You can’t fit too much additional ketchup to an expanded cup, but you can dip larger items to it once it’s fanned out.

Two days later, MTV uutiset (a Finnish news outlet) published the article “Believe it or not: you’ve used ketchup cups wrong your entire life.”

The article was more or less the original foodbeast piece, only translated. Other Finnish news sites took notice and at least Kaleva, Iltalehti, Ilta-Sanomat, Herkkusuu, Aamulehti, MTV uutiset again and likely many others over the course of six years published their own piece about the same thing.

I had had my doubts about the truthfulness of the piece since the beginning — I had a hunch the cup opens by stretching the rim only because the container uses no adhesive, which in turn is because a package that uses no adhesive is cost-effective and environmentally friendly to manufacture. But what was the Truth™?

At lunch time last monday I decided to finally get to the bottom of the case. Was the feature a conscious design choice by the package designer or a byproduct of ecological and cost-effective design?

I asked the clerk behind the Burger King counter where their cups come from. She could only tell me that they are supplied by a wholesale company called Kespro and showed me a large box. On the box, there was a logo that said “Genpak.”

It was evident that Kespro orders their cups from Genpak, from either Canada or the United States. There wasn’t a contact e-mail listed on their web page so I sent a contact request through Facebook Messenger and was immediately greeted by a chatbot.

Thank you for taking time to message us. We will do our best to get back to you as soon as possible. Talk to you soon.

While I was waiting for a real person to answer my inquiry I did some more research and found out that Genpak isn’t the only company manufacturing these kinds of cups. I found similar containers for sale by the Solo Cup Company* of the Red Cup fame and Medline, a company I had never heard of. In fact, it appeared that many companies sold the cups, but only a handful manufactured them.

*Solo Cup Company was acquired by Dart Container Corporation in May 2012. Dart also manufactures these paper cups.

All cups had the same folding mechanism.

Out of these three I found Medline the most interesting, namely because they had nothing to do with ketchup. They outlined themselves as a “manufacturer and distributor of healthcare products and solutions” and described the cups as “Ideal for medication distribution”. On the product page both the Supplier and Manufacturer was listed as none other than Medline itself.

The website also had a “Patents” page that listed several of the patents claimed by the company. Though I couldn’t find the cups there, the general thought about patents stuck with me — if I could find the original patent document of the cup, that, if anything would describe exactly how the cup should be used the right way.

Scrambling through the Google Patents page was an exercise in futility however. A query of “paper cup” alone brought over 20,000 results.

I turned to the company’s Twitter and asked who I should contact and got the US customer service number. After clarifying that I was from Finland I was given the European customer service number. Its area code appeared to be that of Netherlands.

So I called them: