Liz Gyekye

French industrial designer Petit Romain has created a Heineken cube concept

Romain imagined enjoying Heineken out of a square bottle instead of the traditional round bottle, after he said he was tired of round bottles in six-packs that clink together and are difficult to stack.

Back in the early 1960s, Heineken debuted a rectangular beer bottle that doubled as a glass brick. Similar to that design, the Heineken Cube concept delivers optimal storage for manufacture, transport, and ultimately consumer use.

Earlier this year, Heineken became the latest company to launch an online open innovation platform, as it sought ideas to help ‘green’ up its products.

The first challenge set by the company’s Ideas Brewery was for innovators to submit their ideas for ‘sustainable beer packaging’. It found a winner in June.  The winner was ‘The Heineken 1000$ bottle’ from Helmut Witteler (Germany). The jury appreciated his detailed proposal of a promotional mechanism supported “by an innovative device”, the ‘Heineken-O-Mat’- designed to motivate consumers to return/recycle bottles.