Lunch and a Bunch More
Hey, kids, let’s do lunch.
First, unzip this insulated purple bag. Now place your peanut butter and jelly sandwich in that mini-cooler compartment. The chips should travel just dandy in the crush-proof zippered pouch. Put your juice drink in the space between the two ice packs, and the apple goes in the outside pocket, near the secret compartment where you stash all those creepy, crawly bugs.
Now make us proud and stay away from candy.
Like the ubiquitous backpack, soft, zippered, sporty lunch gear--with gadgets and gizmos galore--seem to be the hot trend for lunch-toting youngsters and teens.
Forget the old school has-been brown paper sack of yesteryear. Or the measly metal lunch box that doubled as a suitcase.
These days, kids, second grade and beyond, want soft, plastic carriers with four layers of insulation for their meals. They want ice packs. They want zippers and Velcro, handles and removable shoulder straps. They want stickers and bright colors sans cartoon characters. They want key chains.
At Houston-based Igloo Products Corp., senior products manager Robbie Douglas simply says, “Kids are looking for things that look cool and do what they want them to do.”
“But the trend over the last few years is to put as many bells and whistles on them, things that are fun, attractive and neat,” she says.
Igloo offers the Kool Kit, the Lunch & Munch, the Mini Lunch Box and the ever-popular S’CoolMate. Big this year will be the Ice Box Deluxe, especially with teenagers, because “it doesn’t look like a lunch kit. It’s designed to carry a CD player on top and all kinds of other things in the bottom,” she says.
And, natch, lunch somewhere in the middle.
Another popular Igloo item is the soft-sided Cool Sack Deluxe, featuring three compartments, because kids need an area for lunch, snacks and their accessories (read: toys), Douglas says. The sack also has a key clip and pockets for more stuff (read: more toys).
Now, sure, the too-cutesy Rugrats lunch box with a matching thermos bottle is cool for preschoolers who can relate to the diapered Tommy and clan. But older kids--we’re talking second-graders here--want to emulate, well, older kids in middle and high school.
They’ll be toting their lunches in bags such as the Lunch Pack, because the oblong design fits perfectly inside a backpack, says Andrius Birutis, spokesman for Chicago-based Outer Circle Products, which manufactures a line of hip lunch gear under the Arctic Zone label.
And, he adds, once a kid is that age, cartoon-adorned lunch boxes are not the bomb.
“Cartoon figures have a very limited appeal and are mainly popular with preschoolers and first-graders,” Birutis says.
“Kids in the second grade don’t want to be associated with preschoolers. They want what the bigger kids are packing their lunch in.”
Among children’s faves: Arctic Zone’s Lunch Cooler, Deluxe Lunch Bag, Lunch Bag Plus, Crush-Proof Lunch Carrier and the Insulated Lunch Box, the latter of which features a mini-cooler thermal compartment for juice boxes and cans; all range in price from $4.99 to $9.99.
Several of the kits feature removable plastic liners that keep food from getting squashed and separate dry compartments for keys, money, bus passes and other kids’ trinkets.
John Lanman, vice president of marketing for Thermos Co. in Schaumburg, Ill., says a third of his company’s business is in character-licensed lunch boxes “that mainly appeal to the younger kids,” between 3 and 8 years old.
The firm handles the key Warner Bros. and Disney characters, including Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. He says this school season’s popular boxes will be Mattel’s Barbie Dream House lunch kit ($9.99) and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh ($6.99).
“So far they’re going neck and neck,” he says about the hard plastic lunch kits with the foam-insulated thermos bottles.
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For the fashion-forward luncher, Lisa Frank Inc., out of Tucson, does lunch gear--bags and water bottles--in psychedelic colors, happy faces and shiny, iridescent plastic. Like Outer Circle, Igloo and Thermos Co., Lisa Frank also is trying to claim a piece of the highly competitive market.
Which explains why Nashville-based Aladdin Industries is calling it quits after this season after nearly 50 years of doling out lunch boxes to die for. The first was Hopalong Cassidy. Others included Zorro, the Beatles, Lamb Chop and the company’s bestseller, the Disney School Bus.
Aladdin was the first company to get into the character-licensed lunch box business, says vice president Lillian Jenkins, who started with the company in 1949 and owns an original Beatles lunch box, still in its original paper wrapping. (She was offered $500 for it once and turned it down.)
“After 50 years, it’s just become too competitive” to stay in the lunch box business, Jenkins says. The company will continue to produce other consumer products from cups to trays.
“When kids started using backpacks, that changed the lunch box as we know it,” she says. “The kids nowadays want the new stuff--the zippers, the straps, the gizmos. I understand it. But I still think nothing will ever replace the nostalgia of those old metal kits.”
