Why Heinz spent 185,000 hours redesigning this ketchup bottle cap | Hacker News Reader

Why Heinz spent 185,000 hours redesigning this ketchup bottle cap

fastcompany.com

12 pointsppjim22 comments

I'd love a diagram. The Silicone valve worked well. Good to implement something recyclable. I wonder where they are on the return-to-glass story and re-cycling?

It seems to be this pending patent for "Container, closure, and methods for manufacture" which contains many diagrams of the design https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220204224A1/en

Fig. 4 especially points out the flow/direction of ketchup and air.

>> ...after 185,000 hours of product development, $1.2 million in investment...

Their R&D engineers earn $6.50 per hour?

Maybe those don't count into the budget as the engineers were already there paid. Maybe they spend $1.2 million for the 3d printing and testing?

The numbers feel a bit off.

> Nine years later—after 185,000 hours of product development, $1.2 million in investment, and 45 different iterations—a new design will be rolling out in the U.K. within the next couple of months.

Is that legal? That works out to just under $6.50 hour.

This is journalist math. It's guaranteed to be wrong.

Your math assumes the money was spent entirely on labor, not on equipment or prototypes.

> Your math assumes the money was spent entirely on labor, not on equipment or prototypes.

But wouldn't that reduce the hourly rate I calculated? I find it hard to interpret "185,000 hours of product development" as anything but 185,000 man-hours of product development.

I'm guessing outsourcing? With enough Bangalore interns You can get even more impressive numbers ...

Not an industrial designer, but is there any reason this couldn't have been changed out by one "10x" designer in a dozen iterations over a few weeks/months?

It's a bottle cap with a valve in it, after all.

Materials science is hard.

It's one thing to 3d print the design, it's another to get the recipe for a plastic just right and a manufacturing process where the tolerances are perfect to make something like this work.

LOL. This is genius level trolling. This is every executive at every tech company.

It seems there was some heavy delay - that news is from 2021 with a scheduled rollout in 2022.

https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2021-07-07/heinz-to...

> In the U.S., even widely recyclable soda and water bottles often end up in landfills

Arguably, this isn't a bad outcome. A lot of stuff that goes through the official recycling programs ends up in landfills! Landfills are cheap, effective, and safe. And if there is no market for low-quality recyclables, it's far superior to shipping them overseas to sit in open pits next to rivers.

> While other packaging alternatives exist, Smith says they all come with tradeoffs. Glass bottles, for example, have a larger carbon footprint than plastic during transportation, because they’re heavier. (Also, the recycling rate for glass in the U.S. is abysmally low.) The company is still experimenting with other solutions, including a paper bottle that could potentially be used with the new cap.

A good summary of why single use plastics are the current local minimum. It's at least nice to hear the industry regularly considers alternatives.

Landfills take up space which in some areas is at a premium. Also, as they contain a lot of organic matter, they spew methane. And as they also contain a lot of nasty things like batteries, they leach all sorts of toxic plumes.

Finally, though sequestering carbon by dumping it into a landfill sounds like a good idea, in reality plastic bottles themselves often contain nasty compounds (like various plasticizers) that themselves leach out if the landfill is perfused with water.

They are a necessary evil, but too much stuff ends up in them.

Space could be an issue in some places. But there is a LOT of space in the US. And a good number of landfill land is reclaimed afterwards anyway.

Methane is not really related to plastics - if anything the problem is exacerbated by renewables. But landfills could actually be part of the renewables picture here: https://www.epa.gov/lmop/basic-information-about-landfill-ga...

Leachate is also a landfill factor that has been MUCH improved over the last few decades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leachate

I think people underrate how good modern landfills are. I think you'll find for most plastics, landfills are much less carbon intensive than recycling. And in some categories, they may even be superior to reuse.

> But there is a LOT of space in the US.

It's pretty obscure, but a little known fact is that a surprising number of people don't live in the US.

I mean, we could pull the ol' uno reverse and start importing the world's trash instead of exporting our own under the guise of recycling.

> I think you'll find for most plastics, landfills are much less carbon intensive than recycling.

recycling means we don't need to worry about the carbon intensive process of extracting and processing the raw materials to make new plastics instead of just reusing the plastics we've already created. The continuous creation of more and more plastic also means more and more microplastics.

You might love landfills, but I hope I never live too close to one. Proximity to landfills has been linked to all kinds of cancers and health problems.

Plastic recycling basically doesn't work. Virgin feedstock is cheaper and easier to work with. Few plastic products are "pure" (most contain pigments, adhesives, and/or different kinds of plastic, not to mention other contaminants like the previous product contained in it).

In other words, essentially all plastics are "single use" plastics.

> Why Heinz spent 185,000 hours redesigning this ketchup bottle cap

I bet the new cap is also cheaper to produce. They'll recoup the 1.2 million soon.

Prices good, delivery time was terrible. Would not recommend.

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