A new batch of emojis including several food ones are arriving to your smartphones following a round of approvals by Unicode Technical Committee, the body responsible for standardizing digital text globally. In the pantry of food emojis, you’ll now find an unpeeled yellow onion sitting at a tilt, a full head of garlic, a single Belgian waffle, several falafels atop tahini, a stick of butter, a single shucked oyster, yerba mate in a gourd and finally, a juice box.
The latter was proposed by Theo Schear, an Oakland-based filmmaker, writer and emoji creator, and co-designed by illustrator Aphee Messer. (Schear has also co-authored several other emojis including an upcoming disco ball emoji.)
“I realized there's eight alcohol emojis but only milk for kids,” says Schear who uses the term “digital alcoholism” to address the overrepresentation of alcoholic beverages in our emoji vernacular. In fact, the juice box emoji is relevant not only to kids but folks of all ages around the world who don’t drink alcohol.
Once approved, the juice box, or beverage box, got a spin from the different emoji makers of the digital realm from Apple, who went with an apple juice box for their version to Samsung who is partial to orange juice. Google kept their design close to Schear’s original grape design.
Schear came to propose the emoji through his friendship with Jennifer 8. Lee, the vice chair of the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium. Lee has co-authored several emojis including the dumpling and the hijab emojis. She also co-founded Emojination, a non-profit organization dedicated to making the proposal process accessible to all and emojis more representative of the diverse people and quotidian objects of the world.
Emojination’s website lists proposed emojis as well as their status in the approval process. Lettuce, for example, was considered redundant and was not submitted to the Unicode’s Emoji Subcommittee whereas beans, dosa, fufu, and durian have all been submitted and are awaiting approval. Soon, you could employ a flatbread emoji which has recently been approved by the subcommittee.