This Edible Water Blob Could Change Hydration Forever

It can be tough to get your recommended daily intake of water, but one innovation is making it easier than ever to keep a bottle, or blob, of H2O on hand. Ooho!—an inexpensive, biodegradable "water bottle" that’s paving the way for the future of hydration—first came to the public's attention in 2013.

Created by Rodrigo García González, Guillaume Couche, and Pierre Paslier of Skipping Rocks Lab in London, the orb (which Fast Company once described as looking like a silicone implant) is created by taking a frozen ball of water, then covering it in layers of membrane made from seaweed extract. The process is a riff on a culinary technique called spherification, which is appropriate given that the gelatinous coating is edible.

Back in 2015, Ooho! received a $22,500 sustainability award from the EU, and now it looks like these water blobs could be ready for tossing into your bag on the way out the door in the near future. Designboom reports that the company will begin testing out their water bubbles at major sporting events in 2018.

Ooho! does have serious potential when it comes to environmental efforts: In America alone, 50 billion plastic bottles are used annually, and the spherical Ooho! packaging could one day bump petroleum-based plastic from store shelves. But if the idea of biting into a water blob weirds you out, don’t worry, it’s not a must.

"At the end of the day you don’t have to eat it," Paslier told The Guardian. "But the edible part shows how natural it is. People are really enthusiastic about the fact that you can create a material for packaging matter that is so harmless that you can eat it."

So natural in fact, that you can even make them yourself at home—though, to be honest, the tap might be easier in that case.

To see what it’s like to hydrate with Ooho!, check out the video below.

Ooho! Experience from Skipping Rocks Lab on Vimeo.

An earlier version of this article appeared in 2015.