Fiji. Naked. Evolution Fresh. Odwalla. Starbucks Frappucino. And now, the meal replacement of the future, Soylent.
They’ve all embraced the same type of bottle for their products. It’s not exactly a square. And it’s not exactly round. “The official term is ‘sqround,'” says John Zelek, Senior Creative at Soylent. The company’s new bottles are shipping now.
The cylindrical white bottle had a wide mouth and a rounded neck. It was almost–but not quite–as neutral as the Soylent brand itself. Because with an almost art deco flourish, it tapered toward the bottom and had feet at the bottom to add stability.
“It was the kind of thing we needed then,” says Zelek. “We used it as a blank canvas to put our brand on. But there were a couple of issues with it.”
“Two circles are going to have one pressure point. If you hit one side of the box, all of the bottles are going to smash into each other,” says Zelek. “A lot of the time, we’d ship to consumers, and the bottle would show up dinged. It just didn’t set up the best look possible.”
Searching for the perfect modified square profile, Soylent looked to the shape of milk bottles from the ’50s and ’60s. “We thought there was a nice parallel to the days you used to get your staple foods delivered, because that’s where we are at again,” says Zelek of the Amazon Prime era of shipping. “I’d say that was the main object for inspiration.” And ultimately, the soft-squared curves of those milk bottles are very similar to what you see in use by beverage companies today.
It’s the sqround bottle!
“When we pitched it to our manufacturer, they were like, ‘Oh yeah, sqround? We can do that,'” laughs Zelek.