Packaging That Changed Shopping

Packaging: Once goods were scooped from barrels and sacks by a shopkeeper; sealed cans, cartons, bottles and bags turned products into brands, made self-service shopping possible and reshaped how people store and eat food.

Nicolas Appert: The French confectioner won a government prize around 1810 for preserving food in sealed, boiled glass jars, a method sought by Napoleon's army decades before anyone understood why it worked.

Peter Durand: He patented the idea of preserving food in tin cans in 1810, but a dedicated can opener was not patented until the late 1850s, so early cans were opened with chisels, bayonets and hammers.

Margaret Knight: She invented a machine to make flat-bottomed paper bags and won a patent battle against a man who stole her design and claimed a woman could not have invented it.

Robert Gair: A Brooklyn printer's accidental cut in 1879 led him to invent the pre-cut, mass-produced folding carton, the ancestor of every cereal and cracker box.

Uneeda Biscuit: Launched by Nabisco in 1898, it came in a sealed, moisture-proof package instead of the open cracker barrel, and it became one of the first nationally advertised packaged foods.

Piggly Wiggly: Clarence Saunders opened the first self-service grocery store in Memphis in 1916, letting shoppers pick items off shelves themselves, which meant packages suddenly had to sell themselves.

Cracker Jack: In 1912 the snack began putting a prize in every box, turning the package itself into part of the product and inventing a marketing trick later adopted by cereals.

Heinz Ketchup Bottle: Henry Heinz sold ketchup in clear glass at a time when competitors hid cheap fillers in opaque bottles, using the packaging itself to advertise purity.

Coca-Cola Contour Bottle: The 1915 design brief asked for a bottle recognizable by touch in the dark or even when broken on the ground, and it became one of the world's most famous shapes.

Thomas Sullivan: The New York tea merchant sent samples in small silk bags around 1908; customers started brewing them without opening them, and the tea bag was born by accident.

Joseph Coyle: In 1911 this Canadian newspaper editor invented the egg carton to settle a dispute between a farmer and a hotel owner over eggs broken in delivery.

Tetra Pak: Ruben Rausing's company launched a tetrahedron-shaped paper milk carton in 1952, and its later aseptic packaging let milk and juice sit unrefrigerated on shelves for months.

Swanson TV Dinner: Launched in 1953 in an aluminum tray, it turned a frozen meal into an evening in front of the TV; the famous origin story about 260 tons of leftover Thanksgiving turkey is widely told but disputed.

Bubble Wrap: Invented in 1957 by Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes as textured wallpaper, it flopped until it was used to protect IBM computers in shipping.

Coors: In 1959 the brewery introduced the first all-aluminum beverage can, lighter and easier to recycle than steel, and it helped transform how drinks were sold.

Ermal Fraze: After a picnic with no can opener, this Ohio inventor developed the pull-tab can top, first used on Iron City beer in the early 1960s; the tabs were so often littered that the stay-on tab replaced them.

Ziploc: Introduced by Dow Chemical in 1968, the resealable bag with an interlocking zipper made storing leftovers easier and became a household staple.

Sten Gustaf Thulin: The Swedish engineer designed the plastic shopping bag in 1959, reportedly intending it to be reused many times as an alternative to paper bags made from trees.

Nathaniel Wyeth: The brother of painter Andrew Wyeth, this DuPont engineer patented the PET plastic bottle in 1973, making light, shatterproof soda bottles possible.

Fredric Baur: He designed the tall Pringles can to hold stacked, uniform chips, and was so proud of it that some of his ashes were buried in one after he died in 2008.

Norman Joseph Woodland: He came up with the barcode while sitting on a Miami beach, drawing Morse code dots and dashes in the sand and stretching them into lines.

Universal Product Code: The first product ever scanned at a checkout was a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum, at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974.

Chicago Tylenol Murders: After cyanide-laced capsules were placed on store shelves in 1982, drugmakers rushed out tamper-evident seals and new federal rules followed, the reason nearly every medicine bottle now has a foil seal.

Wrap Rage: The term describes the frustration and injuries caused by hard-to-open plastic clamshell packaging, a problem that pushed Amazon to launch its 'Frustration-Free Packaging' program in 2008.