humangear GoPouch Review

We can think of endless reasons to use a zip-top bag on a trip. Most of them involve food, but they also come in clutch for DIY packing cubes and toiletry bags, to make a plane kit of art supplies for your kid (or any travel companion, really—who doesn’t like to color?), and to carry home a wet swimsuit from a vacation without having the rest of your rolling carry on luggage smell like salt or chlorine.

But while Ziploc and store brands are a dime a dozen (more or less, depending on if you go for a knockoff, freezer style, or maybe a holiday print), they’re not good for Mother Earth when they inevitably tear, stop sealing, or just get coated in peanut butter.

So what is an Earth friendly sustainable packer to do? You probably don’t want to pack your PB&J or hummus wrap in your favorite packing cube, and plastic wrap is just as eco-unfriendly, so you may be in the market for alternatives. We’ve tested tons of travel containers over the years, from hard sandwich boxes to collapsible bowls and silicone bags. We like the flexibility of a bag because it doesn’t take up extra space when empty. While we were pretty happy with the options from Stasher, we’re excited to get our hands on a choice from another of our favorite brands, humangear.

How well does the GoPouch work? Is it only good for your workday lunch, or can it be upgraded to international travel? That’s what we’re here to find out!

The Rundown

Instead of thin, cheap plastic, the GoPouch is silicone. That means it’s thicker and much less likely to rip or tear. Plus, you can put it in the microwave and dishwasher. You can only microwave the bag itself, not the SlideLock™ (more on what that is shortly), but both pieces can get tossed on the top rack of the dishwasher or washed by hand.

Plus, they lack all those bad acronyms you hear about. The GoPouch is BPA-free, PC-free, and phthalate-free, so you don’t have to worry about yucky chemicals leaching into your food.

The humangear GoPouch comes in two sizes at the time of this review—small and medium—and three colors—clear, green, and blue. All three colors are transparent, so you can see what’s inside. The small has a max capacity of 400 ml or 1.5 cups, and the medium is about double that, with a max capacity of 800 ml or 3.5 cups. There are even neat little hash marks on each front to show you where the max fill line and the halfway marks are.

Those max fill lines are well below the top of the bag, but you must be able to close the bag for it to contain whatever you’ve packed inside. It can get tricky if you go too far above that with something that won’t give, like a travel adapter or something just as bulky and rigid.

That said, we’ve had no problem packing a pita wrap inside the medium, and the sandwich roll often extends to the seal at the top with no issue, so you may be able to squeeze in a little more as long as it’s not super fat and bulky.

It’s easy to pack what you need inside these silicone bags because they have a broad base to stand on, and there’s a polypropylene (that’s a fancy name for a certain type of plastic) Flex-frame at the top. If you’ve ever tried to pour a bowl of homemade Chex Mix into a standard Ziploc bag, you know how hard that can be; the bag won’t stand or stay open, and you really need a second set of hands to do it without spilling it all over the counter. You don’t need help to pack these bags, though, because they balance perfectly on a desk, table, or counter and stay open thanks to that plastic frame.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so check it out. It’s basically six longer rectangles of plastic (three on each side), with a hinge on either side and eight smaller rectangles of plastic to articulate the frame in between. It means you can open just one side or the other, or pop it open all the way to pour in your snacks, eat said snacks while watching your favorite YouTube channel, or get ready in the morning if you fill it with toiletries.

That frame doesn’t seal it shut, though. For that, another piece of plastic (polyoxymethylene, to be exact) slides over the top. The SlideLock,™ exclusive to humangear, saves you from pinching a seal shut, hoping you didn’t miss a gap. It works so well that you’re supposed to be able to pack liquids in these bags without worrying about leaks or the bag popping open.

While that works if you just put water inside and turn the pouch upside down, the liquid can leak out if you put any pressure on the bag. That means you can safely use it as a 3-1-1 bag for the airport since it contains small spills pretty well, but we’re unlikely to want to use it for soup. On the other hand, why would you want to anyway? There’s no insulation to keep your tomato soup hot or your gazpacho cold, so it doesn’t seem ideal for that use.

Now, there’s a slight chance that, in the right circumstances, something could catch the top lip of the SlideLock™ and pull it back while it’s inside your bag, but that never happened to us and seems very unlikely. Even if it did, it’s most likely to be as you’re pulling the GoPouch out of your bag, in which case we hope you’ll see it happening and stop pulling! Otherwise, the slide is very tight on top of the bag and doesn’t just jostle open or closed.

Packability

The small and medium sizes of the GoPouch are nice and flat in your travel daypack or soft cooler when empty. The small is a little wider than a typical sandwich bag, and the medium is taller and wider, but both are the right size to take through the TSA line with your liquids since they’re less than one quart.

You can also use the pouches for other gear, though if you toss pencils inside, for instance, they could mark up the interior and make it so you wouldn’t want to use them for food later. And frankly, the silicone doesn’t strike us as the best material to hold tech, mostly because of how it feels to touch. That said, it’s durable enough to get the job done and will work in a pinch.

Since they weigh just a few ounces, we like packing snacks for the plane and keeping one in a travel daypack in case we can’t finish a bag of popcorn at the movies or want to bring some sunflower seeds along to feed the birds. You can even fold them in half to be shorter for a sling, although you can’t do it the other way because of the plastic on the top.

Quick Comparison

The closest competitor to the GoPouch is a Stasher Reusable Silicone Bag. They have the same goal—erasing the need for single-use plastic bags—though they go about it slightly differently.

The Stasher bags close, much like the disposable ones, by pressing together a seal at the top. That means you must ensure that you’ve pressed it entirely closed, and you could have a problem if you miss a tiny spot. It’s also a spot where food or other gunk can get stuck and accumulate, potentially wrecking the seal and, if not, just giving you something to clean. The GoPouch has a smooth interior all the way to the top.

The traditional Stasher bags are also shaped more like disposable plastic bags in that they’re flat. There’s nothing to hold them open for you to fill or help them stand while you fill them or snack on mixed nuts (or chips, fruit, baby carrots … you get the idea). The ability to open the top widely makes the GoPouch easier to clean by hand than the Stasher bags, though both can go in the dishwasher. Both also collect lint and hair like it’s their job, though, so we try to keep them closed when storing them to keep that from happening inside.

Now, Stasher sells many more different versions of its bags than humangear, so you now can get your hands on a stand-up version, as well as sizes ranging from pocket to half-gallon, with stops at sandwich- and quart-size along the way, among others. At the time of this review, humangear just has the small and medium, so there may be a use that the brand does not cover.

Whatever you need them for, we think there can be a place for both in your pack-out, though we like the convenience of the GoPouch’s locking mechanism, and if you’ve struggled with worn-out zip-tops, you might, too!