Who is juice box

Which is understandable. Issues of cleanliness have become sources of innovation in the past, and a great example of this came from the company that gave us the juice box.

This story starts with a Swedish business school graduate studying in the U. A self-serve grocery store, like this Piggly Wiggly, proved deeply inspiring to the packaging industry. 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. As noted in a trade publication of the era , Piggly Wiggly was incredibly profitable right off the bat:.

The first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tenn. The Piggly Wiggly organization retained the clerks formerly used in the other store and had the same management, but put into effect its self-service system and its own equipment.

Under the old system the overhead had been 15 per cent; the Piggly Wiggly overhead was three per cent. But while the concept quickly gained popularity with consumers in the U. 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. And this realization, by the time he died in the early s, made him and his family incredibly rich.

When his son died in , he was the second richest man in Sweden. The year that an American inventor, G. Maxwell, had invented the first paper milk container , which were shaped roughly like a standard drinking glass and used a clamp-down paper lid. A follow-up invention, the Pure-oak, was patented by John Van Wormer in and is still in use today. The unusually shaped Tetra-Pak, dating to the s was built in an effort to combine sanitation with minimal waste.

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. This is where the cleanliness part comes back in.

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. This was not a perfect system, and often led the milk to spoil. Refrigeration was not really common even in developed countries until the s or even the s. Meanwhile, the dairy industry in the U. Unfortunately for them, paperboard had simply proven too efficient a delivery mechanism to ignore.

Robertson wrote for Food Technology magazine in 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. 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.

The credit for the invention is a bit complicated, as Beach Packaging Design notes , with Rausing getting his name on the patent despite not really doing much of the work. The original Tetra-Pak: Too weird for Americans. 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.

Nonetheless, a pair of follow-up innovations to the original Tetra-Pak get us closer to the juice box, which really took off in the U. In , 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 pf preservatives.

This was an important innovation whose benefits linger today. The Tetra Brik, or the proto-juice-box. 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.

These packets, named for the Italian island of Capri, took more than a decade to enter the U. By that time, there was a context for these packages, thanks to the sudden success of the juice box. The way that many Americans were introduced to the juice box. But perhaps there was another way they could get in on the aseptic packaging craze? It turned out that the secret selling point was juice. Early advertising for the boxes explained that the boxes , complete with tiny straw, could stay in the cupboard for as long as six months without going bad.

Seven-year-olds finally found their perfect vessel for drinking juice. Its official name was the ml Tetra Brik Aseptic, though Americans knew it as the juice box. And not long after, brands such as Hi-C were hitting consumers with television ads that effectively turned the juice box into the de facto container of growing up.

The privately held Brik Pak, the U. Analysts anticipated that things would get even bigger after products like milk moved to shelf-stable packaging. By the late s, juice boxes were everywhere, representing one-fifth of the juice market according to one estimate.

The Tetra Brik had finally found its home in the American market. There was just one problem—and a pretty big one, shared with Capri Sun and the like: the packaging model was seen as environmentally risky.

A New York Times article laid out the concerns of environmentalists around the moves by manufacturers to combine packaging. For its part, Tetra-Pak took the concerns seriously, noting that the packaging was the way it was for safety reasons in the piece.

Still, the issues with recyclability have yet to kill the juice box, which did in America what milk did for aseptic packaging basically everywhere else. All of that is not to say that sustainability is not a concern of Tetra Pak. Click here to learn more about the innovative continuous filling process. His unique tetrahedron-shaped paperboard milk cartons were a huge hit in Europe, where they first started appearing on shelves.

Rausing then set his sights on developing a new variation of his carton, one that could be shipped and stored more easily while still keeping the contents safe.

In the Tetra Brik package debuted in Dr. Its advantages were obvious: not only could it be completely filled to capacity, it was also a real space saver.

The Tetra Brik carton changed the industry forever. With their perfectly rectangular build, Tetra Brik cartons could be easily and efficiently bundled and packaged together and shipped in huge quantities. This was a real game-changer. After all, imagine stacking hundreds of 2-liter bottles on top of one another: their cylindrical shapes leave awkward gaps in between each unit.

The Tetra Brik package proved to be the perfect solution to that problem. But Dr. The Tetra Brik carton was only beginning to revolutionize the dairy industry. Just six years after the introduction of the Tetra Brik package, Dr. Rausing and his company Tetra Pak named after his first tetrahedron carton incorporated aseptic packaging processes—like flash-heating the contents and sterile filling methods—into the construction of the new Tetra Brik Aseptic carton.

With these new aseptic cartons, the entire system was now more sanitary, preserving the quality of their products longer—up to six months without spoiling , with no refrigeration or preservatives required. This safe, cutting-edge technology let Tetra Pak refine their existing inventions and create new products. Then, in , the Tetra Brik Aseptic ml carton was launched in Europe , and the first juice box was born.

In just 50 years, the juice box has already come a long way. Tetra Pak debuts the Tetra Brik carton, solving the problems of inefficient filling and large-scale shipping. Made entirely from resources that can be replenished, it set a new standard for sustainable packaging and renewable living practices.

More recently, Tetra Pak has taken Dr. The Tetra Brik Aseptic package is the best selling beverage carton, ever. Without all that, the juice box we grew up with would never have existed. So next time you see one on the shelf, remember that it represents the latest in a long line of legendary innovations. Then stick in that straw, take a long sip, and enjoy.

Recyclable and made with renewable materials, every single carton is part of our groundwork for a shared, healthier future. Learn more. So what happens when you get rid of bottles and turn to boxes? From dehydration to salting, smoking, and now aseptic packaging, the human quest to preserve food is still evolving today. Researchers have found that spinach is not only good for your heart, it could also one day be your heart.

How a humble paper carton was able to replace glass milk bottles for good. Chefs, entrepreneurs, and others are helping us eat our way out of a food waste crisis. Spread the word. So how does it work? By using sustainably sourced, renewable materials, Tetra Pak cartons are protecting our foods, preserving our natural resources, and promoting environmentally conscious practices.

To learn more about cartons, click here. Amount of juice produced annually: Over 50 billion liters. Brought to you by:. Explore His unique tetrahedron-shaped paperboard milk cartons were a huge hit in Europe, where they first started appearing on shelves.

In , the world got its first juice box.