comes adorned with traditional Chinese motifs that represent the Mid-Autumn festival. “This innovative dual-lifecycle design combats waste by turning disposable packaging into a lasting decorative object, seamlessly blending traditional Chinese mid-autumn symbolism with modern sustainable practice,” Wu says.

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3-in-1 Cardboard Pot Just Made Plastic Pots Obsolete

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The plant pot is not a product most people think about reinventing. It holds soil, it sits on a shelf, and eventually you wrestle it off the root ball and toss it in a bin. End of story. But three design students from Münster School of Design looked at that ordinary object and saw something worth fixing, and the result is POT+, a 3-in-1 recyclable cardboard plant pot that manages to be both surprisingly clever and genuinely necessary.

Sophie Greif, Paul Sommerfeld, and Paula Storm developed POT+ over just eight weeks as part of a course on sustainable cardboard packaging. Eight weeks is not a lot of time. It barely covers a single design iteration at most studios, which makes what they produced even more impressive. The concept is straightforward: a biodegradable, glue-free cardboard pot that doubles as a scoop and includes a built-in plant tag. Three tools, one object, zero plastic.

Designers: Sophie Greif, Paul Sommerfeld and Paula Storm

The plastic plant pot problem is bigger than most of us realize. Most of those thin, flimsy pots that come with supermarket herbs or garden centre annuals are not recyclable. They fall into a category of plastics too contaminated with soil and organic material to process properly, so they end up in landfill. Billions of them, every year. Environmental groups have flagged this as one of the garden industry’s most persistent and overlooked waste problems, and yet the plastic pot has remained almost entirely unchanged for decades. We have essentially built a throwaway infrastructure around plants, which is a genuinely bizarre thing to do for products sold in the name of nature.

POT+ addresses this directly and without fanfare. Made from 100% recyclable cardboard, it can be tossed straight into the paper recycling bin after use. It is water-resistant and stable for up to two weeks, which covers the window between purchase and repotting for most plants. Beyond that, the ergonomic design and integrated scoop make the actual task of repotting cleaner and easier. And the built-in plant tag is one of those small details that makes you wonder why it was not always part of the package. Anyone who has scratched a plant name on a popsicle stick and promptly lost it will know exactly what I mean.

What strikes me about POT+ is how it reframes the idea of sustainable design. So much green design falls into the trap of asking people to change their behavior significantly in exchange for a smaller environmental footprint. POT+ does not do that. The user experience is genuinely better: fewer tools to fumble with, a biodegradable pot that sidesteps the recycling bin debate, and a plant tag already built in. The sustainability is incidental from the user’s perspective, even though it is clearly the central intention from the designers’.

That alignment between good design and ethical design is harder to achieve than it looks. Students are often praised for one or the other, but rarely both. Sophie, Paul, and Paula merged perspectives from Communication & Product Design and Media & Product Design, which likely accounts for the final product feeling as considered in its branding as it is in its function. POT+ has a clear identity. It looks intentional, not experimental.

The Green Product Award recognized it for good reason. But the more interesting conversation is about what POT+ signals for design education. Eight weeks, three students, three different disciplines, and a finished concept that could genuinely replace a product category. That is not a student project in the diminutive sense of the phrase. It is the kind of outcome that most professional design teams would be proud to put their name on.

The plastic plant pot has been a quiet environmental problem for decades, hiding in plain sight because it is so mundane, so ubiquitous, so easy to overlook. POT+ does not try to be remarkable. It just quietly gets the job done better. And right now, that might be the most useful kind of design there is.

The post 3-in-1 Cardboard Pot Just Made Plastic Pots Obsolete first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Bento Box Built to End Takeout Waste for Good

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Every time I order food delivery, I already know what’s coming before I open the bag. A stack of plastic containers, lids that barely seal, and that guilty beat when I toss everything in the trash about five minutes after eating. It’s a ritual nobody talks about but everyone performs. It happens millions of times a day.

That’s the problem Kaja Brunke decided to sit with. The Polish designer, who earned her Master’s from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, didn’t approach meal delivery packaging with the usual sustainability playbook. She didn’t swap the plastic for bamboo and call it done. She asked a harder question: what if the container was never meant to be thrown away at all?

Designer: Kaja Brunke

The result is ReBento, a returnable, reusable container system designed specifically for subscription meal delivery. It just won the Packaging category at the Green Product Award 2026, and once you understand what it’s actually doing, it’s hard to unsee how obvious the solution feels, and how long it took for someone to build it properly.

