The Basics of Packaging #1

What is Packaging? Was Packaging always like this? How has food packaging developed? History of Packaging?

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Packaging refers to the container or wrapper that holds a product or group of products. It is the science, art, and technology of enclosing or protecting products for distribution, storage, sale, and use. It can also be described as a coordinated system of preparing goods for transport, warehousing, logistics, sale, and end-use. Packaging contains, protects, preserves, transports, informs, and sells.

Packaging is heavily integrated into our daily lives. The primary use for packaging is the protection of the goods inside. Packaging also provides us with a recognizable logo or packaging.

Packaging Sector is an Important Global Industry,it represents about 2% of the Gross National Product (GNP) of the developed countries.

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Development of Food Packaging

Food Packaging has developed strongly in recent years:

• Designing and manufacturing packaging materials has become a multi-step process

• It involves careful and numerous considerations to successfully engineer the final package with all the required properties, like

Product Safety

Shelf-life extension

Cost-efficiency

Environmental issues

Consumer convenience

• Now we have an innovative, modified, and controlled atmosphere for packaging

• Active and intelligent packaging systems are being developed, tested, and optimized in laboratories around the world

Packaging of a product affects every aspect of its design and performance, Flavor, Integrity, shelf life, minimizing damage resulting from microbial attack, safety cost, and brand image.

It is not only focused on developing economic and effective packages for protecting the food products, but also on the aesthetic value of the packages.

The packaging industry is about 345 million euros worldwide (Europe represents 1/3).

50% of this market is packaging for food

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History of Packaging

The first packages used the natural materials available at the time:

• Baskets of reeds

• Wineskins (Bota bags)

• Wooden boxes

• Pottery vases

• Ceramic amphorae

• Wooden barrels

• Woven bags

The development of packaging is inextricably linked to food. For much of early human history (think Stone Age), food was eaten immediately and on the spot. But the need to transport food and water got people thinking about containers.

The History of Packaging begins with packaging materials but ultimately is inseparable from attempts to make packaging attractive. We even see new substrates and packaging shapes driving design. Yet before the design could emerge in support of branding, packaging went through a series of material transformations, reflective of larger technological shifts.

Packaging began in Egypt approximately 3,500 years ago, and as it developed, it was influenced by Napoleon’s wars, a Brooklyn printer’s mistake, two brothers named Kellogg, and a little help from Inuit tribal knowledge in the arctic.

Plastic is our newest packaging material. Various plastic substances were discovered in the 1800s, but they weren’t ready yet to serve as packaging. It wasn’t until the invention of cellophane in 1908 that the foundations of plastic packaging were laid.

In 1946 an underarm deodorant in a spray bottle named “Stopette” debuted. It was one of the first commercial plastic bottles. Decades later, PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) plastic bottles appeared in 1977, and they quickly became the standard container for plastic bottles (strong, non-toxic, and 100% recyclable)

Packaging and recycling are now forever linked, but the union only began in the 1970s with changing social values. Today, there is another social change: consumers want product transparency, and packaging has to communicate nutrition info and a food’s origin.