memes

Tired: Eating Tide Pods. Wired: Drinking Tide Boxed Wine.

Tide’s new packaging is ideal for shipping … it also looks suspiciously like a box of wine. Photo: Procter & Gamble

It’s been just about a year since the earliest whispers of the Tide Pod–eating trend made their way out of the deepest caverns of Tumblr and onto the mainstream web. (In case you’ve forgotten, you can refresh your memory here. The short of it was that people weren’t actually eating Tide Pods so much as joking about eating them in such a committed way it seemed as though they were.) Tide enlisted Rob Gronkowski of the New England Patriots to explain to people that they really shouldn’t eat Tide Pods. (A baby in Florida died in 2013 after ingesting a Tide Pod.) But as with most internet trends, Tide Pod mania went away as quickly as it arose. And Tide went back to just being soap. Until now.

On Friday, Procter & Gamble announced a new package for Tide detergent, designed specifically to make the product easier to ship. It now comes in a box, complete with a sealed bag of soap inside of it and a measuring cup for doing your wash. “The version uses 60 percent less plastic than shipping an equivalent 150 ounce bottle of Tide since it doesn’t require additional layers of cardboard boxing or bubble wrap,” CNN reports. “It’s lighter and takes up less space in a delivery truck — saving P&G money on shipping costs.” The new packaging also uses significantly less water. All this is good for the environment. It’s good for P&G, which can now sell more detergent at a lower cost. It’s good for Amazon, which now also gets to sell more detergent. And also … it’s good for anybody who was missing the Tide Pod meme, because if you looked at this thing and saw anything other than a soapy box of wine please seek medical attention pronto.

A reminder: Laundry detergent is poison. You shouldn’t drink it. You definitely shouldn’t drink it in a wine glass with a nice hunk of Roquefort to top it off. And you absolutely positively shouldn’t pull it out of its nicely redesigned cardboard box and play a rousing, sudsy game of Slap the Bag with your pals.

Tired: Eating Tide Pods. Wired: Drinking Tide Boxed Wine.