It’s one thing to have life-saving medicine, but it’s quite another to get it delivered to where its really needed. And what better way to make sure it gets to the furthest reaches of the world than by packing it in with a truly vital necessity like Coke.
In every crate of Coca-Cola, there’s a bunch of wasted space between the necks of the bottles, and the AirPod, designed by Simon Berry, makes good use of it. And that’s to say nothing of piggybacking on Coke’s stellar distribution network. In its current test run in Zambia, the pods contain an anti-diarrhoea kit, but the possibilities are only limited by what you can cram in that pack. And since people crave Coke a little more enthusiastically than they do anti-diarrhoea medication, both the goods will keep flowing.
Berry’s project, dubbed ColaLife, has teamed up with the soda behemoth to get AirPods in distribution alongside crates of Coke destined for the outer reaches of Zambia, but ironically, no kit-selling retailers have actually been slipping the packages in with the Cokes. Instead, they’ve just been shipping them packed separately, negating that bit of clever packaging. Still, the piggyback project has had a net benefit by cleverly filling holes, just ones inside delivery trucks instead of ones inside actual crates. Now if only someone could turn coke into live-saving medicine, then we’d really be set. [Wired]