Boon unveiled several new feeding products at the trade show, including baby bottles and a straw cup and a great-looking dish drainer that plays on artificial grass. Here's a close-up demo of the straw cup:


Born Free refused to let us film their prototype, but it's too late for that. Born Free and OXO each have identically-functioning cups that will be coming out around the same time - each of them featuring a twist ring that releases the straw, which is held against the inner rim when it is closed, rather than pinched midway between the center and edge, as the last two popular straw cup design saw similar widespread adoption a few years ago by Thermos, Nurture Pure, etc., and the flip-top (Munchkin, Playtex) did before that. Design comes in waves across this industry.

Here's a bowl I guess we missed - it's available now. Its lozenge shape echoes rounded corners we're seeing in new designs across the market. Such corners give babies and multitasking caregivers more scoopability when trying to get food out of a bowl - a feature pioneered by another company we'll write up soon. Anyway, Boon's bowl:



But Boon also has a bizarre web-like bowl holder in development that sort of turns the stay-put bowl idea on its head. "Wrap" actually encapsulates a bowl of your own in a thermoplastic elastomer webbing that has a suction base and wraps around the bowl lip too. The idea is that it helps keep the bowl affixed to a surface (these things are always great for high chairs, terrible for tables - porous surfaces don't take to suction cups well) but if it fails, the wrap protects the bowl if it is dropped, thrown, etc. We're looking forward to testing this one out when it comes into production.


We saw another clever reworking of the stay-put bowl concept from a new-to-America company that we've been waiting to reach our shores. We'll have a demo of that up soon.

And here's the Grass dish drainer, which is just plain clever. We'll test it too, to see how it works.


Boon also has some new bath stuff, also in prototype stage, that we'll show off soon. One strange item I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet, and one that looks very interesting.