I found myself being severely turned off by a very insignificant part of my day this morning, as I received a coffee with a lid. Not just any lid. A bloody, sippy-cup lid with bad tasting coffee inside of it. Good coffee or not, it got me thinking about how many different coffee cup lids I’ve come in contact with over the last month and realized how many awful....yes awful and poorly designed many of them are.

Getting a coffee to go isn’t unusual for many people in North America and drinking them on the fly is quite typical. Go to France, Spain and of course Italy, and you’ll be surprised at how many people drink coffee, but do so sitting down. (I know! How silly.) Well not only is the quality of their coffee probably much more superior than ours, but they get to indulge it sitting on a beautiful street side cafe while people watching. It’s a beautiful thing if you have been lucky enough to try it.

Regardless of who wins the best coffee, even the worst tasting kind can be considered moderate out of a beautifully hand crafted ceramic mug while sitting outside on a cool summer morning.

In the same regard, the best tasting coffee can be, and certainly has been for me ruined by a disgusting, plastic, Dixie, sippy-cup lid with an unnecessary open and close “button / lever” that tastes like refined plastic.

It’s as if the designers are trying to resolve ‘problems’ with ‘old’ lid by making moderations at the expense of features that are complete unnecessary, while sacrificing the tatse. Such as this one. Look at it! Not only does it change colour as the temperature of the drink gets warmer or cooler, but it has a spout like tea pot.

So all kidding aside, who has the best coffee cup lid? Well,(and this is at no bias or commitment to Tim Hortton’s) but I really do feel that Tim’s have the best. Why? Because your taste buds aren’t really touching the plastic. They have an opening that is directly on the rim of the paper cup, one that sometimes has a roll up rim and prize, which doesn’t change the taste of the product inside. They have a nice click in button for the tab that pulls back and if you need to semi-reclose it you can do so with ease.

Dunkin Donuts just came out with an incredibly interesting lid seen below designed by Josh Harris. Whoa! King of all lids right? Still, a plastic sippy-cup function that you have practically suck on to drink out of. It’s a splendid idea, though again, why does a lid need to have innovation and content? Can’t a lid be just that? A lid. And not some extravagant design, Nobel Prize winning, piece of plastic?

Not only are people trying to reinvent the wheel that already rolls, they are making something simple and functional into something complex and doing so at the expense of what you are actually paying for—the coffee.

So I congratulate Tim Horton’s for using a lid that doesn’t obscure the taste, keeps my coffee covered long enough to keep it warm from the front door to my car and is easy to drink out of. Bravo! Now if they only thought to take the nicotine out of the coffee, we’d be all laughing! But that’s for a different discussion all together.