The best slim lunch box is a meal-prep container

The best “slim lunch box” for a briefcase isn’t a lunch box at all. It’s a shallow meal-prep container.

Here’s the problem with every purpose-built lunch box: they’re all thicker than you think. The Bentgo Classic, the one everyone recommends, is about 2 inches tall. That’s fine if your briefcase has empty space, but in a packed laptop bag it becomes a bulge problem. Anything insulated is even worse — you won’t fit it in anything but an actual backpack.

That said, if you want the closest thing to a grown-up office lunch box, get the Monbento Box. It’s slim, stackable, looks like something a design-conscious adult would own, and slides into a briefcase without announcing itself. The Sistema Bento To Go is the budget version: slightly slimmer, uglier, gets the job done.

But the real move is to skip the lunch box category entirely. A 1.5-to-2-inch Pyrex or Snapware meal-prep container with a locking lid is slimmer than