The ice cream cone was popularised at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, in the best-known version of its origin story, when a waffle vendor rolled a crisp pastry into a cone to help an ice cream stall that had run out of cups. Whether or not that exact story is the whole truth, the underlying logic is real: an edible container that holds its contents and then disappears with them.
More than a century later, food technologists and sustainability researchers are revisiting the same idea through edible plates, edible cutlery, and edible packaging, now presented as a response to the plastic waste crisis. The cone knew first. The wafer has been solving the packaging problem since before packaging was a problem.