A box from Nothing landed on our doorstep a little while ago, and it’s been rattling around our kitchen ever since. Nothing is a Miami company started by brothers Brandon and Jordan Leeds, and it makes to-go cups with no plastic lid at all.
The top of the cup folds down to close itself. We poured hot coffee into the hot cups, iced drinks into the cold cups, and put the paper straws through their paces. Here’s our review.
The Moss and Fog verdict
Recommended!
Sturdy, clever and genuinely nice to hold. The fold-down lid replaces a whole piece of plastic, and the cups and straws handled everything we threw at them. We loved them and came away with no real complaints.
| What we tried | Hot Cup with hot coffee, Cold Cup with iced drinks, paper straws |
| What we loved | Solid build quality, no lid to lose, and a range that covers almost any drink |
| Worth knowing | Sold by the case of 1,000 for businesses. The 180-day breakdown promise is Nothing’s own standard. |
| Price | From about 15¢ a cup wholesale. Samplers from $19.99. |
The trouble with the paper cup
Most paper coffee cups aren’t just paper. They carry a thin plastic lining, usually polyethylene, that keeps the coffee from soaking through, and that lining is exactly what makes them so hard to recycle. Many also contain PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that refuse to break down. Then there’s the lid, a separate piece of plastic that often outlives the drink by a few hundred years.
Nothing’s answer is to drop the plastic entirely. The cups are paper with a water-based coating that the company says is plastic-free and PFAS-free, and the lid is simply more of the cup. One material, one piece, one thing to toss.
How the fold works
Each cup comes with tall paper flaps standing up around the rim. Fill it, then fold the flaps down and over. On the Hot Cup they close into a lid with a small spout to sip from and a locking tab that holds it all shut. The Cold Cup folds its four flaps into a top with a hole that takes a straw, or doubles as a spout if you’d rather skip the straw. The folding steps are pressed right into the paper, so nobody needs a tutorial.
What it’s like to use
We started where most mornings start, with hot coffee. The Hot Cup felt well made from the first pour, folding it shut quickly became second nature, and we didn’t miss the plastic lid one bit. Honestly, it’s a little satisfying to fold your own.
Then we switched to iced drinks in the Cold Cup. Same story: well made, easy to close, and right at home with a straw poking out the top. The paper straws were the pleasant surprise. Paper straws have a bad reputation, and Nothing clearly set out to fix that. We were happy with ours from start to finish.
Quality was the theme across the whole box. Nothing in the box felt cheap, and the clean white cups look good on a counter. We loved them, and we couldn’t find a real complaint to make.
A cup for nearly every drink
The versatility is where Nothing really wins us over. Hot Cups come in 8, 12 and 16 ounces. Cold Cups run from 8 all the way up to 24 ounces, big enough for the largest iced coffee order you can think of. And Nothing says the Hot Cup works fine for cold drinks too, so a small café could get by with a single cup.
The straws come in a whole family. There’s a short Cocktail straw, the standard Classic, a bendy Classic Flex, two Giants for smoothies, and the wide Shake XL, which is made for boba pearls and thick milkshakes. That’s a lot of range for something most companies treat as an afterthought.
The sustainability claims, checked
This is the part we care about most, so we read the fine print. Nothing lists its cups as plastic-free, PFAS-free, home and industrial compostable, repulpable and recyclable. Every product, the company says, is built to break down in 180 days or less with no special facility needed. It calls that promise “Gone in 180.”
Two things are worth knowing. First, Nothing describes Gone in 180 as its own internal standard, and we didn’t find a third-party compost certification listed on its site. That doesn’t make the claim wrong, but it’s the company’s word, so treat it that way. Second, the products are made in Indonesia, one of the world’s big paper-producing regions, and Nothing says it plans to manufacture in North America once it’s large enough.
What won our trust is how plainly the company talks about reusables. Its own site says a reusable cup is the gold standard, and if you can use one, you should. Nothing is aiming at the moments when single-use is going to happen anyway: the café line, the festival, the airport. Making those cups less permanent feels like the right fight. It sits nicely next to other ideas we’ve loved, like a plastic made from fallen leaves and our roundup of sustainable design ideas.
Who it’s for
Nothing sells to businesses, so cups come by the case of 1,000. Wholesale, the Hot Cup works out to roughly 17¢ to 20¢ a cup and the Cold Cup starts around 15¢, depending on size. Nothing says more than 4,000 cafés and restaurants have already switched. Cafés can also order cups printed with their own logo, which makes the switch a branding moment as well.
Not running a café? The sampler boxes are the easy way in. The Hot Cup and Cold Cup samplers are $29.99 each and the Straws sampler is $19.99, a nice way to stock a party or an office kitchen, or to hand to the owner of your favorite coffee shop as a gentle hint!
The bottom line
Nothing took one of the most wasteful objects in daily life and made it simpler instead of fancier. One piece instead of two, no plastic, and a cup that’s honestly nicer to use. We’d love to see these at every coffee counter we visit.
Nothing sent us a sample box to try. Our opinions are our own. Product photos courtesy of Nothing. Via The Dieline.
