Pringles are pretty delicious. Where I used to work, the HR person will often restock the kitchen’s snack table with various goodies and Pringles were always the first to run out. But the tall, narrow tube design is difficult for sharing, and the more you munch into the chips, the deeper you have to reach into the tube. That’s awkward design.
In comes the redesigned packaging for Pringles by young interior designer Dohyuk Kwon who created a way for the chips to be more shareable. This Bloom Chips concept design initially seems like an ordinary tall tube we’re used to seeing, but a quick unpackaging reveals that the tube expands into a bowl. Now that the packaging doubles as a portable and recyclable container, chips can be enjoyed without sticking your whole forearm into the cylinder hoping for the very last piece.
“Its mechanism is more complex than it looks,” Kwon tells Fast Company Design. “Simply speaking, it’s like a blooming flower.”
The Bloom Chips design recently won a Red Dot Award under its Interior Accessories category. However, a red flag sticks out. It doesn’t seem like the bowl can be folded back up into a tube when it’s expanded, and if you can it seems like the process would crush the chips. This means that when you open a new thing of Bloom Chips Pringles, you are forced to finish the whole thing in one sitting unless you like soft chips. Although this can be slightly inconvenient, we suppose it does fall into the tagline, “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”
In the interview with Fast Company Design, Kwon is also asked if his packaging design was inspired by Jiffy Pop popcorns, where a bowl-shaped container is put into the microwave so the popcorns all stay in the bowl instead of a large, greasy bag.
“I didn’t know Jiffy Pop until a few minutes ago,” Kwon replies. “It’s very, very interesting. I guess once there was a man who complained about existing popcorn package, so he made the package for Jiffy Pop.”
Either way, there seem to be many people who are unhappy with sticking their hands into things when it comes to getting some food in their mouths. While the concept is unique, it is rather unlikely to be mass produced. Well, not for Pringles anyways. For more insight to other design concepts that won the honorable Red Dot Award, visit the official site for the full list of winners. Spoiler alert: We pretty much want 80 percent of those designs to come to reality.
What do you think of this Bloom Chips packaging? Would you find it helpful for your daily lives, or would you only buy Bloom Chips just for parties and social functions?
