Shrinking Jug Keeps Milk Fresh an Extra Week

by Jacob Gordon, Nashville, TN

Image via James Dyson Award

One of the main reasons milk goes bad is its exposure to air. As you tip the carton, drenching your seventh bowl of Chia Goodness Cereal you are getting rapidly closer to the moment of pouring the chunky remnants down the drain. What a waste.
A clever solution to this problem just might be Fresh, the Shrinking Milk Jug. The refillable jug sits on the table while the user presses down on the top. With each press, the air void in the container is eliminated, keeping the milk fresher longer; up to a week longer, according to its inventor.

Fresh (which we first glimpsed over at The Design Blog) has been shortlisted for the James Dyson Award, a student design competition hosted by the foundation of Mr. Dyson himself, the clever (and now quite wealthy) fellow behind Dyson vacuum cleaners and the ultra-efficient Airblade hand dryer (Lloyd gave it a whirl here). The winner walks away with £10,000 and, surely, some encouraging words and maybe a kind noogie from one of the best-known inventors alive.

Last year's winner of the James Dyson Award was Michael Chen whose Reactiv jacket communicates a cyclist’s intentions. The 2009 winner will be announced in September. Alongside the Fresh milk jug are myriad green and tantalizing concepts, which we hope to bring you in the coming weeks.

The designer of the Fresh (whose name does not appear on the entry) has thought this through one step further: "Also milk is sold in bags in Canada and some parts of Europe, because the bags use 75% less plastic than jugs. The milk in these bags must be poured into an open pitcher, causing it to turn sour even faster than in the jug. The Fresh pitcher could be the design solution to encourage more people to use these bags, and therefore more of the world to go a little greener." (More details on the entry here.)

This notion reminds us of the refill system being used by Method: buy the hand soap pump once, then buy bagged refills.

So would you consider buying your milk by the bag and then pouring it into something like the Fresh?

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