Blog » Coffee Lovers » Who Made That Coffee Lid?

In the late 1970s, when you ordered coffee to go, you usually had to tear a hole in the plastic lid if you wanted to drink through it. This maneuver was so awkward that you risked burning your hand. So in the 1980s, a number of food-packaging engineers tried to fix the problem. William and Kenneth Dart, of the Dart Container Corporation, created one of the first of a new breed of coffee-cup lids, filing a patent in 1981 for a plastic disc with a press-down tab that acted like a valve. The inventors called this feature a “lip-engaging buttress”; you pushed on it with your upper lip to release a gulp of coffee. Once you finished drinking, the tab snapped back into place to prevent spills. (Kenneth Dart, who made a fortune in this and other business ventures, later renounced his citizenship and moved to Belize, where he was exempt from U.S. taxes.)

The Dart Container Corporation’s lids — and most others like it — were designed to discourage customers from pulling a lid off a boiling-hot cup of coffee. But people continued to do it anyway. Most famously, Stella Liebeck scalded herself in 1992 while prying off the lid of a McDonald’s coffee cup. She sued and was initially awarded $2.86 million in damages. “That sent America’s garage inventors to work,” Phil Patton, a design historian, says. After Liebeck v. McDonald’s, plastic lids were covered in warning labels. And “once they started printing ‘Caution’ on their lids, the chain restaurants like Wendy’s realized that they could print their logos as well,” he says. Companies also began adding “dimples” so that the server could indicate whether the coffee contained cream or sugar.

Because of the number of variations on the basic design, it’s difficult to attribute the modern coffee lid to a single inventor. Louise Harpman, an architect who, along with her partner, Scott Specht, owns what is perhaps the world’s largest collection of disposable lids, has scoured 7-Elevens and latte bars for new specimens. “Everywhere in America, we found regional differences,” she says. She is partial to the elegant Solo Traveler lid with a hole that doles out coffee in sips. Designed by Jack Clements, the lid was included in a Museum of Modern Art exhibit of “humble masterpieces.” “I think Scott and I might have a first-run 1986 Solo Traveler in our collection,” Harpman says. It’s impossible to know, of course. The lids aren’t date-stamped.

Patton is a fan of lids designed to sit above a fancy coffee drink without damaging its peaks of foam. With a gently domed roof and curved entryway, he says, it “looks like an architect’s model of a civic center.”