Seattle company Vapor Path has designed a new coffee cup lid, the Viora lid, that claims to enhance the aroma and taste of your drink by mimicking the the design of an open-top ceramic cup. “If we’ve done our job right, and god knows we’ve tried, we’ll be recreating that experience of drinking from an open-top cup,” says Doug Fleming, CEO and founder of Vapor Path.
A ceramic cup is an ideal drinking vessel for a few reasons. An open top allows aroma to hit your nostrils and inform your brain what you’re about to be drinking. Another consideration is mouth position, which should be as natural as possible while drinking. “If you purse your lips like you’re sucking from a straw it pulls the soft palate closed, which is in the back of your mouth that connects the back of your mouth and your nose,” Fleming explains.
A relaxed mouth means you’re engaged in retronasal breathing, which allows the aroma in your mouth to travel up that passageway, adding to the taste experience. Lastly, drinking a cup of coffee is actually pretty similar to drinking a good glass of wine. You want it to hit various parts of your tongue, in the proper order, to engage different taste buds. An open-top cup lets this happen.
Your standard coffee cup is good at spill protection, but that’s about it. The most recognizable lid, the Solo Traveler, was designed by Jack Clements in 1986. It features a horizontal opening on the top ridge of the plastic that makes your drink pour out like a spout. The raised center allows room for foam while the depressed area gives your nose some wiggle room. It’s a thoughtful, efficient design, and good enough to be in the MoMA’s permanent collection. But Vapor Path thinks it has something even better.
The Viora lid features an exaggerated hole in the middle to let the steamy aroma reach your nose faster. Its depressed middle makes room for your nose and foam. Pretty standard stuff. But the real innovation comes from the repositioned drink opening. While most lids have a hole on the top of the drinkover rim, the Viora is cut into the inside wall of the rim. This has a couple added benefits: It keeps liquid sloshing inside the cup instead of onto your shirt, and it’s the key to a natural open top-like drinking position.
You’ll notice that the hole is wider and arches up into the rim. This allows the liquid to fill a well before it hits your lips. We’ve been conditioned from a young age to know what to expect from our cups. We instinctively know how soon the liquid is going to hit our lips, so if the timing is off, it starts to feel weird. “If you make the drink opening too big then you don’t get decent spill prevention. You make it too small and the liquid starts reaching your lips just a little too late so it starts to feel uncomfortable,” says Barry Goffe, CEO of Vapor Path. “When you get it right it feels like you’re not drinking out of a lid anymore.”
It sounds simple enough, but manufacturing a lid with a this kind of opening was a challenge. Most mass-produced thermal-formed lids use a certain type of tool to cut the opening. The Viora, because its cut is on the inside wall of the rim, required custom cutting tools. “We went to manufacturers and they said, ‘We can’t really do that, the people who do do that are in the berry trade,” recalls Fleming. Many plastic berry trays feature vertical side cuts for draining; the Viora lid needed an adapted version of those slits. So Felming and Goffe reached out to the berry manufacturing world and created custom cutting tools that could make the cut at scale.
Because it’s not able to use the same mass production techniques, the Viora is a little pricier than other lids. Standard lids go for 3 to 5 cents apiece, and high-end lids with resealable closures and premium sustainable plastics sell for 7-10 cents. Viora has positioned itself in the middle of that market at 6 cents. Vapor Path is making a bet that the burgeoning artisanal coffee scene will be enough to support the lid until they can produce it in bigger quantities, reducing the prices.
For what it’s worth, drinking out of the Viora does feel noticeably smoother. The liquid flows instead of dribbles, and I could actually smell hints of lemon in my green tea with lemon. It does everything the standard coffee lid does, but maybe even just a little bit better. You hear that, Starbucks?
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