ReBento works like this: meals are delivered in durable, leak-proof containers. Inside, removable glass compartments let you separate and reheat food directly in the box, no transfer required. After you’re done, empty containers are collected by couriers on their next delivery run and cycled back into the system. No secondary logistics chain to build. No complicated drop-off points. It integrates into the delivery infrastructure that already exists.

That last part is what makes it genuinely clever. Most sustainable packaging concepts are designed in isolation, as if the supply chain is a blank canvas waiting to be reimagined. ReBento was designed around the reality that already exists. Brunke clearly understood that a solution only works if it doesn’t require the whole system to change around it. Couriers are already going door to door. Why not have them pick something up on the way back?

The glass compartments are a thoughtful detail that deserves more attention than they might initially get. Glass is heavy, yes, but it’s also the reason the dining experience actually improves. Food doesn’t absorb the smell of the container. You can reheat without transferring to another dish. The meal arrives as it was meant to be eaten. For anyone who has peeled hot soup-soaked rice out of a soggy paper container, that alone is worth talking about.

What Brunke has built is not just a product. It’s a framework for how meal delivery could work if the industry decided to take the waste problem seriously, rather than paper over it. The sector has largely settled for greenwashing: compostable containers that require industrial composting facilities most cities don’t have, or “recyclable” plastic that rarely makes it through the actual recycling process. ReBento sidesteps the whole debate by making durability the point.

I’ll be honest: I’m a little impatient for something like this to reach the mainstream. Subscription meal delivery is one of the fastest-growing segments of the food industry, and the packaging waste it generates is staggering. The irony is that the subscription model is actually the ideal environment for a returnable container system. The logistics are already in place. The customer relationship is already ongoing. The pieces are all there.

Brunke came to design through an unusual path: advanced math and physics in high school, a year on exchange in Illinois, and a degree grounded in solution-based thinking. You can feel that background in ReBento. It’s not a conceptual piece that looks beautiful in a portfolio and stops there. It’s a system that has been thought through to the point of asking: how does this actually get picked up, cleaned, and sent back out again?

That’s the kind of design thinking that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves, because it’s not flashy. A returnable bento box won’t stop traffic the way a concept car does. But the best design isn’t always the loudest. Sometimes it’s the kind that makes you wonder why it took this long.

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The Grocery Container That Finally Makes Reuse Actually Work

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Walk into any supermarket and you’ll notice that the food gets a lot of attention, but the packaging it comes in? Almost none. We’ve become so accustomed to grabbing a plastic-wrapped chicken breast or a shrink-sealed block of cheese and tossing the container without a second thought that it has essentially become invisible. Which is exactly why Lars Biedermann’s ReLoopBox caught my attention the moment I came across it.

ReLoopBox is a circular, reusable container system designed to replace the disposable plastic packaging that floods our grocery stores, refrigerators, and eventually, our landfills. On the surface, it sounds like a straightforward sustainability pitch. But the more you look at it, the more you realize that Biedermann, an industrial design graduate from FH Joanneum in Austria, wasn’t just designing a container. He was designing a completely different logic for how food packaging should work.

Designer: Lars Biedermann

The system uses standardized, vacuum-sealed containers made from copolyester, silicone, and stainless steel. These aren’t flimsy alternatives to plastic wrap. They’re built to be durable, reusable, and returnable, meant to circulate between consumers, manufacturers, and retailers rather than taking a one-way trip to the bin. Each container is embedded with a digital chip that tracks it through the supply chain, handling inventory and logistics with minimal friction. It’s the kind of detail that quietly separates a thoughtful design from a well-intentioned one.

The vacuum seal is also doing real work here, and it’s worth noting. One of the grimmer realities in food sustainability is that a significant portion of what we buy never actually gets eaten. Food goes bad too quickly, and a lot of that comes down to packaging that doesn’t do much beyond keeping things contained for the journey home. A vacuum environment slows spoilage significantly, which means ReLoopBox isn’t just arguing against plastic waste. It’s also quietly taking aim at food waste. That’s two problems addressed through one design decision, and I appreciate when a solution earns its own complexity.

