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.”
The New Caraway Trash System
Caraway began developing the trash system in 2020 or 2021, and began by surveying customers to see what they would improve in a trash system. It turned out that most of them had multiple recycling bins in their home because they needed to separate paper from plastic. (“Typically those cheap blue plastic bins,” Nathan says.) Since they didn’t have 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, with bins designed to sit side by 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 is a particular design feat: a stacked two-compartment unit with pull-out drawers, each fitted with a discreet brushed metal handle, that allows you to sort glass and metal from cardboard and paper. The trash and recycling cans are meant to nest coherently, side by 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 one on the wide bin.
The recycling unit required solving for a unique structural challenge: 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 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 says they deliberately excluded stainless steel and black, the color of most trash cans on the market today. “We really wanted to bring a Caraway look and feel to this,” Nathan says.
A Natural Extension
Caraway launched in 2019 with a non-toxic cookware set, then expanded into bakeware, food storage, and utensils, with each product thoughtfully designed to work with the others. The company has accumulated over 2.5 million customers and is now sold at Target, Crate & Barrel, Walmart, and Costco, in addition to its own direct-to-consumer channel. The company has raised $70.3 million over multiple rounds, including a $35 million Series A led by McCarthy Capital 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 who manage factory relationships. And 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 upend their processes—and most aren’t. Caraway’s products often require 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, founder and CEO. “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. By expanding into the rest of the home, Nathan says Caraway has broadened its R&D pipeline, although he doesn’t share 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.