Earlier this month, my wife Carolyn and I attended the International Home + Housewares Show at McCormick place.
I’m glad I brought Carolyn along, because she tends to see in items a domestic utility that’s lost on me.
We were invited to have lunch at the booth for Aladdin. Remember that company? They manufacture the tartan-patterned thermos bottles and lunch boxes that were standard in all public school cafeterias in the 50s and 60s. The Aladdin Company is almost 90 years old.
Carolyn works for Oak Park public schools, so she brings her lunch almost every day. She likes to take salads. However, it’s undesirable to dress the lunch salad in the morning because leaves get limp and it’s usually hard to transport the dressing in liquid form. So you need to carry salad dressing separately from the greens, but how?
“This is a game changer,” Carolyn mentioned as soon as we were introduced to Aladdin’s screw-top containers, designed to carry, for instance, salad dressing. These containers can hold 4 ounces of fluid, which is a good size for salad dressing, and the tops screw on, so there’s no spillage on the way to work.
As I work at home, I probably have less use for these Aladdin containers, but I appreciate a sensible product when it comes along.
