Several issues are hurting Tupperware, including a “sharp decline in the number of sellers, a consumer pullback on home products, and a brand that still does not fully connect with younger consumers,” according to Neil Saunders, retail analyst and managing director at GlobalData Retail.
“The company used to be a hotbed of innovation with problem-solving kitchen gadgets, but it has really lost its edge,” he said.
Never knew Tupperware made anything other than plastic containers, much less revolutionary problem-solving kitchen gadgets.
Hey Kitchen OVERLORD (
@Kaido ), what do you think of their problem-solving gadgets?
It's been awhile since I wrote a dissertation on food! I'll say two things right off the bat:
1. A lot of people are, understandably, heavily anti-plastic. Plastic recycling is a
known scam. I recognize the dangers of plastic. However, I use plastic extensively in everything from cooking (utensils, containers, vac-seal bags, trash bags, Dobie sponges, condiment squirt bottles, etc.) to my hobbies (literally everything in my computer is made out of plastic, from my keyboard to my laptop, and I even 3D print plastic), so I've come to terms with using it in my life. I essentially view plastic as a necessarily evil in modern life, so it's an accepted part of my workflow.
2. Unlike Alton Brown, I'm a HUGE fan of uni-taskers. I have really low frustration tolerance, so anytime I can get a tool that does a really wonderful job solving a problem (especially a repetitive problem that irks my ADHD to death, such as
hulling strawberries), that's a win for me!
When I first got married, I got one of those smart-spin things from TV. I loved it because all of the lids were the same size. Growing up with Tupperware, I could never find the right lid, which was really frustrating, so while these weren't very big containers, it was a good answer for me at the time:
It was a good answer especially because of how much I
loathe finicky things. Saran Wrap used to make a good cover when you couldn't find a lid, but they changed their formula, so now it's not as sticky anymore:
Ever wondered why Saran Wrap is different today than it used to be? Turns out, there's a pretty good reason why the kitchen staple lost some of its stick.
www.tasteofhome.com
However, they come out with Press N' Seal, which is even more awesome because it actually sticks to stuff & to itself, so I use it a lot:
I later got a suction vacuum-sealer for plastic bags & jars (lets you store food up to a year & meats up to 2 to 3 years), then got into
Sous-Vide, where you cook underwater in vac-seal bags. Over COVID, I finally invested in a
chamber-vac, which can do neat tricks like rapid hydration (great for pasta doughs, cookie dough, etc.) & vac-sealing bags full of liquid. I also use gallon-sized Ziploc freezer bags & use Souper Cubes (silicone molds) extensively, which lets you freeze anything relatively soft (pasta, soup, shredded meats, ground taco meat, etc.) into conveniently-sized bricks:
I really like these one-cup brick molds because they stack in the freezer, so you can pretty much double your space when storing leftovers! Part of my ADHD includes both phases & aversions, so sometimes I'll go through a phase where I'll make something a dozen times while I'm trying to perfect it (which is currently
cornbread) & need a place to store all of the leftovers lol. I also get mild food aversions at times, like sometimes I really don't like eating leftovers the next day because I get instantly sick of it, but I can eat it again in a week or a month, so being able to have a really good system for both freezing & reheating leftovers is fantastic! 40% of food in America is wasted & the average family of 4 loses $1,500 a year to food waste, so having a solid food-storage system pays for itself in no time!
40% of food is wasted. Let's save the food.
savethefood.com
A few years ago, they came out with what I call the
Future Oven, which does bagless, bathless sous-vide, plus a variety of other functions (steam-injected baking, convection baking, dehydrating, air-frying, etc.). More info here:
TL,DR: This is a cool new oven that (1) automates cooking to (2) give you perfect results. It's expensive, but 100% worth it if you want to save money by cooking at home & eat delicious food all the time without really trying. This is an Easy Bake Oven for Adults lol. This is basically Sous...
forums.anandtech.com
One of the key things it does really well is rehydrating food. Leftovers in the microwave are sometimes only 50% as good as the original meal, whereas I can easily get 90 to 95% as good with the Anova oven. They have a whole section dedicated to it on their recipes website:
Explore recipes created for the Anova Precision™ Oven. Learn how to cook sous vide favorites, traditional classics, and discover new steam cooking techniques only available in the APO.
oven.anovaculinary.com
As a result, I now almost exclusively eat from my freezer! I no longer have to rely on having the energy & interest every day to cook a whole meal for my family. I can just stick a frozen meal in there for half an hour with the steam-reheat function & boom, it comes out fantastic! I still use the microwave sometimes, like when I just want food FAST, which is why I like to use these
dual-oven meal-prep containers, which can be microwaved OR baked!
