Failure™ Magazine

Juice Box Hero

Robert Stribling’s spill-free juice box straw.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Business, Science & Technology

Photo courtesy of The Last Straw.

For married father of three Robert Stribling, a seemingly insignificant parenting slipup was the mother of invention. One ordinary evening five years ago, the Georgia entrepreneur was feeding his two-year-old daughter and getting her ready for bed when he turned his back for “just a second”—long enough for Emily to squeeze the Minute Maid juice box she was holding and squirt apple juice all over her just-changed-into pajamas. “I wondered why a Fortune 500 company would have such a faulty delivery system on one of its products,” says the mechanically-inclined Stribling, recalling the incident that inspired him to create a better juice box straw.

Stribling’s solution to the spillage problem was to add a liquid silicone rubber valve to the common straw—the duck-billed valve working in reverse so the straw stops the flow when the box or pouch is squeezed but opens when you purse your lips to it. With prototypes in hand he phoned longtime business partner, Jim Elliott, and relayed the concept, along with an eye-opening statistic: more than a hundred billion juice boxes are manufactured every year. After Elliott hung up the phone he poured himself a martini. “Then he called back and said, ‘You ought to name it The Last Straw,’” remembers Stribling, who went on to form The Last Straw LLC (TLS) with the intention of manufacturing and selling his invention to major juice companies.

But convincing a consumer products giant like Coca-Cola or Nestlé to adopt a new packaging innovation is more challenging and complicated than one might imagine. Extensive safety testing was TLS’s first priority, as “safety is paramount with any mouthable product for a child,” emphasizes Stribling, who notes that TLS valves are made of the same material as pacifiers. He hired third-party Ph.Ds to perform tension and compression tests (“to consider how hard the strongest, freakiest child might bite down or pull on the straw”), and to determine what kids might do with his straws, which look much the same as common straws, except for the valve. “They might stick it in their nose or ear … or stick it in a buddy’s nose or ear,” reminds Stribling, mindful of all the possibilities.

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