Posts Tagged ‘packaging’
“This is a cardboard universe”*…
As we rid ourselves of the detritus of the Holiday season, let us pause to consider its signature component: at the turn of the 21st century, corrugated cardboard accounted for just fifteen percent of the United States recycling stream; today, it’s nearly half. Shannon Mattern on the cardboard box…
… As historian Maria Rentetzi writes (“Cardboard Box: The Politics of Materiality,” in Boxes: A Field Guide), “the cardboard box — the waste of our commercial world — is recycled in such a way as to make visible the disorder in our societies, the faults of capitalism.” It is an abject object that touches all parts of the city, from the granite kitchen island to the sewer grate. And for many of us, the cardboard box is our closest touchpoint to globalized trade, structuring our relations with people in distant places. It brings the logistics chain to our doorstep. The magnificently ripped metal freight container may get the Economist cover shot, but the plain brown box delivers messages to our homes. Its very existence in our homes, Marshall McLuhan would say, is the message. In the immortal words of Walter Paepcke, founder of the Container Corporation of America, “packages are not just commodities; they are communications.”
Let’s unpack that, shall we? Boxes are media in multiple senses of the word. They’re lithographed surfaces designed to be read, and they’re dimensional containers that mediate between outside and inside worlds. They’re “media of transport and information, shapers of public opinion and consumer desire, and means of targeting attention.” And they’re “logistical media” that “arrange people and property into time and space,” that “coordinate and control the movement of labor, people, and things situated along and within global supply chains.” The cardboard box is a minimalist form with maximalist ambitions, an arboreal apparatus made from one of the world’s most abundant renewable resources, then filled with plastic and moved around by copious quantities of oil. It doesn’t just coordinate and control landscapes; it transforms them.
Cardboard’s ubiquity rests on simple claims: I can hold that, and I can go there. The Container Corporation of America was founded in 1926, and upon those claims it built an empire with surprising reach. The CCA made collapsible shipping boxes, and it transformed packaging into a science and an art. It advanced market research, shaped mid-century taste, and altered the chromatic universe through color standards. It employed some of the best graphic designers of the period, and as national borders shifted after the Second World War, it commissioned Herbert Bayer, author of the Universal typeface, to revise the World Geo-Graphic Atlas. Even then, the CCA was remaking that new world to meet its logistical needs, rehabbing mining towns and germinating forests, and orchestrating civic discourse about all of this.
How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process? Soon we’ll dive into the Paepcke archive, to find answers to those questions. But first I want to show you how a cardboard box is made…
In turn, inspiring and horrifying– the social history of the cardboard carton: “World in a Box,” @shannonmattern.bsky.social in @placesjournal.bsky.social.
For an earlier (R)D focused on Mattern’s work: “To clarify, ADD data.”
* Philip K. Dick, The Dark-Haired Girl
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As we tape it tight, we might recall that it was on this date in 1910 that a federal official who might slowed the onset of the cardboard box was fired: Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, was fired by President William Howard Taft. Pinchot had opposed Taft’s newly appointed Secretary of the Interior, Richard Ballinger, who favored commercial exploitation of federal reserve lands.
During President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, Pinchot had help enable policies for the conservation of natural resources. Roosevelt had designated millions of acres to protect as National Forests. That legacy was threatened, so Pinchot pressured Taft to remove Ballinger from office. In November of 1909, Collier’s Magazine had created a scandal when it accused Ballinger of shady dealings in coal lands in Alaska. When Pinchot criticized both Ballinger and Taft, the president reacted by firing him.
“There’s no better feeling in the world than a warm pizza box on your lap”*…
On the origin of that sacred vessel…
Ah, the humble pizza box. When else has such a more modest creation kept so many so well fed? Patented in 1984, after being filed in ‘81 by a Robert E Hall, the creation is described as such: “A box is formed from a unitary, double-sided corrugated cardboard blank having a plurality of scored lines which enable a set up in box form. A bottom panel of the box has cemented thereto a single-sided, fluted corrugated cardboard medium with the fluted side facing upwardly. A moisture-resistant glue is used between the smooth faces of the fluted corrugated medium and the confronting liner of the blank to provide an impenetrable barrier which prevents grease from penetrating through the box. The boxes are manufactured on a conventional production line which is modified by, in effect, running one stage in a reverse direction in order to invert the single-sided medium and to apply the glue in a different manner to establish the moisture barrier.”
