Ever noticed how much air is in a box of spiral or ziti pasta? Those fun shapes take up a lot of space, requiring larger boxes. Bigger boxes mean more packaging waste and larger footprints on grocery shelves. That’s why Dr. Lining Yao of Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab and her colleagues set out to “solve the problem of puffed-up pasta boxes.”
Irregular shapes don’t stack nicely and neatly in a box. So, Yao and her team asked this question: “What if different pasta shapes could be flat-packed into containers…?” The idea was to design a new pasta that shipped flat and cooked up in 3D shapes.
To make this pasta transformation take place, the researchers “mapped out tiny grooves and ridges” on the flat noodles. When the origami pasta hits the boiling water, it expands at different rates around the ridges and grooves. This response causes it to fold into shapes like self-folding origami pasta. How fun is that? You toss in the pasta and watch it curl into a new form!
Shapes Yao’s team have developed so far include boxes, rose-like flowers, and helix curls. View more pasta shapes up close and in action on the NPR Science Friday website.
This story caught our attention because it’s about taking something with a long tradition and innovating to solve a problem with it. We’re curious. How is your company innovating?
At StratMg, we’re here to the support market success your industrial manufacturing products from idea to first sale and beyond. Contact us to have a conversation about ways we partner with you for sales-driven growth.
–parin
Managing Partner
Photo credit: Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab via NPR
With over two decades of experience, Parin leads an expert demand-generation agency, StratMg, that helps industrial manufacturing clients achieve unambiguous and quantified organic sales growth across the US, EMEA & APAC.
Parin has built & positioned StratMg to be a value-added marketing services provider that strives to create a culture of quantified sales-driven marketing initiatives leading to sustained business growth through channel management, diversification, new customer acquisition and retention strategies and tactical execution.