Aesthetically, the design is clean and considered, which matters more than people give it credit for. Sustainable products have historically struggled with an image problem. They tend to look corrective rather than desirable, like they’re asking you to make a sacrifice. ReLoopBox doesn’t carry that energy. It looks like something that belongs in a well-designed kitchen, which is probably the smartest thing Biedermann could have done. If a product doesn’t look good, it doesn’t get adopted, and if it doesn’t get adopted, the environmental argument is moot.

My honest take is that the real challenge for a system like this isn’t the design itself, which is genuinely impressive. It’s behavioral. Getting consumers to return containers, getting retailers to build the infrastructure to accept them, getting manufacturers to commit to a circular model instead of a linear one, that’s a much bigger lift than any design brief can anticipate. We’ve seen well-designed reuse programs come and go because the return loop is where things tend to fall apart. Biedermann seems to understand this, which is why the digital chip integration is such a critical piece of the system. It removes guesswork from the tracking process and makes the logistics side of the loop far more manageable.

What makes ReLoopBox feel genuinely fresh isn’t that it proposes reuse. We’ve had reusable containers for decades. It’s that it proposes a reuse system, one that thinks about the full journey of a container rather than just the moment it sits on a shelf. Biedermann has described his practice as holistic design with a goal of contributing something positive to the world, and that philosophy is visible in every layer of this project.

Whether ReLoopBox eventually scales into something we see in mainstream retail remains an open question. But as a piece of design thinking, it’s the kind of proposal that makes you look at the grocery aisle a little differently, and realize that even the most mundane objects are still waiting to be redesigned.

The post The Grocery Container That Finally Makes Reuse Actually Work first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Coffee Sleeve Reinvented From the Grounds Up

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Every morning, millions of people grab a coffee to go and toss the paper sleeve into the trash without a second thought. It is a tiny object, easy to overlook. But that tiny object is part of a system that produces an estimated 16 billion disposable cups every year, sleeves included, and nearly none of it gets recycled. In the UK alone, cup sleeve recycling sits at roughly 2.8%, which is a polite way of saying almost everything ends up in a landfill.

That number has been sitting in the back of my mind ever since I came across GoBean, a design concept by Aranza V. Sanchez and Song Yeon Lee, two design students from Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach in Germany. The project recently earned a nomination for the Green Product Award, and when you look at what they have actually built, you understand why.

Designers: Aranza V. Sanchez & Song Yeon Lee

GoBean is a coffee cup sleeve made from coffee grounds. Not coffee-inspired, not coffee-colored. Actually made from the used, spent, leftover grounds that cafés collect and typically throw away. Combined with natural binders, the material becomes water and heat resistant, which matters quite a bit when your job is to wrap around a hot cup. It feels like a design idea so obvious that you wonder why it took this long to exist.

The material is 100% compostable and breaks down completely in about three weeks. If you would rather not compost it, you can plant it directly into soil. The sleeve, the thing that kept your fingers from burning on a Tuesday morning, becomes part of your herb garden by Friday. That circularity is not just a marketing point. It is genuinely elegant design logic.

What makes GoBean feel more serious than a typical student concept is the business model built around it. The idea is that cafés supply their own spent coffee grounds as the raw material for production. This turns waste into a resource, gives cafés a reason to participate, and keeps the material loop local. Designers often get credited for solving the object, but solving the system is harder, and Sanchez and Lee are clearly thinking about both.

I will admit, I have a complicated relationship with sustainable packaging projects. A lot of them promise a lot and deliver something that either does not perform as well, costs too much, or requires consumer behavior change that just is not going to happen at scale. GoBean avoids most of those traps by meeting the product exactly where it already exists. The sleeve still looks like a sleeve, fits like a sleeve, works like a sleeve. The only difference is where it comes from and where it goes afterward.

The Green Product Award tends to surface work that is genuinely trying to move the needle on material innovation rather than just putting a green label on something old. A nomination here carries a bit of weight, and GoBean fits the ethos of that kind of recognition.

It is also worth noting that this is a concept still in development, not something you can order from a café supplier today. That distinction matters. Student projects are exactly where this kind of thinking should live, unencumbered by the commercial pressures that usually flatten ideas before they can fully form. Whether GoBean eventually makes it to mass production will depend on all the less exciting stuff: manufacturing cost, supply chain logistics, regulatory approvals. None of which are guaranteed.