In truth, the pizza box has many parents, with patent 4,441,626 simply improving grease absorption and venting (dunno who came up with the weird little three legged table you sometimes see.) Neapolitan pizza bakers would put their pies in metallic containers called stufe as far back as the 19th century. Corrugated cardboard was added to the recipe in the ‘60s, with Domino’s creating something pretty similar to the package we know and love — aka the Chicago Folder — shortly thereafter…
“Who Invented the Pizza Box,” from Modern Delivery.
More at: “Pizza packaging: Overview and History.”
See also: “My favorite dish to prepare is something on the takeout menu.”
* Kevin James
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As we hold the mushrooms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1901 that Chapman J. Root opened the Root Glass Company in Terre Haute, Indiana; his specialty was the manufacture of glass bottles that would withstand high internal pressures. In 1915 the company entered, and in 1916 won the design competition for what would become another packaging superstar: the iconic 6.5 ounce Coca-Cola bottle.
“My favorite dish to prepare is something on the takeout menu”*…
Who drew that winking chef on your pizza box? Anne Ewbank investigates…
Takeout containers—especially for pizza, Chinese food, and sushi—have an iconic art and style. Granted, it’s not always the most elegant or politically correct, but some of these designs are now instantly recognizable. So, today, we investigate the origins of the smiling chef of pizza-box fame, the ubiquitous red pagoda of American-Chinese takeout, and the surprising elegance of plastic sushi trays…
The iconography of take-out: “The Hidden Histories of To-Go Container Art,” from @AEwbank in @atlasobscura.
* Tyler Perry
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As we forgo the extra cheese, we might send expressive birthday greetings to Ralph Steadman; he was born on this date in 1936. An artist and illustrator renowned for his political and social caricatures, cartoons, and picture books, he is probably best known for his collaborations with Hunter Thompson, especially on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
But Steadman also dabbled in comestible labeling; he brought his gonzo sensibility to the art for Flying Dog beer and designed the V logo used on Flying Dog’s packaging since 1995… work that occasioned censorship by the Colorado State Liquor Board, then an appeal by Flying Dog that was, in 2001, settled in Flying Dog’s favor.
“Agriculture engenders good sense, and good sense of an excellent kind”*…
In an influential 1943 essay, Polish economist Michał Kalecki staged a contest between capitalism’s pursuit of profit and its pursuit of power. While the benefits of government-sponsored full employment would benefit capitalists economically, Kalecki argued, it would also fundamentally threaten their social position—and the latter mattered more. If wide sections of the country came to believe that the government could replace the private sector as a source of investment and even hiring, capitalists would have to relinquish their role as the ultimate guardians of national economic health, and along with it their immense power over workers. Kalecki thus saw how the desire to maintain political dominance could override purely economic considerations.
This analysis finds a striking illustration in historian Ariel Ron’s award-winning new book Grassroots Leviathan, which advances a major reinterpretation of the contours of U.S. political economy and the origins of the U.S. developmental state—the government institutions that have played an active role in shaping economic and technological growth. In Ron’s revisionist account, the groundwork for the rapid economic development in the second half of the nineteenth century was less industrial and elite than agricultural and popular. “Despite the abiding myth that the Civil War pitted an industrial North against an agrarian South,” he writes, “the truth is that agriculture continued to dominate the economic, social, and cultural lives of the majority of Americans well into the late nineteenth century.” This central fact—at odds with familiar portraits of a dwindling rural population in the face of sweeping urban industrialization—carried with it shifting attitudes toward the state and the economy, dramatically altering the course of U.S. politics. Far from intrinsically opposed to government, a consequential strain of agrarianism welcomed state intervention and helped developed new ideas about the common good…
How a grassroots movement of American farmers laid the foundation for state intervention in the economy, embracing government investment and challenging the slaveholding South in the run-up to the Civil War: “In the Common Interest.”
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As we hone our history, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Mylar was registered as a DuPont trademark. A very strong polyester film that has gradually replaced cellophane, Mylar is is put to many purposes, but main among them– given it’s strength, flexibility, and properties as an aroma barrier, it’s widely used in food packaging.
“Human nature is like water. It takes the shape of its container.”*…
This story starts with a Swedish business school graduate studying in the U.S. in the early 1920s and seeing something unfamiliar to him: A self-serve grocery store.
