Hawaii is a unique place. Millions of tourists visit each year to witness the enormous volcanoes, unique geese, and, of course, the unique Hawaiian soda can shape. But why does Hawaii have a separate Kanji episode? There are no roles in the universe. The simple fact that they can is the answer.
The most obvious difference between Hawaiian cans and regular cans is the ridges around their neck, which are sort of like flourless lays for cans if you don't think about it too hard, but the most important difference here isn't the neck ridges at all; it's the diameter of the lit A regular non-horned cam lid has a diameter of 2 and 1/8 inches, just over a thousandth the diameter of the Epcot golf ball, but a Hawaiian lid is a whopping two and three eighths inches, also just over a thousandth the diameter of the Epcot golf ball, but critically, a quarter inch bigger than the normal Lids. The Hawaiian Lids, known as 206s, were actually the industry standard for a while, having mostly run the gargantuan 211 Lids out of town between 1987 and 1988 because in the canvas aluminium is money, and the aluminium in a can's lid is more than twice as thick and uses more than twice as much material as the rest of the can, making smaller Lids a great way to cut your manufacturing costs.
you only save a shred of aluminium per can, but if you're manufacturing billions of cans a year, it adds up pretty quickly, and just imagine what you could do with all that extra aluminum. You could make a cool bike or a smartest business guy trophy, or you know, a bunch more cans, but because humanity's greed knows no bounds, the rest of the world didn't stop at the 206 lids; they kept shrinking the lids until they reached that nearly microscopic 202 size most of us enjoy today, but Hawaii never got the memo. Why the surprise? It's economics again. Canada beverages comprise what economists call a weight-gaining industry, and not just because of the physiological impact of sucking down Diet Coke like it's air. In this case, weight-gaining means that as the product goes from raw materials to finished product, it gets heavier, which also means that as soda gets manufactured and packaged,its weight increases.
It gets more and more expensive to transport up to 94 percent of the contents of a soda can, which is just carbonated water anyway. Are you going to pay to ship water to an island? Not if you want a shot at that smartest business guy trophy.
to save on transport costs Soda companies manufacture and bottle their products relatively close to the point of sale, so wherever you buy your soda, it's probably not coming from that far away. If you're in New York City, for example, your Pepsi is likely coming from one of the three bottling plants within city limits. So like most other places, Hawaii soda is bottled locally, but because it's so remote, companies save on transport by using locally manufactured cans too, and if you're looking for Hawaiian-made cans, look no further than the one can factory in the state. The Ball Corporation's Kapolei, Oahu, metal beverage packaging plant is probably best known for those little mason jars your neighbour sells her homemade jams in, but they also make about a quarter of the 180 billion cans manufactured worldwide every year.
Cans are a super high volume product, which means you can get economies of scale even at really, really large scale. The Hawaiian can markets are large enough to support one high volume factory like the ball plants but not a second; it's kind of a Goldilocks situation if Goldilocks have been looking to dominate the tropical can market rather than eat bear porridge. The Kapolei plant supplies cans to everyone from Coca-Cola, which has a bottling plant just 30 minutes away, to Pepsi Hawaiian Sun, and soon Hai, we're using Ball Corp. cans for our new small batch IPA pops as interestingly as
The plant makes about a million cans every day, which isn't many in the grand scheme of beverage manufacturing; they would barely cover my own Lacroix habits, and while globally it pays off to swap 206 lids for 202s, in a market as small and remote as As Hawaii changing all the equipment in the can factory, not to mention the bottling plans to suit the larger lid, is just too expensive to be worth it, so rather than invest in overhauling the entire archipelago's can infrastructure, Hawaii just sticks to the 206s. So next time you're in Hawaii, crack into that giant lid and bask in all that extra aluminum. There is truly no better way to enjoy the hazy tolerable taste of hops as interesting as it is.
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