History & Evolution of the Product

From preserving food to serving up a cool beverage, the metal can has played a pivotal role in packaging’s history. Now, nearly 200 years after its invention, the metal vitality shows no signs of abating.

The history of packaging could not be complete without paying deserved tribute to the metal can. In the 18th century, Napolean’s government offered 12,000 francs- in those days, a fortune-to anyone who could develop a way to preserve food for the military, on the battlefield or at sea. More of Napolean’s army had been felled by scurvy and malnutrition than by actual combat. A “Jacque”-of-all-trades Parisian, Nicolas Appert took home the price in 1809 after 15 years of research. Finally, after partially cooking food, sealing it in bottles with tight cork stoppers and immersing the bottles in boiling water, he arrived at the solution: if food is sealed in an airtight container and the air inside is expelled, and if the container is then heated sufficiently, the food inside will keep. A year later, in 1810, an Englishman, Peter Durand, received a patent from King George III for a tinplated iron can, and that largely supplanted the stoppered bottle.

Englishmen who immigrated to America brought their newfound knowledge with them. Thomas Kensett, the ather of the Can Making Industry in the U.S., set up in 1812 a small plant on the New York waterfront to can the first hermetically sealed oysters, meats, fruits and vegetables in America.

Although primarily a convenience package in this country, the metal can still serve a life sustaining role in other parts of the world, bringing nutritional foods to underdeveloped countries, milk and juice to famished infants in draught-stricken areas of the world, and much needed food supplies to sites of natural disasters.

Today, about 410 billion cans are produced in the world each year, with about 221 billion sold to soft drink companies and major brewers. Once laboriously produced by hand, the can is now made on highly automated equipment at the rate of upto 2,500 cans per minute. Consolidation in the can making industry has centered production within a handful of companies, and only a few major food companies still produce their own cans.

The hand-made can of the early 19th century bore little resemblance to today’s metal containers. Can bodies were cut and shaped, with the side seam and ends soldered together. Food was inserted through a hole in the top, with a tin disk soldered over the hole after air evacuation during filling. An experienced workman could manufacture six cans per hour.

By the mid 1800s, side seaming of cans had become mechanical. The canning industry, especially in the U.S., burgeoned. By the turn of this century, there were 1800 canneries in operation.

The next major change in the metal can arrived after Sir Henry Bessemer discovered a process for converting cast iron into steel. At about this time, too, a sedmiautomatic turret-style can bodymaker was able to push production rates up to 2500 per hour-quite a dramatic change from the manual can making of a century earlier.

Cans were not for food alone. A New York dentist, I.W.Lyon, developed the first powdered tooth cleanser, packaged in a dispensing can with a cylindrical dome and conical top. A myriad other non-food products, including personal grooming aids and cleansers, followed in oval, oblong, square and rectangular cans.

In the early 1960s, drink cans-mostly for beer-were made of tinplate. But in 1964, the first aluminium can was introduced, and the soft drink and beer markets gradually warmed to the idea of cans rather than bottles. First five years later, the first dawn and ironed steel can was introduced as an alternative to aluminium beverage cans.

Today, more than half of all food cans use the same two-piece construction as beverage cans, many of them now incorporating easy-open lids for on-the-go convenience.

Those of us from the Baby Boomer generation probably remember when fallout shelters were stocked with shelves and shelves of canned foods. At the twilight of this millennium, it is perhaps fitting the small camp of alarmists who fear the world will stop functioning at 12:01 a.m. January 1 are stocking their pantry shelves with of-course- canned foods. Aside from convenience, no other form of packaging provides the shelf life of canning.