I also use a
Hot Logic Mini heated lunchbox to have hot meals (12V for car & 120V version for wall available) when I'm away from home. These take about 2 hours to heat up (set temperature of 165F), so you just plug it in at 10am if you want to eat at noon. Those dual-oven containers are nice because I can microwave them, steam-retherm them in the Anova, or stick them in my heated lunchbox:
So I've built up a pretty diverse set of ways to make food (Instapot & Anova oven), store food (freezing in ziplocs, Press 'N Seal, Souper Cubes, and vac-seal bags), and reheat food (microwave, heated lunchbox, steam-convection). This approach has saved me so much money that I bought a couple more Anova ovens & a couple of deep freezers over the years! It's also enabled me to eat
according to my macros, which helped me lose 80 pounds.
My current meal-prep approach is pretty simple: I treat it as a daily chore. Once a week, I pick out 7 items to make & then go shopping for what I'm missing. Every day after work, I make one batch of one recipe (pre-selected & pre-shopped-for), then divvy it up to freeze & label it with
my macros. A typical batch of say chili or crack chicken can easily make 8 souper cube's worth of bricks. One batch a day times 30 days a month = 240 bricks of food in my deep freezer every month!
So as far as Tupperware goes, they have a HUGE line of products these days. I do have a few various odd-shaped containers for storing stuff in randomly, but mostly I either vac-seal or Souper Cube up the leftovers for convenience & for efficient space-saving storage, that way it's easy to thaw out or reheat exactly what I need, without getting sick of eating the same thing over & over again! I just checked Tupperware's website & they list 230 unique products in six different categories (baking tools, bowls & plates, chopping, cleaning, countertop storage, and drinkware), so they have a pretty diverse product line available today!
My main product-storage containers are OXO Pop containers, which took me a couple years of buying them on a monthly basis to fully outfit my kitchen (a single metal container can run like $30 a pop lol, pun intended!). I like them because they're heavy duty, keep the bugs & dust out, and are easy to work with (nice big openings to scoop out stuff like rice, flour, cornmeal, etc.). I buy my baking soda, baking powder, cornstarch, etc. in bulk to keep in there & then put nice printed labels on them. I used to have so much frustration working directly out of folded bags; these eliminated my problems with bugs, dirt, reduced shelf life, and usability frustration!
Tupperware itself is great. I haven't really seen too many people in the younger generation using it. I do see a lot of Pyrex use, especially the ventilated glassware for microwaves for doing leftovers in. It really all boils down to how you want to play the meal-prep & leftovers game. Some people store it in big containers in the fridge & eat it up in a few days. I get kind of sick of eating the same stuff by the next day, so having a way to both freeze it & effectively reheat it without it getting all nasty cold in the middle & rubbery on the edges is a HUGE win for me!
I think if they were smart, Tupperware could buy up Press 'N Seal, Souper Cubes, Ziploc, FoodSaver, and VacMaster and create a single "meal-prep" brand. Like offer a kit for a few hundred bucks that includes everything, add on a subscription-refill service, etc. Do different colors & designs to make them more appealing to use, rather than just boring "kitchen tools". People don't realize how much money they're losing out on, both in the health benefits from cooking at home & the long-term medical impact and from food savings from preventing waste ($1,500/yr) to cooking at home more (average family spends $7k/yr eating out, $3k of which is fast-food). So potentially literally THOUSANDS of dollars a year in savings, all from getting setup & spending a few minutes using a modern workflow in the kitchen!
The convenience & quality are outstanding too! Like, the other day for my daily after-work meal-prep session, I made mini chocolate-chip & M&M cookies. It took all of 10 minutes & my electric stand mixer did most of the work. I freeze them on a tray overnight & then chuck them in a Ziploc freezer bag to store:
Then I can bake however many I want directly from the freezer, anytime I want! I have chocolate-chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, avalanche cookies, etc. Plus cornbread, various TV dinner meals, and all kinds of Souper Cubes (soups, chilis, bisques, shredded meats, ground meats from sloppy joes to taco meat, etc.). All ready to go, anytime I want great food!
Convincing people to cook at home & live off leftovers may be a pretty big challenge these days! We live in the age of Uber Eats & Doordash delivery. The average grocery store has 42,000 products in it. You can get high-quality frozen & prepared meals at the supermarket these days. Most people have at least a few medium & large-sized Tupperware-style containers, but there are so many competitors on the market (even the Dollar Store has decent offerings these days!) that they're not quite as name-brand as they used to be. As far as special gadgets go, it's the same deal with Pampered Chef...you can just hop on Amazon & get 15 different styles of garlic peelers these days, haha!
I think they'd do well to absorb some other brands & push training as their core narrative, whether it's pandemic prep or eating healthy or whatever the marketing angle might be. I think the only Tupperware-brand stuff I personally own are some semi-reusable, disposable, thin-plastic divided lunch containers that I got because I needed a specific size. Then again, sometimes marketing makes all the difference: