Side Salad: Aw, You Barely Touched Your Kraft Mac & Cheesecake, Honeybear
May 27, 2026
Good morning from Dieline’s editor-in-chief, Bill McCool. Here’s your daily side serving of design news, short musings, brand stuff, and forgotten ephemera.
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I cannot begin to tell you how much I love local news-style “sting operations,” because that’s exactly what Beyond Plastic did here with Starbucks. The coffee chain claims its cold cups are “widely recyclable,” so the non-profit placed trackers on the cups, and it went about as well as you’d expect. Read all about it in Rudy’s piece.
Howdy. You strike me as the kind of person with a trash compactor for taste buds. Can I interest you in the Kraft Mac & Cheesecake? You sure?
Blue Moon is making blue beer for this weekend’s upcoming Blue Moon, which is probably not great news for people who enjoy green beer, unless you happen to have some yellow food dye lying around.
Found this rejected Green Eggs and Ham sequence in the Dr. Suess archives: “I would not drink vodka from a bag. I would not squeeze it and drink it from a rag. I would not could not, it would make me gag. I would much rather lick cooogne samples from a barely used 70s porno mag.”
Say goodbye to Mas +. A nation now turns its lonely eyes to Prime (jk jk, please do not drink any Paul-supported beverages).
Maybe it’s just because I didn’t touch LinkedIn over the weekend, but hand-wringing over the Turner Duckworth Bob’s Red Mill redesign isn’t a real thing, right? Certainly not to Cracker Barrel levels. Granted, I armchair QB’d this a week or so ago in these here pages, but this isn’t bad work at all; I just preferred the quirkiness of the previous design. That said, props to Joe Foley here in Creative Bloq for pointing out the hilarity of Americans freaking out over the removal of old white men from their packaging and/or branding. It’s genuinely a thing!
Buh-bye.
Bill