Earlier this year, a photograph of single, ready-peeled oranges sold in little plastic tubs at a Whole Foods supermarket in California sparked an online furore. "If only nature would find a way to cover these oranges so we didn't need to waste so much plastic on them," commented London tweeter Nathalie Gordon.
Why have we become so reliant on packaging, and how did we develop our blind spot to unnecessary waste around it? In the year 1035, a Persian traveller was visiting markets in Cairo and saw that vegetables, spices and hardware were sold to customers wrapped in paper. According to The Origins of Paper Based Packaging by Diana Twede (2005), this traveller's account is the earliest recorded use of paper packaging.
Tinning was a major innovation in food packaging in the 1700s, and led the way for the invention of canning in the 1800s. The world’s first commercial canning factory was on Southwark Park Road, London, and they produced the first canned goods for the royal navy in 1813. After canning came corrugated and pre-cut paperboard boxes. In New York in 1907, Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland developed Bakelite, an early plastic. Around the same time, Swiss chemist Jacques E Brandenberger had the idea for cellophane, which he perfected over the first decade of the 1900s.
Apart from increasing the shelf life of food, packaging is an opportunity to create brand identity. The classic Coca-Cola bottle acts as both packaging and an identifier. In the 1950s, Proctor & Gamble wanted to combat crisp-lovers’ complaints that crisp packets were full of broken, greasy and stale crisps, and that the air in the bags was a wasteful misrepresentation of how many crisps were actually in the bag. All fair points.
From 1956 to 1958, American chemist and food storage technician Fredric Baur was assigned by P&G to create the perfect potato chip. Baur designed the Pringles’ saddle shape as well as the iconic tube to go with them. Baur nailed the shape and its packaging, but he couldn’t get the taste right. In the mid-1960s, another P&G researcher, Alexander Liepa, picked up where Baur left off and got the taste of Pringles right, and Pringles were launched in the US in 1967. Baur was so proud of his design that he requested that some of his ashes be buried in a Pringles tube. His children observed his wishes when he died in 2008.
Clear glass bottles
Henry Heinz started out selling freshly grated horseradish in 1869. He innovatively sold his goods in clear glass bottles, so that his customers could see the product. Heinz Tomato Ketchup was launched in 1876 but it wasn't until 1890 that the instantly recognisable Heinz glass bottle was introduced.
This glass bottle is a brilliant example of a lasting, classic design that people feel attached to, even though it doesn’t actually work that well. When you hold a glass bottle of ketchup over your food and tap it on its bottom, it’s almost impossible to predict how much ketchup will come out. Will your chips end up drowned in the stuff? It’s a risk we all take every time we use a glass ketchup bottle. Its plastic counterpart, introduced in 1983, is not only cheaper but it’s much easier to use.
There's a Ted Talk entitled "Why is ketchup so hard to pour?" by George Zaidan. It's worth a watch if you want to learn more about the challenges of getting ketchup, a classic non-Newtonian liquid, out of a glass bottle.
But let's go back to that peeled orange in the plastic box. Isn't it time we move away from overpackaging? Perhaps the model of ethical grocery stores – where you bring your own packaging and food is sold by weight, such as Unpackaged in London, could provide food for thought?
Edible packaging
When people talk about the future of food, edible packaging is often part of the conversation. Loliware are edible glasses made of seaweed, organic sweeteners and natural flavours. The industrial designers behind these so-called biodegr(edible) cups are Chelsea Briganti and Leigh Ann Tucker. Their mission is to transform tableware and food packaging, and to address the fact that in the US alone, an estimated 25 billion plastic cups are thrown away every year. WikiFoods is another food technology company who have engineered an edible skin that can coat a variety of food and beverages, creating little pearls of sustenance.
Tomorrow Machine, a Swedish product design duo, combine a passion for sustainability with truly beautiful aesthetics. The designers Hanna Billqvist and Anna Glansén have captured a number of their sustainable packaging projects, including smoothies encased in an edible agar seaweed gel and basmati rice packaged in biodegradable beeswax paper. For more, check out their website here.
