Kleen Kanteen Sippy Cups a Safer Alternative

Last year, GreenDaddy’s parents considered retiring early and becoming entrepreneurs: they wanted to manufacture an invention – they hadn’t decided on it yet – in their native India, and then sell in the states. Around this time GreenDaddy and I discovered that there was no such thing as a sippy cup made out of stainless steel, and we thought: that’s it! Mom and Dad can make sippy cups in India, the land of stainless steel innovations!

Why did we care so much about stainless sippy cups? It wasn’t so much they had to be stainless steel, we just didn’t want them to be made out of plastics that leach hormone disruptors into food – we’ve written a lot about this here, and here and here. Our family doesn’t eat off of any plastic substance: all BabyG’s bottles were glass, her high chair is wooden, we store leftovers in glass containers.

When it came to be sippy cup time there was no such thing as a non-plastic one. At first, we opted to teach BabyG to sip from a normal cup, which is fine at the kitchen table, but on long stroller or car rides, she wants a little something to sip, you know? Ergo our dream of getting rich on stainless sippees. Of course, neither of us were good enough capitalists to do more than email a stainless steel manufacturer in his home state in India. Meanwhile, I regularly googled “non-plastic” sippy cups, and eventually hit up on discussions on the mothering.com forums and Berkley Parents Network announcing rumors of Klean Kanteen’s product. We bought it as soon as it was available.

The Klean Kanteen Sippy Cup costs a pretty penny – around $15 on sale. You can buy a matching, Built NY insulated sleeve and spend $20 on everything. We didn’t buy the sleeve, as $15 is already a hefty price for a sippy cup, but people who did buy it love that it keeps drinks at the temperature you want them, and say it makes them easy to attatch to strollers, etc. I wish I’d gotten one because when it gets hot here, cold water stays cold for about two seconds.

The body of the Klean Kanteen is made from recycled stainless steel, and it doesn’t have an epoxy coating inside. It features an adaptor that changes it from a kid-sized, stainless steel water carrier into a sippy cup. The actual drinking spout is the regular Avent toddler spout, and though we haven’t tried it, I have read that any Avent spout or bottle nipple can be used. I have read a few reviews from customers complaining that the spouts leak, but if they switch to a different Avent spout, that problem goes away. Ours doesn’t leak, though.

Design-wise, I am not the number one fan of the Klean Kanteen. When BabyG first tried to use it, at 9 months old, it was awkward for her to lift the 7 and a quarter inch long canister high enough. At 13 months, it is still awkward. The container is fat at the bottom – regular, adult sized, water bottle fat – and a little thinner at the top, where kids are supposed to grasp it. This means that the greatest weight of the liquid rests in the fat part, and the baby has to pivot that weight around, more or less, from the thin part. I mean, if you had a giant object that was wide and heavy on one side and skinny on the other, you would have troubles picking up the skinny side, too. It’s physics.

Moreover, the baby has to tip the bottle extra high to make the water spill from the fat part of the canister “up” into the thinner part. All and all, it just doesn’t make much physical sense. Better if the whole bottle were thin, or there was an easy to grasp part in the middle.

Another feature I don’t like, is how the adaptor that converts the Klean Kanteen from a basic stainless steel water bottle into a sippy cup, is made from #5 polypropylene, as is the actual sippy spout part (which is an ordinary Avent sippy spout top).

Of course, if you’re going to use plastic, #5 is “an okay one” — meaning it isn’t “known” to leach, but that it is hazardous to make. Bisphenol-A, that hormone disruptor scientists noticed leaching out of plastics #7 (which many baby bottles and sippy cups are made out of!), has not been caught leaching out of polypropylene. At it doesn’t contain the carginogens like plastic # 3 (the plastic pre-wrapped sandwiches, etc) or #6 (Styrofoam) is suspected of carrying.

As somebody who believed all plastics were healthy as no-sugar apple pie until just a couple years back, and who has read that no matter the safety rating, one should never put plastic in their mouth or heat food in plastic, I admit I’m not completely sold on the safety of plastics not “known” to be hazardous.

Still: if you don’t want your baby drinking water or juice or milk or whatever it is you feed her out of materials that are either “known” or “not known to be” to be made out of carcinogenic or hormone disrupting chemicals, and you really need a sippy cup, none of my complaining matters a single iota: The Klean Kanteen is the ONLY sippy cup that is mostly made out of a non-plastic material.

If water sits in your car on a hot day, it will be touching the stainless steel, not the plastic. And Klean Kanteen never develops that plastic taste, even if you leave the same water in there for a couple days.

I think Klean Kanteen saw the need for the stainless sippy cup, and they converted a product they already had to answer a growing consumer demand. They’re a good company, and I’m grateful they’ve created this product. I think many of the design “flaws” are more results of not actually having designed their “kids cup” to be a “sippy cup” for babies.

However, I’ve been reading around the web, and here and there people have mentioned the existence of stainless steel sippy cups at expos, etc, that are actually designed for toddlers. I bet by the time BabyG is a few years old, there will at least a couple better options. Heck, maybe GreenDaddy and I will visit a stainless steel plant when we visit Gujurat, this summer, and actually become stainless steel sippy moguls ourselves.

Until then, I do recommend the Klean Kanteen, and we will continue to use ours. When I lost the first one, I shelled out the excessive moolah, and bought another. I believe the Klean Kanteen is safer for my baby than the other options available. I’d like it to be more steely. I’d like it to cost less. And yes, it’s awkward — but, hey, at least in this aspect it’s giving BabyG an early lesson in adapting to the imperfections of the world.