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https://www.barrons.com/articles/good-company-how-w-ps-porter-collection-is-reinventing-leftovers-01657211008
Nothing about the doggy bag is beautiful.
Whether it’s a Styrofoam carton, a paper box, a plastic bowl and lid stuffed into a paper bag, no fridge looks great stuffed with leftover take-out. That is, before the advent of W&P’s Porter collection.
This line of sleek, sustainable products changes the way you think about leftovers, thanks to a deft marriage of material and aesthetics. Made from glass, silicone, and ceramic, the design of the Porter’s water bottles, sealable bowls, and snack bags are compact, and easy on the eye. The result is a suite of products you wouldn’t be embarrassed to tote to a restaurant in anticipation of taking some food back home; or to work, with last night’s lasagna in tow. Their neatness inspires their use.
The collection is the latest from W&P, whose founders Josh Williams (the W) and Eric Prum (the P) lived together in college at the University of Virginia and became best friends. After graduating, they started a catering business, which often included craft cocktails they’d mix on site with Mason jars, holes punched in a secondary lid. Shake with the original lid, swap lids to pour the drink, no need for a traditional mixer. The Cocktail Shaker was W&P’s first product, and it was one of Kickstarter’s early successes, raising US$80,000 in seed money Williams and Prum used to launch their company.
In the following decade, W&P created other kitchen products including a line of ice cube trays, refining the brand along the way. Based in New York, which is notorious for its bulky and wasteful to-go containers, W&P decided to build a better takeout box. The launch aligns well with New York State’s 2020 ban on expanded polystyrene, single-use foam food and beverage containers, and polystyrene loose fill packaging materials, or packing peanuts. While “sustainability is the underpinning” of the Porter Collection, says W&P President Kate Lubenesky, the products are “crave-worthy. It’s not just a lunch container, it’s a beautiful bowl you can take to work with you.”
The whole line is about reducing trash. “There’s so much waste that goes with takeout food,” Lubenesky says. “As we were becoming more and more environmentally conscious and aware of our own impact, the team was looking for solutions for their own lunches.”
While Porter’s offerings serve much the same function as those of Tupperware and Rubbermaid, the differentiator is the form. “We’re using classic materials people are comfortable eating and drinking from,” Lubenesky says. “And it’s all designed to go together.”
In 2021, the company added reusable silicone bags to the collection, deploying a new manufacturing tactic that lets the bags be flipped inside out and therefore easy to clean.
It’s all about joy, Lubenesky says. “Sometimes when I’m going into a coffee shop and I bring my own mug, I have that sense that I’m doing something good and I’m proud of myself. But there has to be a pleasure incentive. You have to reward yourself. Pulling a battered old mug out of my bag just doesn’t have the same joyful effect as when I pull out a pretty speckled terrazzo mug or a sealed glass boil. That little joy element reinforces the behavior. That’s where you’re celebrating it.”
The Porter 15-piece collection set comes with a sampling of the best stuff in the lineup, including two Porter Mugs, two Porter Glasses, a Porter Water Bottle, five snack and storage bags ranging from 10 to 50 ounces, one Porter Bowl, two sizes of a Porter Seal Tight Bowls, and two Porter Utensil sets. The materials are mixed and matched throughout: some are lined with borosilicate glass, others wholly of LFGB-certified silicone. They’re all BPA-free and dishwasher safe; the silicone bags can be flipped inside out for a complete cleaning.
MSRP is US$323, though the set is often on sale (at the time of this writing, it was marked down to US$250.)
The Porter Collection is all about reducing consumers’ reliance on single-use containers, whether it’s for a lunch they cart from home or leftovers from a restaurant. By wedding appealing design to sustainable materials, the idea is to encourage people to carry these items wherever they go. That means no more plastic forks in a landfill, no Styrofoam boxes, no throwaway bags.
Owning this collection might mean skipping the wasteful restaurant experience altogether, even. “We’re encouraging you to take your food with you,” Lubenesky says. “That’s really the behavior we want to encourage consumers to adopt.”
Launching in August is a lunchbox, inspired by the Japanese style bento boxes but roomier, to suit the (ahem) American diet. There’ll be dividers and a removable tray that offer different options for packing a tidy lunch, space for salads, apple slices, and sandwiches, all made from the same line of sustainable materials in the rest of the collection.
“Sustainability can sometimes feel like a chore, or work,” Lubenesky says. “We want it to feel fun.”
Nothing about the doggy bag is beautiful.
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