Packaging was born with one main purpose: to protect and preserve the product. As we have often told in this blog, however, packaging is much more: it has to do with marketing, with the value of the product, with consumer habits, with the image and philosophy of the company and, more and more, with sustainability. 

If we think to all these requirements, technology plays a leader role over centuries and decades to find always better solutions ... and is strictly linked to the evolution of packaging! 

Small and large inventions, new materials, new production methods, new needs of society and of the environment: today we will show you how packaging and wrapping of the most common products - from glass bottles to plastic ones, generation after generation, changed from the first cans to flexible packaging!Il contenuto del tuo articolo blog qui...

From tin boxes to beer cans

Immagine: Sun Ladder [CC BY-SA 3.0]

At the end of the eighteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte had a problem: he had to find a way to preserve food so to guarantee the right supplies for his army, and he wanted to do it effectively and economically. For this the French general decided to make up an award of 12 thousand francs to find the solution for a better food preservation. 

15 years passed before anyone could claim the prize: in 1810 the French chef Nicolas Appert invented canned food. The idea was to boil food and pack it hermetically in glass containers. A few years later, Durand from England patented a container much more resistant than fragile glass bottles, lighter and cheaper: the tin can. In Italy Francesco Cirio opened the first canned pea factory in 1856. 

Curiously only after several years they discovered why, in fact, all these methods of conservation worked: we had to wait for the French scientist Louis Pasteur who observed and described the role of microorganisms in food spoilage!

Una scatola in latta contenente ostriche fresche, 1935 (Smithsonian)

Over time, the production techniques and the materials of tin cans and cans improved but probably the most important innovation arrived in 1959: the year of the first aluminum can (a can of beer, to be exact!). Aluminum is a lighter material than tin, cheaper, odorless, with a great ability to prevent the loss of product aromas. In short, using this material greatly improved the characteristics of this packaging, and aluminum production in Europe got bigger from that year.

One last curiosity. In 1962 a brewery in Pittsburgh, United States, decided to apply another small innovation to the aluminum can: it was the iconic "tab" to favour the opening. During the following six months, the brewery's sales increased by 400%!

From cardboard boxes to Tetrapak

Although cardboard was already used for some centuries in China, the idea of ​​using it as a packaging came out in the West. A British industrialist, Sir Malcolm Thornhill, patented the cardboard box in 1817. 

The first cardboard boxes were used to transport different kind of goods - from jewellery to silkworms - but they had one flaw: they were particularly fragile. The solution was found unexpectedly and from a completely different field. 

In 1856 a couple of English tailors patented corrugated cardboard, used to keep their hats in the right shape. Corrugated cardboard is made of two flat cardboard surfaces that enclose a corrugated one. After a few decades corrugated cardboard became the perfect solution to make cardboard boxes more resistant: in this way the cardboard box also became a packaging able to better protect fragile contents, such as glass bottles.

Immagine: m01229/Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Over the years, cardboard was used in a variety of packaging. For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century the Kellogg Brothers used cardboard for the packaging of their new cereals. Curiously, at the beginning, the protective waxed paper material, used to keep the crunchiness of the product, was placed outside the cardboard package, while now the plastic bag is inside the box.

During the fifties an other important invention changed the way of preserving food: in 1951 in Sweden the Tetrapak was presented to the press and immediately attracted the attention of the public. The new type of packaging manages to protect food without using preservatives or refrigeration.

Immagine:17qq.com

Glass bottles and plastic bottles

Probably one of the oldest forms of packaging in the world is the glass bottle. It was already used in Asia in the first century BC and in the ancient Roman Empire. It is indubitable that before the industrial revolution, manufacturing a glass bottle required such a large workforce that the practical and common use of the bottle remained rather rare. 

The shape of the bottle didn’t change a lot during the years, while the production techniques developed a lot and still today this type of packaging is very widespread! 

In the mid-nineteenth century the German entrepreneur Friedrich Siemens gave an important turning point to the automated production of glass bottles by inventing a particular type of oven that allowed to make glass production continuous (this technology is still used today). Thanks also to that invention, at the beginning of the twentieth century the American Michael J. Owens developed an automatic bottle blowing machine, which was able to produce 2,500 bottles per hour.

In the mid-twentieth century another type of bottle was introduced, it was going to have an important role in the history of packaging: it was the plastic bottle.

Although plastic was developed in the nineteenth century, the first bottles made of this new material spread commercially only in 1947. Plastic bottles had some advantages compared to the glass ones: they were lighter, had lower production and transport costs and above all they were more resistant. However, there was a problem: in the 1950s they still did not seem suitable for storing sparkling drinks (the main problem was the bursting of the bottle or the loss of carbonation). 

The PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles, patented in 1973 by Nathaniel Wyeth solved this problem. Coca Cola began to use them in the 2-liter, resealable format, and they became an icon of the Eighties. At the same time, however, this type of packaging clearly showed its limits from the point of view of environmental impact, becoming - especially in the last decade - one of the symbols of pollution.

To tackle the problem, technical solutions have been applied- a greater recyclability or using biodegradable materials - or other types of packaging are used: returning to glass or addressing towards the new flexible packaging.

Flexible packaging 

So let's get to "our" packaging: flexible packaging, flat bags and stand-up pouches created by combining extremely thin layers of different materials - from paper to aluminum to plastic (we told you about it here). The idea is to make the most of the potential of each material, while minimizing the quantities used, thanks to technology! 

If we want to find an ancestor of flexible packaging, we could mention the use of paper to wrap food in ancient Asia or the first paper bag factory in England in the mid-nineteenth century. The invention of cellophane or the first plastic bags of the seventies also have to do with the evolution of flexible packaging.

Immagine: bakingbusiness.com

Indeed, we can say that there is no date of birth for flexible packaging: this type of packaging is rather the sum of continuous innovations from the point of view of production techniques and materials that have made it possible to have packaging that uses less and less raw materials, less energy and that protects and preserves the products in the best possible way.

For this reason, also for sustainability reasons, flexible packaging is increasingly popular and is replacing other types of packaging, as we have told in "Famous brands that use flexible packaging".

Keeping in mind and challenging on a better recyclability and reuse and with an estimated growth of over 4% over 2022, could flexible packaging really become the packaging of the future?