Tide's New Eco-Box Could Be The Tide Pods Of 2019 — In The Worst Way Possible

Remember January 2018? It was a different time. Yes, America was far from perfect, but at least there was only one laundry detergent product we had to worry about teens eating. Now, things are way more complicated. Late last week, P&G announced a brand new way to package Tide detergent, and it has joined the ranks of Tide Pods as a laundry detergent that teens might be tempted to ingest.

The new Tide Eco-Box is designed specifically for e-commerce, according to P&G's official press release announcing the new packaging. The ultra-concentrated detergent comes in a sealed bag that's placed inside a shipping-safe cardboard box. The new packaging design contains 60% less plastic and 30% less water than a regular 150-ounce Tide press-tap, plus it doesn't require other boxes or bubble wrap. Clearly, this is a plus for the environment, yet upon Tide's Eco-Box announcement, consumers quickly began pointing out a potential drawback to the new design. Namely, that it looks like boxed wine.

Just like when the Tide Pod Challenge first became a thing earlier this year, many are sharing hilarious memes comparing the Tide Eco-Box and boxed wine brands like Black Box and Franzia. Side by side, the similarities between these two products are pretty hard to ignore: the interior bags filled with liquid, the perforated cardboard flaps, the taps.

Though the similarities between boxed wine and the Tide Eco-Box are amusing to many, some have called out P&G for apparently forgetting its track record for creating Tide products that teens want to eat. If teenagers were challenging one another to eat Tide Pods for no reason, detergent that looks like alcohol could insight way more dangerous dares.

Tide Eco-Boxes will be available starting in January 2019, so parents might want to keep a close eye on their teenagers around that time to make sure they're not chugging glasses of Tide or slapping the Eco-Box's interior bag. Check for blue mouths, moms and dads. Hopefully, though, teenagers will have moved on from dangerous laundry detergent-related games by then. It's hard to think like a teen — especially since some of them actually eat Tide Pods for fun — but it doesn't seem totally ridiculous to imagine one scoffing at these new memes, and saying, "Tide challenges are so 2018."