Early European coffee houses of the 17th century served coffee in small handleless bowls of imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain. In the 1710s the Meissen factory in Germany made tall, narrow cups so the heavy sediment of Turkish style boiled coffee would settle far from the drinker’s lips. When the French drip method removed the grounds, makers like Sèvres switched to shorter, wider cups, handles became standard around the 1730s, and deep saucers let drinkers pour hot coffee out to cool. Later the straight sided coffee can won high society but lost the café, since it does not stack.

Modern shapes follow the drink: an espresso demitasse holds 50 to 100 milliliters, a cappuccino about 160, and a latte 225 to 570. In orbit, astronaut Don Pettit designed a capillary cup whose sharp inner corner lets surface tension carry coffee to the lip, work now informing pump free medical diagnostics. On the ground the drive through produced the 1986 Solo Traveler lid, shown at MoMA in 2004, and a waste problem of 120 billion disposable cups a year in the United States.

• The first coffee cup lid patent, filed in 1967, had no drinking hole, so users tore away a piece of plastic.
• In 2009 about 14 billion disposable lids were sold in the United States, a $180 million market.
• Paper cups are lined with polyethylene, making them hard to recycle, and hot water can release trillions of nanoparticles per liter.
• Stiftung Warentest found melamine and formaldehyde leaching from bamboo cups above 70 degrees Celsius, and the UK Food Standards Agency ordered them withdrawn in June 2023.
• Pandemic bans on outside cups stalled reusables, and 2023 data showed use still below pre-pandemic levels.