source– Apple is credited with reinventing the mobile phone, the computer and the music industry. Now it has redefined the pizza box.
The technology giant has invented a space-age pizza box specially for employees at its new headquarters in California. The circular design – naturally finished in white – features carefully-placed holes that allow heat and moisture to escape, preventing the pizza from getting soggy.
The box, whose design has been patented by Apple, was made to allow staff to take pizzas from the 4,000-seater staff canteen back to their desk.
The patent, which was first published in 2012, describes how the box can be easily stacked and features a “plurality of ridges”, “allowing moisture expelled from the food item to be transported away from the food item”.
While the box has been in use for some time at Apple’s “Caffe Mac” canteens, but will come in especially handy at the new “Apple Park” headquarters in Cupertino, where staff have started to move in.
Staff are meant to eat in the enormous main café together in order to encourage employees from different departments to collaborate, meaning a lengthy walk to lunch for some workers around the new headquarters’ spaceship-like “ring” design.
A report on the new headquarters from Wired said that the pizza box was partially designed by Francesco Longoni, Apple’s head of food services.
Unfortunately for takeaway fans around the world, Apple does not appear to have any plans to distribute its invention more widely, leaving the rest of us grappling with low-tech containers and soggy pizza.
True aficionados will be able to experience the box, however. Apple plans to open a café to the public when the headquarters are fully operational.
I have a few thoughts on this whole thing. First of all, I’m actually glad Apple is taking it upon themselves to fully maximize everyone’s living experience and spend hundreds of hours and most likely millions of dollars to research something like the Perfect Pizza Box. I think they should improve more things. I’ve long called for a more sensitive and precise toaster. And how about an iToilet? Make everything I own a carefully designed marvel of modern technology. It just means we’re one step closer to having a complete monopoly on all consumer goods, which will make life a lot easier if you only have to go one place to get anything. People may mourn the death of the small business, but I’ll rejoice at the chance to get all of my shopping done in one convenient place. How many times do you have to go to one place for some tech services, then another place for clothes, then another place to get food? Bouncing around all over town like that takes up the whole day. But if everything is in one spot? Then I’ve got all my shopping done in an hour and I’m feeling good about the rest of the day. The fact that this box was partially designed by the head of their food services is also a great sign, since it means Apple is so committed to progress, even their lunch ladies cafeteria staff are brilliant engineers. It makes me feel like my future is in good hands.
But, and this is a big but here, folks, the cardboard pizza box is a sacred item. A symbol of American Identity. A pure aphrodisiac. Seeing a cardboard pizza box releases every positive endorphin our bodies produce. It not only signals it’s time to eat, but that it’s time to eat pizza. That’s one of the greatest sensations mankind can have. Sure, after being in a box for 30 Minutes or Less™ and bouncing around in a car it’s not a crisp as it would be if you got it straight out of a brick oven in New Haven, but unless you’re actually getting New Haven style pizza, why does crispness matter? A poorly ventilated cardboard box keeps all those wonderful vapors trapped within, only magnifying the flavor of the pizza itself. The cardboard infuses some of its own flavor into the pizza, as well, which can’t be overstated. Pizza in a cardboard box just smells different. It feels different. It tastes different. Replace that with a new age plastic disc perfectly engineered to eliminate moisture and funnel the steam away from the pie? I don’t know if I want to live in a world where that’s the norm. It’s like a new cast-iron skillet vs. a twenty year old one. Sure, the new one is cleaner, more consistent, and in much better shape, but the old one has so many great flavors built in that the new one can’t hope to match. The pizza itself may be purer in the Apple Box, but that’s not what pizza is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be clean and always fresh and designed by MIT grads. It’s an everyman food. Imperfect. Messy. Not always the most sanitary. But delicious nonetheless. And, speaking from experience, cardboard boxes have an important role in film, television, and real life, as a wake up call. It’s going to be a lot different waking up to a neat stack of plastic discs that you can reuse than it is for a big, bulky, greasy stack of cardboard pizza boxes. If you’ve ever had more than two cardboard pizza boxes lying around at one time and you haven’t had a party or anything, it can cause you to re-evauate your life a little bit. At the very least it forces you to clean up a bit before ordering the next round of ‘za. But these reusable plastic things? Just wash them off and you can put anything in there. It’s so convenient you’ll wind up just ordering more and more pizza with no shame or sense of the moment. You’ll ruin the allure of pizza night because it’ll become your default meal. Pizza will become monotonous. That’s a worst-case-scenario for humankind. Cardboard boxes keep pizza consumption in check. It keeps the supply healthy and the air of exclusivity alive. I keep coming back to this, but the worst business decision of the last 10,000 years was McDonald’s making breakfast all day. Why would anyone want it anymore if they can always get it? If you can always get the perfect pizza experience, it’ll just become passé. Just another thing to put into your stomach. Pizza doesn’t deserve that. Not now, not ever.
Brian's Den 