But as a vision of what disposable packaging could be, it is hard to argue with. The sleeve you use for ten minutes does not need to exist for a hundred years. That mismatch has always been the problem, and GoBean is one of the more elegant answers I have seen to it. Design does not always save the world, but sometimes it asks the right question. In this case, the question is simple: if your coffee sleeve is made from coffee grounds, has it ever really left the café?

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Pepsi Max’s New Can Turns Blue When It’s Cold Enough to Drink

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Most of us don’t think twice about the can we grab from the fridge. You reach, you pop, you drink. But Pepsi Max is betting that at least some of us will stop, look twice, and maybe even squeal a little when the can in our hand starts changing colour right before our eyes.

That’s the premise behind Pepsi Max’s new Perfect Chilled variant, launched as part of the brand’s wider Pepsi Football Nation campaign ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Out of 86 million football-themed cans hitting shelves across the UK, only 150,000 carry something extra: thermochromic ink that begins to shift at 12°C and turns a full, vivid blue at 8°C, the temperature Pepsi considers optimal for drinking. In other words, the can tells you when it’s ready.

Design: Pepsi

The design itself is clean and considered. The 330ml can wears the classic black-and-white pentagon pattern of a traditional football, a smart visual shorthand that doesn’t need any explanation. It’s immediately recognisable, seasonally relevant, and works beautifully with the colour-change mechanic. The graphic language is minimal without being plain, and the blue reveal against the black-and-white base is genuinely satisfying. When that blue kicks in, it’s not subtle. It’s the kind of visual shift that makes you want to show someone standing next to you.

The Perfect Chilled variant also doubles as a prize trigger. Finding one means you’re entered into a competition where prizes include £5,000 towards a home entertainment bundle, football tickets, Pepsi Football Nation merchandise, and vouchers. So the colour change does two things at once: it signals peak drinking temperature, and it reveals whether you’re holding a winner. That’s a neat piece of design thinking, making a single moment do a lot of heavy lifting without feeling gimmicky.

I’ll admit I have a soft spot for thermochromic packaging. It made waves in mainstream consumer consciousness back in the 2000s with Coors Light’s cold-activated mountains, and various brands have been picking it up ever since. But Pepsi’s version feels more purposeful than most. Rather than just being a party trick, the temperature cue here is tied to a genuine product promise: that Pepsi Max is best at 8°C, and the can will tell you when you’ve hit it. That’s functional design, not just fun design, and the difference matters.

The scarcity piece is where the campaign gets genuinely clever. At 150,000 Perfect Chilled cans out of 86 million, the odds aren’t outrageous, but they’re not guaranteed either. It creates just enough tension to make you actually look at the packaging, which is something brands have been desperately trying to achieve in the era of eyes-down, scroll-while-shopping retail behaviour. When your product can make someone pause on the way to the checkout, you’ve done something right.

Pepsi didn’t stop at the can, either. The campaign includes a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that replaces the word “soccer” with “football” on any webpage, a nod to the ongoing, completely unresolvable debate that football fans clearly feel strongly enough about to install software over. It’s a small touch, but it speaks to the same sensibility running through the whole campaign: know your audience, and then give them something that feels made for them specifically.

Packaging rarely gets the cultural credit it deserves. It’s the thing you throw away, the design you never frame, the object that lives in your hand for about four minutes before it goes in the recycling. But at its best, it does what this Pepsi Max can does: it turns a routine moment into a small, unexpected experience. For a product that’s been on shelves since the 1990s, making a can feel exciting again is no small feat. And if the price of admission is putting your Pepsi in the fridge before a football match, well, you were probably doing that anyway.

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Starbucks built a Yeti cooler for your Venti Iced Lattes, but you can’t buy one yet

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You know what’s ‘vertical integration’? Starbucks building its own cooler box for its own beverages. Meet the Yeti-alternative that’s designed not for your Budweisers, but for your venti iced lattes. It’s called the Starbucks Ice Box, and while it looks perfect from top to bottom, it has one problem: it’s only available in South Korea.

The design is deceptively simple but gets every detail right. Four individual cup slots keep drinks stable and separated, eliminating the float-and-tip chaos that happens when you throw tall cups into a standard cooler. A dedicated ice compartment sits at the bottom, isolated from the drinks themselves so you’re not fishing cups out of melted ice water an hour later. The domed lid has ventilation slots that allow air circulation without sacrificing insulation, and those side latches look substantial enough to actually keep everything secure when you hit a pothole. It’s wrapped in Starbucks’ forest green colorway, compact enough to fit behind a car seat or in a trunk corner, and clearly designed by people who have done the group coffee run enough times to know exactly where the pain points are. The proportions feel right in a way that general-purpose coolers never quite nail when you’re dealing with tall, narrow vessels.

