Tide turns heads with new ‘wine box’ detergent dispenser. Why did they make it?

Forget Tide Pods. Those candy-colored packs of detergent that teens sunk their teeth into for the #TidePodChallenge are old news.

Now there’s a more “adult” forbidden laundry snack: a box of Tide that some say looks a little too much like a tantalizing container of boxed wine.

Proctor & Gamble, the manufacturers of Tide, announced the new “Eco-Box” earlier in November. It stands upright on two cardboard “legs,” with a spout to dispense blue laundry detergent into a cup.

The company said the new packaging was part of an effort to shift thinking toward e-commerce. The packaging is lighter, uses less plastic, doesn’t require extra fluff like bubble wrap and takes up less space — making it ideal for shipping and trucking directly to customers who order it online rather than pick it up in the store.

“The Tide Eco-Box is designed to keep the convenience of online shopping for the consumer but reduce the overall impact of that convenience on our environment,” Isaac Hellemn, a brand manager for Proctor & Gamble, said in a news release.

But the new design rattled people on social media, who couldn’t help but remember the infamous “Tide Pod Challenge,” in which teens scarfed down single-use Tide pods and filmed it for video.

By January of 2018, more than 80 calls had come into the poison control center about teens intentionally biting laundry pods, the New Statesman reported.

It probably started out as a joke, The Miami Herald previously reported, but enough people tried it that Tide put out a statement saying the pods “should be only used to clean clothes and kept up, closed and away from children.”

The “craze” has died down since then, but now some on social media say Tide’s ECO-BOX looks like a tempting dispenser of boxed wine. Could a new “challenge” be on the horizon?

Tide said it was trying as hard as possible to make sure people knew their detergent box was for laundry, not for drinking, according to Buzzfeed News.

“We all know laundry detergent is for cleaning clothes. To be sure people know this is detergent, we put a large picture of our Tide bottle on the side of the box,” the company said in a statement to the website. “Whether your Tide comes in a box or a bottle, it should be stored up and away, out of the reach of children.”