If you visit most parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia, you will find something on almost every dining table, whether it’s at home or a public dining establishment: a pair of chopsticks. If you live there, then you learned to use them starting when you were a young child. If you’re visiting, then you will have to learn to use a pair when eating, or else you embarrassingly ask for other utensils. But in any case, chopsticks are part of every dining experience in that part of the world. They are more than just tools; they are a cultural staple, passed down through generations and deeply woven into the rituals of everyday life.
Wherever you live in the world, chances are you’re familiar with Coca-Cola’s iconic contour bottle, whether or not you drink it. Yes, there are cans and plastic bottles now, but even the latter has that distinct shape that was introduced in 1915 to make the brand identifiable wherever you see it, even if broken, even in the dark. That silhouette has since become one of the most recognizable forms in consumer branding history. Coke wants to bring the two together, as many parts of Asia don’t necessarily have the Coke bottle as a regular part of their dining table. So they decided to launch a campaign and create a product that would bridge the two worlds: CokeSticks.
Designer: Coca-Cola
The product is just like what its name sounds like. It reimagines the famous contour bottle as chopsticks that people can actually use when eating. They’re not relying on a logo or any label, but purely on the power of its most iconic form and of course, the equally iconic Coke red color. It’s the kind of idea that feels both obvious and brilliant once you see it: strip away everything but the silhouette and the color, and the brand is still unmistakably there. It proves that this bottle is so distinctive that it can function as something else entirely, because it has its own design language that needs no introduction.
The CokeSticks are made from food-grade stainless steel and are designed to be fully usable despite their unconventional source of inspiration. They are also a clever crossover between packaging design and product design, which has been one of the brand’s strongest suits over the past decades. Coca-Cola has long understood that their bottle is more than just a container; it’s a visual icon, and CokeSticks is perhaps the boldest proof of that yet.
This concept and the campaign are also very specific to Asian dining culture, which goes to show that this is a market they really want to pick up, pun intended. The functional nature of the product can also be seen as both a branding exercise and an industrial design object. And if you’re a fan of the brand and love using chopsticks, then this could easily become part of your daily dining experience. It sits at a fascinating intersection: something that is both deeply familiar and completely new.
There’s also something satisfying about the idea that an object as everyday as chopsticks can carry that much brand storytelling. You don’t need the logo. You don’t need the label. Just those curves, that Coke red, and you already know exactly what you’re holding. It’s the kind of design thinking that collectors and design enthusiasts will appreciate, because it’s not just a gimmick. It’s a genuine extension of one of the world’s most iconic visual identities into a new, functional form.
Well, that is, if you’ll be able to get them. It doesn’t seem like something they’ll be selling anytime soon, as CokeSticks will be distributed to restaurants and food delivery experiences in the region. They are targeting this to reach 700,000 people, so hopefully, if you live in Southeast Asia, this will eventually make its way to your table.
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