Design: Starbucks Korea

This isn’t Starbucks’ first merch attempt. They’ve consistently pushed out loads of accessories over the years, mostly in eastern markets (like these TWS earbuds in collaboration with Samsung, and these $28 retro cameras that they debuted in China) although this one feels way more purposeful than any of their other launches. It’s something people will buy and use for years, rather than becoming just another collectible, and you know that if someone’s buying a Starbucks cooler, they’re a customer for life. Vertical integration for the win!

The design is as simple as it gets. The insulated walls keep the insides whatever temperature you want. Although built for iced drinks, you can put your hot beverages in too and have them piping even after hours. For iced drinks, you can also add ice packs into the cooler to chill them down further – just be careful they don’t drip or the cups could get soggy. A lift-out tray holds four venti drinks, because if you’re the kind to drink regulars, you probably wouldn’t be keeping them for hours. The clamp-lid ensures everything is locked in tight, and a Starbucks-branded handle sits flush against the top, giving the entire thing a gorgeously monolithic design.

The only place you can grab this right now is on obscure sites online. A Japanese website has it listed for ¥26,530 or $169 USD, not including shipping. If anyone in Starbucks’ global team is reading this, consider it your sign to manufacture this for the American and European audiences too, trust me, your annual turnover will thank you!

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KitKat’s New Wrapper Actually Kills Your Phone Signal Completely

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We’re already a third into 2026, and one “trend” that seems to be sticking is that this is the year when people intentionally go offline or analog to take a break from our increasingly digital lives. Hobbies like journaling, knitting, scrapbooking, baking, and board games have become a regular part of people’s personal schedules. More often than not, when we do these things, we keep our phones, or at least the internet, away. Some, though, may need more “drastic” measures just to make their phones quiet for a few hours every day.

KitKat Panama, in collaboration with creative agency Ogilvy Colombia, is taking the brand’s iconic “Take a Break” slogan to a whole new level with a special concept called Break Mode. Instead of people just eating a KitKat as a way to take a break, they turned the chocolate’s packaging into an actual Faraday cage. Basically, once you put your phone into the empty packaging, all signals (calls, 4G/5G connectivity, Bluetooth, and GPS) are entirely and effectively blocked, turning your world offline and analog, at least until you take your phone out again.

Designer: KitKat Panama

How they did it was by adding multiple layers to the special packaging. The copper layer is the primary conductive material, while the polyester layers give it structural integrity. The polypropylene outer coating provides durability and everyday usability, while the precision-engineered sealing mechanism ensures that your signals are truly blocked.

This kind of technology was once reserved for medical labs and data centers but can now be found in this iconic red KitKat package (well, at least if you’re in Panama). There’s also a sustainability angle to it, as the packaging’s materials have an approximate one-year lifespan and can eventually be separated for responsible recycling.

The ritual that KitKat envisions is quite intentional: unwrap your KitKat fingers, slide your phone into the empty packaging, and fully immerse yourself in the moment. Your digital world goes quiet, and your break truly begins. It feels almost ceremonial in the best way. Kim Waigel, Marketing Director for Nestlé in Central America, summed it up well: “Break Mode goes beyond simply saying ‘Take a Break’; it empowers individuals with the physical tool to genuinely achieve it.”

The concept was introduced at some of Panama’s most high-traffic venues, including a major technology expo, a concert event, and even a university campus, bringing the experience directly to the people who arguably need a digital detox the most.

Now, before you start planning your offline hours around a KitKat wrapper, it’s worth noting that Break Mode’s commercial viability is still under evaluation. So it isn’t something you can grab off a shelf at your nearest convenience store, at least not yet. But honestly, the fact that this concept even exists feels like a sign of the times. In an era where we’ve normalized doom-scrolling and round-the-clock connectivity, simply putting your phone away has become a radical act. And leave it to a chocolate brand to make that feel like something worth celebrating.

Whether or not Break Mode ever makes it to mass market, it’s already doing its job, sparking a conversation about what it truly means to take a break in 2026. Because sometimes, the most powerful thing you can do for yourself isn’t downloading another wellness app. It’s slipping your phone into a KitKat wrapper and letting the silence do the rest.

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