Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics called

for the redesign of hot dogs. “If

you were to take the best engineers in the world and asked them to design a

perfect plug for a child’s airway, you couldn’t do better than a hot dog,”

said Dr.

Gary Smith, former chairman of the AAP’s Committee on Injury, Violence, and

Poison Prevention. “When it’s

wedged in tightly, that child is going to die.” Never ones to resist a challenge, or the

chance to play with our food, we carved out a little time to explore the redesign

of the hot dog.

We began by thinking outside the bun. What other ways could we come up with for

hot dog delivery? Looking for

inspirations from food innovations like GoGurt and Push Pops, we briefly toyed

with the idea of a semi-solid hot-dog paste…a Push-Pup, if you will, not

unlike the Sushi Popper. But frankly, the idea of a hot dog in a non-Newtonian

form, was more than a little gag-inducing.

For enhancing a sense of play, we flirted with the idea of

Lego-inspired shapes, like the fruit snacks at right. But, given the reason behind the call for

redesign, it seemed a bad idea to train kids to eat things shaped like toys.

So we decided the best way to preserve the hot dog

experience would be to work inside the bun, and identified several key factors

to keep in mind:

Esophagus-sized cylinders and spheres = bad, very

bad

bad Fit within existing buns for “authentic”-ish

experience

experience Look for opportunities increase sense of play

Enhance condiment-to-hot dog engagement

We began our exploration in sketch form. When one designer remembered a friend choking

on a Lifesaver candy, but still being able to breathe, we looked at options

with a hole down the center. We worry

that these holes could be too easily compressed, and, worse, that people wouldn’t be

able to resist the urge to stuff the hole with cheese, and that would take us

back to square one as a choking hazard.