By Jared Ebersole in Video — 21 Mar 2026

Why Soda Can Tabs Have That Hole

The hole in a soda can tab can hold a straw, but that is not why the shape survived.

The straw trick works.

That is why the myth survives.

Open a soda, rotate the tab over the drinking opening, and slide a straw through the hole. The tab can help keep the straw from floating around in the carbonation. It feels so neat and intentional that it is easy to believe the hole was designed for exactly that.

It was not.

The hole is older than the hack. It is a leftover from the long, messy evolution of how beverage cans learned to open themselves.

For a long time, cans needed a separate opener. The old "church key" punched holes into the lid: one larger opening for drinking and a smaller one to let air in. That worked, but it meant the can was not truly self-contained. If you forgot the opener, the drink was sealed behind a problem.

Ermal Fraze, an Ohio engineer, helped change that. In the early 1960s, his pull-tab design attached a ring to a scored section of the can top. Pull the ring, tear away the metal, and the can opened without a separate tool. It was simple, satisfying, and quickly became part of the sound and ritual of canned drinks.

But the pull-tab created its own problem.

The tab came off.

Those detached tabs became litter. They cut bare feet. They could be dropped into cans and swallowed. A design that solved the opener problem created a trash and safety problem millions of times over.

The modern stay-on tab was the next answer. In the 1970s, engineers developed tabs that stayed attached to the can after opening. Instead of peeling out a loose strip of metal, the tab acts as a lever. You lift one end, the rivet becomes the fulcrum, and the nose of the tab pushes a scored panel down into the can. The drink opening appears, but the tab remains connected.

That is the key distinction. The tab is not just a handle. It is a tiny machine.

The hole helps make that machine practical. It gives your finger room to lift, keeps the tab light, and removes aluminum from a part that is manufactured by the billions. It also echoes the ring shape people already understood from older pull-off tabs. The result is familiar, cheap to produce at enormous scale, and strong enough to do its job without wasting extra metal.

That last point is easy to underestimate. A single tab is almost nothing. A global beverage industry makes hundreds of billions of cans. Tiny savings become real material. A fraction of a gram matters when the same shape is stamped again and again across factories, trucks, vending machines, stores, stadiums, and recycling bins.

The hole can still hold a straw. That is a bonus use, not the origin story.

This is what makes everyday design interesting. The object in your hand may look obvious now, but it carries the memory of earlier failures: forgotten openers, sharp removable tabs, roadside litter, swallowed metal, manufacturing cost, consumer habit, and the need for one motion to work almost every time.

The soda tab is small because it has been refined.

The hole is not a secret feature.

It is a design fossil that still earns its keep.