Published on April 4, 2026
The modern kitchen has become a canvas for self-expression, a place where consumers obsess over aesthetics and materials with an intensity usually reserved for fashion. They carefully consider the color of their Dutch oven, the kind of wood in their cutting board, and where to display their glass canisters. And yet, tucked into the corner of that same beautiful kitchen, is almost certainly an unattractive trash can that looks like it was designed in 2000 and never revisited.
The home goods market is massive and growing. It was valued at $960 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2030. But aside from premium brand SimpleHuman, which paved the way for well-designed trash and recycling systems, the category has largely been the overlooked stepchild of the kitchen. They tend to come in boring colors, are frequently loud, and often don’t properly hide the trash bag.
Caraway wants to bring new life into the category. Next week, it launches a new trash and recycling system that reimagines both the functionality and the aesthetics of a kitchen trash can. (That is, if you can swing the $445 price tag for the set.) “We designed them to feel like furniture,” says Jordan Nathan, Caraway’s founder and CEO. “We want a product that you could feel really proud to display.”
Caraway began developing the trash system in 2020 or 2021, starting to see what they would improve. It turned out that many had multiple recycling bins in their home because they needed to separate paper from plastic. Typically, these were the cheap blue plastic bins. Since there wasn’t enough space to lay these bins out next to one another, they often kept trash and recycling in different spots, requiring a trek across the kitchen.
The design team took all of this information and began to reimagine what trash and recycling could be. They sketched out a system with a small footprint, designed for the bins to sit side , and a recycling solution with sorting capability.
The result is trash bins that come in two configurations, with a wide or narrow opening, to fit seamlessly into your kitchen’s design. The recycling bin features a stacked two-compartment unit with pull-out drawers, each fitted with a discreet brushed metal handle, allowing you to sort glass and metal from cardboard and paper. The trash and recycling cans are meant to nest coherently, side .
But even though they look effortless, a lot of work has gone into their functionality. “The internal mechanics based on the shape are different per product,” Nathan says. The step mechanism on the narrow bin operates differently from the wide bin. The recycling unit required solving unique structural challenges: making sure a heavy bin full of wine bottles wouldn’t tip over and that the pull-out drawers wouldn’t come flying open. “It was three separate R&D projects that also had to work together,” Nathan notes, “which was quite a big challenge.”
On the aesthetic side, the system comes in the brand’s signature muted, earthy palette—cream, forest green, terracotta, navy, and sage—all powder-coated in the same smooth, seamless finish that has become the brand’s visual calling card. Nathan states that they deliberately excluded stainless steel and black, the colors of most trash cans on the market today. “We really wanted to bring a Caraway look and feel to this,” he says.
Caraway launched in 2019 with a non-toxic cookware set, then expanded into bakeware, food storage, and utensils, each product thoughtfully designed to work with others. The company has accumulated over 2.5 million customers and is sold at Target, Crate & Barrel, Walmart, and Costco, in addition to its direct-to-consumer channel. Caraway has raised $70.3 million over multiple rounds, including a $35 million Series A led in 2022.
Nathan attributes the brand’s success to its rigorous design process, which is painstaking and unusually slow. The company has a design team of three in-house designers, five product developers, and four employees overseas managing factory relationships. That small team is always operating five years out. “We’re actually working right now on our 2030 pipeline,” Nathan says.
Getting there requires finding manufacturing partners willing to alter their processes—and most aren’t. Caraway’s products often necessitate factories to change their production lines since they use new novel materials. The company rarely uses plastic, and its signature ceramic coatings on pots and pans require dedicated production lines free from Teflon contamination. Finding partners takes one to two years alone. “I’d say nine out of ten factories reject our projects because they’re really difficult,” Nathan explains.
The new trash system marks a significant inflection point for Caraway; it is the first product the brand has made that isn’t explicitly tied to cooking. “When we launched the brand, we called it Caraway Home very purposefully,” says Jordan Nathan. “We have a big mission, and the goal is to really build a hundred-year business.”
The longer-term vision is sweeping: Nathan describes a future Caraway store where designers help customers outfit their entire living space with the brand’s products from floor to ceiling. the rest of the home, Nathan states Caraway has broadened its R&D pipeline, though he doesn’t disclose what other rooms beyond the kitchen the brand will step into first.
For now, Caraway has done something deceptively simple: made a trash can you might actually be happy to own. In a category that has coasted on indifference for decades, that’s not nothing.
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