Huskee Cup

Good Design that is Sustainable: Australia alone is responsible for over 1 billion takeaway cups in landfill each year. Globally, over 1.7 million tonnes of coffee husk waste is created from the milling stage of coffee production. The design challenge was to solve this husk waste issue by creating an integrated consumer product system that utilizes this waste as a raw material. There was also a manufacturing challenge of not only formulating our own eco-polymer blend but to also have it work effectively and economically with traditional, large scale production methods and inherent restrictions of manufacturing with injection moulding.

After studying user experience and expectations of conventional coffee ware, we have designed a complete and interchangeable system of durable cups, adaptable to multiple environments and suitable for multiple user groups, by sharing a common saucer and lid. Form Follows Function: The key feature of the HuskeeCups are its ‘fins’ which function to reduce the contact area of fingers with the cup, allowing the user to hold it comfortably when hot liquids are consumed. The form also simplifies manufacturing by removing the need for a handle. This begets further innovation, enabling unprecedented efficiency in packaging, distribution and storage of HuskeeCup.

Good for the User, Good for the Planet: HuskeeCup’s unique design features enable the product to be used in a global takeaway cup replacement system, tackling the global epidemic of waste from single-use cups. It traverses multiple product categories, functioning as both a dine-in and takeaway cup. This enables the development of a world first ‘swap’ system where cafes and consumers use and exchange a single cup, significantly altering consumer behaviour and cafe workflows to enable sustainability coffee consumption ecosystem. Further, by commercialising HuskeeCup we are transforming waste into a financial resource for the coffee farmers involved in the process.

Process Equals Form: The development of HuskeeCup’s design included in depth research into production processes and heat retention rates in several materials. We designed & tested complex 3D printed tooling, culminating in a unique series of cups with an environmental-centric objectives. Manufacturing by injection moulding enabled the incorporation of highly delicate design details, which may not possible in traditional vessel production methods such as Glass blowing or Ceramics production. Additional design features include: * Stackability. HuskeeCup comes in a café-ready range of sizes – 6oz, 8oz and 12oz. Each cup features a universal base geometry that enables them to be stacked and stored easily. * A Universal Lid. We’ve crafted a universal and sophisticated lid design that enables HuskeeCup to function as an alternative takeaway cups with a superior on-the-go user experience. * A Universal Saucer. We’ve designed a ‘valley’ in the base of each cup which nests into the ‘hill’ in the middle of the saucer. This hill and valley system is also reminiscent of the cups origin in the mountains of Yunnan, China. Our unique design and environmental effort has already received the ‘2017 Design Lab Vessels Award’; an internationally recognised event held yearly by Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) in USA.