Eat my inflight coffee cup?
Ahead of this year’s Farnborough Airshow there is much talk about how the airline industry globally can combat waste. New Zealand’s national carrier Air New Zealand seems to have come up with a rather nifty way of dealing with the problem by allowing passengers to actually consume the waste, in a manner of speaking with their new edible coffee cups.
The cups made by a local Kiwi company called Twiice are a vanilla flavoured biscotti and their manufacturers have made the bold statement that they are ‘leak proof’.
With over 8 million cups of coffee served annually on their planes Air New Zealand has a great deal of experience in keeping their customers happy inflight and one of their major concerns is about the amount of waste created by the airline that ends up in landfill sites.
The trial of the new edible coffee cups has been seen to be a big hit with customers during the initial trial and it may lead to a similar product being introduced across the Air New Zealand Network. The initial trials did, however, highlight concerns about whether the Twiice biscotti coffee cup could satisfy certain dietary requirements such as veganism as it contains egg as well as trace amounts of nuts and wheat for those with gluten free diets.