We take advantage of it these days, but there was a time when grocery stores required employees to directly package goods for consumers. In the U.S., goods were sold “over the counter” before the early 1920s, when a truly innovative concept, self-service shopping, came about thanks to a grocery store that’s still around today, Piggly Wiggly [see here]. As noted in a trade publication of the era, Piggly Wiggly was incredibly profitable right off the bat…
But while the concept quickly gained popularity with consumers in the U.S., it had yet to cross American borders in 1920 or so. Which is where Ruben Rausing comes into play. Rausing, then a graduate student at Columbia University who had spent time working in the printing industry, saw a self-service grocery store, and it made him realize something: packaging was about to become very important…
After Rausing finished his education and returned to Sweden, he spent nearly a decade at the printing company Sveriges Litografiska Tryckerier (SLT) before leveraging his contacts and knowledge to create a packaging company, Åkerlund & Rausing, with business partner Erik Åkerlund.
Starting with the packaging of dry goods such as sugar and salt, the company began to focus on liquids around the time of World War II, with paperboard the primary tool.
Prior to the refrigerator getting a global footprint, milk was notoriously difficult to store safely. To give you an idea, when Rausing first came to the U.S., the way that milk was often delivered in his native Sweden involved the use of metal containers that were owned by consumers who cleaned the containers themselves, then went to local stores to get them refilled. This was not a perfect system, and often led the milk to spoil. (Refrigeration was not really common even in developed countries until the 1930s or even the 1940s.)
Meanwhile, the dairy industry in the U.S. had landed on reusable glass bottles that manufacturers cleaned themselves, a more sanitary process than consumer-cleaned metal jugs, but one that relied on a delivery method that had allowed dairies to get monopolies over local markets. Unfortunately for them, paperboard had simply proven too efficient a delivery mechanism to ignore.
“Dairies preferred bottles because they effectively created a monopoly where they established their collection system,” writer Gordon L. Robertson wrote for Food Technology magazine in 2002. “Cartons extended the range beyond the 20–30 miles over which a dairy could operate effectively with bottles; enterprising companies saw the potential and moved to cartons.”
Much as with every other major packaging trend that happened in the first half of the 20th century, Europe got there second. But in the process, they may have built the most innovative model for packaging.
Rausing’s contribution was called the Tetra-Pak, and the corporate line was that he was inspired to have the idea after he saw his wife making sausages. While he may have had the spark of inspiration, it was another inventor, Åkerlund & Rausing employee Erik Wallenberg, who followed the idea through. Essentially, the packaging style was stored with the help of geometry. With the help of a couple of quick turns, the container could close with only three seals, minimizing costs of manufacturing with only a couple of twists. The only issue was that the final shape was non-standard—it was a tetrahedron, essentially a four-sided triangle.
This design nonetheless had multiple advantages, including (with the right packaging materials) the ability to store dairy in a sanitary way over longer periods. With the right packing materials, milk didn’t even need to be chilled in a Tetra-Pak.
Soon, Rausing created an Åkerlund & Rausing subsidiary that was named for the innovative packaging method, Tetra-Pak. And that company, today, is the largest packaging company in the world—and it did so without the benefit of its original form of packaging winning over the U.S. market.
In 1961, the company produced its first aseptic packaging, using a mixture of packaging (plastic, paper, and metal), manufacturing process (a modified form of the tubular packaging that the Tetra-Pak used), and chemical treatment (hydrogen peroxide, to be specific) to allow for a shelf-stable form of packaging that did not need refrigeration and could extend the shelf life of products without the use of preservatives. This was an important innovation whose benefits linger today.
The second innovation came in the form of design, with the Tetra Brik taking many of the lessons learned from the original Tetra-Pak design and applying them to a more rectangular package, allowing for more standardized shipping.
The combination of sanitized packaging and a normalized design seemed like a surefire starting point for American success. But there was a problem—Americans were already used to their cartons that required refrigeration, and so were the companies that sold the milk.
“The major drawback to adoption by American companies is the tremendous cost of changing over from present systems of pasteurization and packaging,” one 1968 article explained of the Tetra Brik. “Since virtually every American family has a refrigerator, the need is not so great as in other areas.”
However, there was still a big world out there for the Tetra Brik, and its shelf-stable nature meant that areas where refrigeration wasn’t quite as quick to appear could get the advantages of having milk distributed in shelf-stable ways.
Americans would find their way to this packaging style through another path: the juice box…
The estimable Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) with the fascinating story of a lunch box staple, the juice box: “Tangential Juice Innovation.”
* Wallace Stevens
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As we poke in the straw, we might send shelf-stable birthday greetings to Reuben’s son, Hans Anders Rausing; he was born on this date in 1926. After many years in the family business, he sold his share of Tetra-Pak to his brother, Gad, moved to U.K., and became a philantropist. His daughter Lisbet, a historian of science at Kings College, London, co-founded (with her husband, UCLA history professor Peter Baldwin) one the the U.K.’s largest and most foresightful foundations, Arcadia.
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