Which coffee cup lid spills the least?
Driving.ca puts designs to the ultimate test
If there’s one thing Canadians love, it’s a cup of hot, freshly brewed coffee. In terms of the restaurant- or café-bought stuff, studies show we lead the world in litres consumed per capita.
If there’s one thing Canadians don’t love, though, it’s spilling that hot coffee all over the interior of their cars while rolling over a speed bump on the way to work.
It was with that in mind that we decided to test the coffee cups of several major Canadian cafés, to see which spilled least when pitted against a driver moving down a bumpy, potholefilled road.
In the interests of scientific accuracy, we decided against performing our test on some randomly selected road with an error-prone human behind the wheel, and instead turned to the laboratory, specifically, the four-post shaker at the ACE Climatic Wind Tunnel at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) campus in Oshawa.
Cups from Starbucks, Second Cup, McDonald’s and, of course, Tim Hortons would be filled to the brim with water — not hot coffee because we don’t want a lawsuit on our hands — and fitted into the front-console cupholder of a new Toyota Corolla, then shaken all about.
The difference in weight, calculated as a percentage of total volume, would tell us which cup sloshed the most. But before we get into results, let’s talk theory.
THE COFFEE CUP: A BRIEF HISTORY
The first disposable coffeecup lids, patented in 1950, were meant merely to help transport your coffee from the café to wherever you were going and, with no holes, weren’t for drinking from.
The classic “peel-and-lock” lid evolved from that design. Like the name implies, you sip from a peel-and-lock by peeling back part of the lid and snapping it down. In 1986, the well-known Solo cup company introduced the Traveler lid, with a raised edge with a hole you’d pucker your lips against; we call it the “pucker-type” now.
It’s no coincidence the Traveler came out just after the first built-in car cupholder showed up, in the 1983 Dodge Caravan minivan. But the wider rollout of that innovation took time.
Not all Fords, for example, had cupholders in 1989, which is why Stella Liebeck was holding her McDonald’s coffee cup between her legs in her grandson’s Probe coupe in 1994 when she spilled the too-hot java on herself and sparked an infamous US$2million lawsuit.
Literally hundreds of coffee-cup lids have come and gone since, most a variation of the peel-and-lock or pucker. We still haven’t perfected disposable coffee-cup design, which is why new ones crop up daily. (This past March, Starbucks channelled $10 million into its NextGen Cup Challenge to spur development of the next great cup.)
Some 600 billion cups of coffee are sold globally each year — in Canada, Tim Hortons alone moves roughly 2 billion.
THE SPILLAGE TEST
The UOIT’s four-post shaker — it works by putting a hydraulic ram beneath each tire of a car — is designed to test prototypes’ suspension systems by simulating thousands of kilometres of rough roads.
The facility’s crew put together a profile of a generic rough road, an ISOstandard Class C rough road with a few four-inch speed bumps and potholes, driven at a simulated 8 km/h, and set our 2018 Toyota Corolla LE on the shakers.
Each cup — size medium — was filled to the full line with water to simulate a freshly ordered brew. The volume was noted and the cup weighed before and after being placed in the Corolla’s cupholder and “driven” over our rough road.
First up was the “grande” Starbucks cup, the biggest we tested at about 475 mL. It sports a pretty traditional pucker-style lid. On our scale, full of water, it came in at 493 grams — until we shook it up. We could see spillage, but the volume lost wasn’t much. The weight after testing measured 492 grams, a 0.2 per cent difference.
The second cup was Second Cup’s, a 450-mL medium also with a pucker lid. It weighed in at 467 grams, but despite the similarities to the Starbucks cup, sloshing was excessive, and it weighed quite a bit less after sitting in our rockin’ Toyota. Five grams lighter (462 grams) works out to a more than a one-per-cent loss.
McDonald’s was third. Though the same volume as the Second Cup vessel, it weighed less, at 463 grams when full, and came with a peel-and-pucker hybrid: a small square tab peels back to make an aperture above the lip of the cup. Did it work? Heck yeah. Post-test we measured 462 grams, again a loss of 0.2 per cent.
We saved the Tim Hortons cup — the one you’ll find in the hands of one-in-10 Canadians every day — for last. The medium held a scant 375 mL, and weighed in at 419 grams. The lid was old-school peel-and-lock, so we peeled and locked it, then popped the cup into the Corolla’s cupholder. At the end of the test, it weighed 415 grams, a difference of 1.0 per cent.
Our editor insisted on one more test, of what he called “the old trucker’s tip” of taking the Tim Hortons peeland-lock lid and pushing the tab inward toward the coffee. This would, he told us, prevent anything from spilling.
Tab popped in, we put the Tims cup back in the car and subjected it to simulated speed bumps one last time. It worked. Weight post-test was 419 grams, the exact same as before the test.
What we took away from our test was if you’re hooked on Second Cup, you might want to pour your morning brew into a spare grande container from Starbucks before jumping into your car with it. A McDonald’s cup will do just as well, or if you don’t want to get any latte on your leather, take a few gulps and dump the rest into a Timmy’s cup and press the tab in with your thumb.