Dive Summary:
- Honey badgers are African, weasel-looking, meat-eating animals. They are also an Internet craze born of a parody video that has been viewed some 63 million times.
- In 2011, three friends secured funding through Kickstarter to make and bottle Honey Badger BBQ sauce.
- The plan was to put the sauce in a plastic bottle shaped like a honey badger—similar to the bear-shaped bottles used for honey.
- The problem was that honey badgers are shaped in such a way that making the bottles proved difficult. Consultants from Berlin Packaging eventually found a way to solve the problems.
(Image credit: honeybadgersauce.com)
From the article: "Among the challenges presented by the initial 3D design, the length of the badger’s snout and the heavy detail on its face would have caused uneven plastic distribution during blow molding. It would also have resulted in filling complications, because the bottle opening would not have been centered for the fill heads. The irregular shape of the bottle lacked a neck or other spot that could be gripped by the filler’s scrambler machine to properly orient the molded bottles for filling. The protruding belly, back, and nose also yielded positioning difficulties on the conveyor, and the location of both the snake and the badger’s claws left insufficient label space."
