An unlikely hit of the last few months’ consumer hardware has been a power bank branded by the German confectionery company Haribo. It first gained attention in backpacking circles because of its high capacity for a reasonable weight, and since then has been selling like the proverbial hot cakes. Now Amazon have withdrawn it from their store over “A potential safety or quality issue”. The industrial imaging company Lumafield have taken a look at the power bank with a CT scanner, to find out why.
As you might imagine, the power bank is all battery inside, with pouch type lithium ion cells taking up all of the space. Immediately a clue appears as to why Amazon withdrew them, as the individual layers of the cells are misaligned, laying open a risk of failure. They also take a look at a set of earbuds from the same source and find something even more concerning — torn electrodes. Thus neither device can be regarded as safe, and the backpackers will have to haul around a little bit more in the future.
You’ll not find the Wrencher on a power bank, but you can be sure if you did, we’d make sure there was an element of quality control at play. Meanwhile we feel slightly sorry for the branding executive responsible at Haribo, who we are guessing has had a bad day. We’ve featured Lumafield’s work here before quite a few times, most recently looking at similar defects in 18650 cells.
If I were branding swag for giveaways I’d definitely stay clear of power banks.
There’s a bit of a history of branded power bank recalls, EE sent out thousands of them to subscribers and then had to recall them for safety reasons. Big Clive tore one down I think.
I’d also be inclined to avoid them, unless I was really going upmarket with the swag, just because(especially with things like the fast charging on modern phones) power banks are kind of a ‘go adequate or go home’ item.
Not necessarily ‘go safe or go home’; but if a power bank can’t actually handle the capacity and current delivery requirements of shoving a useful amount of charge into something, keeping it charged and carrying it around is more hassle than it is worth. If it has awful self discharge or other personality defects that further counts against it being worth the trouble. And if you aren’t going to carry it around you just want a USB AC adapter or spare port on a computer anyway.
Various other brandable widgets, while still often a waste of plastic, become at least positive-value at rather lower cost.
Kazoo!
Really gotta hand it to Lumafield’s marketing people. They are doing a fantastic job.
Yep, good work Paul
Absolutely, showcasing your product this openly with the public takes courage (and not the Apple kind). And their web viewer which allows you to interactively browse their 3D scans of things is just super cool.
The last Lumafield link points to the same place as the first one.
Try https://hackaday.com/2025/09/29/lumafield-shows-why-your-cheap-18650-cells-are-terrible/
I absolutely love Lumafield’s work, both for the accessibility of their methods and results to the casual reader, and for their courage for pointing out manufacturing defects in an era where most run away from potential liability issues. As an imaging nerd who has had a lot of contact with various industries, it’s wonderful stuff and long overdue.
That said, this caused great laughter: “Meanwhile we feel slightly sorry for the branding executive responsible at Haribo, who we are guessing has had a bad day.
I wouldn’t feel bad for them at all – their world is made up of “product velocity” – usually how many hundreds of cases of product per week can be turned over, and what can be done to make that number higher. This is often taken to a very granular level (one of the original profitable uses of “Big Data”) and they are very well paid for this.
Expecting them to understand the minutiae of battery assemblies (or care in the least) is quite a stretch since they have paper assurances of the branded product’s safety and a battery(!) of corporate legal teams to bulwark them in case it all goes horribly wrong.