GoKawiilIt’s not just the quality of the gelato that people complain about these days. It’s also the signature plastic jars.
Devotees have had to hack, saw, or use heavy force to get the goods inside. Much has been written about this phenomenon, so much so that Talenti itself has acknowledged it as a problem. In May 2025, Talenti, tongue in cheek, gave away a gripper called the Talenti Twist and said it had a full team working on a permanent solution to the issue.
Hochschuler told me it’s been a challenge since at least 2007 or 2008. His team would occasionally have to throw away product because the lids were too tight.
When Unilever acquired Talenti in 2014, Hochschuler’s team tried to explain the problem to the new parent company. “They were like, ‘Oh, we know. We understand screw-on lids really, really well. We’re experts in this. We own Hellmann’s, and we deal with this all the time. Don’t you worry,’” Hochschuler said. “I’m like, ‘This is different. You gotta understand what happened.’”
I was dying to know what happened.
The filled jar goes through a blast freezer to help the texture of the gelato retain its creamy mouthfeel and long shelf life. “The product inside is actually expanding outward because it’s freezing, so it caused the lid to slowly turn and tighten,” said Hochschuler. “And it just keeps tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening and tightening until it is so tight, it could almost break it.”
The plastic itself is also part of the problem. The jar and the lid are made of two different types of polymers. That means they’ll react differently to various temperature conditions and will shrink or expand at different rates, causing the two pieces to work against each other, rather than with each other, said Patricia Santos, a professor in the Rutgers packaging engineering program, who previously worked at Mars and Kraft.
I was curious about what was happening between the lid and the thread, so I asked our friends at the industrial CT-scanning company Lumafield (who had helped us dig into the mystery of why Ralph Nader’s pens were drying out).
They put several jars of Talenti gelato into their machine, both new and already opened, and compared those pints against other screw-style jars in the grocery store. “The shape of the thread seemed very unusual,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield, who wrote an article on the scan results. It’s sharp — even sharper than threads of other plastic containers you might find. Those pointy threads could be clawing into the lids, further contributing to the issue, which is why Hao said the internet hack of running a butter knife between the jar and the lid should make it easier to open.
The folks at Lumafield put a closed Talenti jar and a closed mayonnaise jar through an industrial CT scanner to compare how the lids interacted with their respective bases. The Talenti jar is “a very unusual, definitely very custom design,” said Alex Hao, head of product marketing at Lumafield. Lumafield
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