If you’ve ever lost even a single precious French fry as a result of a fast food bag tipping over during the ride home from the drive-through, you’ll appreciate the understated brilliance of the BAGO: a seatbelt that keeps all sorts of bags upright even if you’ve got a lead foot or are hard on the brakes.
We all know that the safest place to store a bag of groceries or fast food is in the trunk of a vehicle, where you can prop it up against all the emergency gear you keep in your car or extra jugs of wiper fluid, but it’s just so much easier to drop it on the floor in front of the passenger seat when driving alone — especially while navigating a drive-through lane. But haste makes waste, and we’ve all experienced the nightmare of a bag of food toppling over after an aggressive acceleration on a fresh green, or when having to suddenly slam on the brakes. It seems like all of the unwrapped and unpackaged food items are especially eager to escape a toppled bag for the freedom of a dirty floor mat, where applying the 5-second rule is both impossible and far too risky.
You can always let your fast food ride shotgun with the protection of a proper seatbelt, but why risk that delicious grease soaking through the paper bag and your passenger seat upholstery when the BAGO provides a much better alternative solution?
Installing the BAGO looks easy enough. You secure one end inside your vehicle’s glove compartment by simply closing its door, while the other end has a spring-loaded clip that attaches to the top of a bag on the floor mat. Once the extra slack in the dangling strap is shortened so that the package still touches the floor, the BAGO holds tightly onto the bag and keeps it upright no matter how bad a driver you are.
BAGO creator Dan Stevenson originally launched the seatbelt for snacks on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where they successfully raised more than $US3,400 ($4,677) to put it into production, with the original backers paying $US22 ($30) to preorder one with delivery expected sometime in May. If you missed out, Stevenson now offers the BAGO on the Indiegogo Indemand platform for the same asking price, but with delivery in June.
Crowdfunded products are always a risk, particularly during a global pandemic that has thrown supply chains into complete chaos, but the BAGO is a fairly simple device lacking the chips and semiconductors that are currently in short supply. As a result, pre-ordering one through Indiegogo isn’t a big risk (no where near as big a risk as leaving a bag of fast food precariously perched on a vehicle’s floor) and as long as you are patient and understanding that delivery delays may be an issue, this seems like a crowdfunded project worth backing. If anything, do it for the fries.