Is it just me or do all parents eventually end up googling plastic food containers at 12:30am?
Because I genuinely think the internet has broken our brains a bit on this subject.
Microplastics. BPA. PFAS. Plastic bottles. Non-plastic bottles. Silicone. Bamboo. Stainless steel. Glass. Heated containers. Non-heated containers. Plastic number 5 which is apparently fine but not number 7 except sometimes number 7. At this point I honestly don’t know if we’re scared of plastic anymore or just scared of making pasta.
When I started designing CoolaWand, obviously the material question came up very quickly.
Could this thing exist without plastic?
I’ve always loved the idea of wooden toys. But honestly I think I mostly love the fantasy of wooden toys. You know the type. Beautiful Scandinavian objects in impossibly tidy houses where nobody seems to own felt pens.
Because in real life, an object that goes in a child’s mouth, into the freezer, into boiling hot food and then through the dishwasher every single day… wood suddenly becomes a lot less magical.
Metal wasn’t ideal either. Too cold. Too conductive. Slightly less “magic wand”, slightly more “medical instrument”. I still have this childhood image burned into my brain of someone getting their tongue stuck to a ski lift.
So I went deep into bioplastics, food-safe materials and all the alternatives. I spoke to specialists, including Laurent Massacrier, a materials expert, who basically explained something very simple to me: bioplastics are progressing fast, but they still can’t handle every use case.
CoolaWand goes from the freezer into really hot food. Again and again. That’s actually pretty brutal for a material.
And then he laughed and said:
“When CoolaWand becomes hugely successful, you can fund the research for a biodegradable version.”
Which honestly made me laugh because… fair enough.
At some point you still need to make something that actually works in real life.
So we chose Tritan. Not because it’s some miracle perfect material, but because for this specific use, right now, it simply made the most sense.
And honestly, I’m not going to pretend I invented CoolaWand to save the planet.
I invented it because every evening my son would complain that his dinner was too hot while simultaneously acting like he was moments away from starvation. I could blow on the pasta myself, tell him to wait “two minutes”, chop everything into microscopic pieces… the dinner stress was still there.
And I just thought: if we can remove even a tiny bit of stress from family meals, honestly that already feels worthwhile.
It was never some grand revolutionary mission. It was a parent problem. Mixed with the very simple desire to add a little more magic into everyday life.
Yes, technically this adds another plastic object into the world. No, I do not believe I have personally destroyed civilisation by putting a magic cooling wand into kitchens.
But this whole process did make me realise something slightly weird.
In my own head too, “plastic” had basically become one giant blurry category of doom.
Plastic straws.
Disposable bags floating in the ocean.
My old Tupperwares that survived seventeen microwaves and a small war.
Baby bottles.
Reusable water bottles.
Everything had sort of merged into one big scary mental category called “plastic”.
Even though obviously none of these things are the same. Not the same materials. Not the same use. Not the same risks.
And I think a lot of parents experienced that same confusion recently with the ban on plastic containers in French nurseries. Which, honestly, makes sense. But I also think it created this strange low-level panic around the word plastic itself.
I even caught myself looking suspiciously at random objects in my own kitchen.
And then at some point I stopped and looked at… Gaspard’s pacifiers.
This object babies basically keep attached to their mouths for months. The object that saves your sanity during sleepless nights, car journeys and supermarket meltdowns.
The rigid part of many pacifiers? Polypropylene. A very common plastic.
And yet I had somehow never questioned it once while throwing them into boiling water at 3am to sterilise them.
I think most of us are just trying to do our best with confusing information, complicated materials and a fairly exhausting amount of modern parental guilt floating around in the background.
Personally, I’d probably rather buy one object designed to last for years than replace a “natural” alternative three times because it warped, cracked or started smelling vaguely damp.
In fact my favourite children’s plates are melamine ones. They’ve survived years of dishwashers, daily falls onto tiled floors and three children. Honestly that already feels like a scientific achievement.
If tomorrow someone tells me I should replace them with bamboo plates that smell faintly of wet sponge after three weeks… I will politely decline.
Anyway. Between environmental guilt, panic-inducing Instagram reels and endless debates about food-safe plastics, I think we all deserve to breathe a little.
And if, like me, you’re constantly looking for little ways to make daily life slightly more magical… please share them in the comments. I genuinely love hearing them.
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