Why was there milk in triangular bags?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How did this original milk package come about? How did you come up with such a thing at all?

In the late 1930s, the famous popular science journal "La Science et la Vie" exploded with an April Fool's article about the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids and the unusual properties of regular tetrahedrons. Quite in the spirit of that time, I must say. Indeed, it was in those years that the French chemist and mystic Jacques Bergier told on the pages of specialized publications that the bull's blood placed in a reduced cardboard copy of the tomb of Cheops did not coagulate, and the meat remained fresh for an unusually long time. And at about the same time, a certain M. A. Bovi argued that in exactly the same tetrahedra, oriented to the cardinal points, the corpses of small animals do not decompose, but are mummified.

The authors of the article in "La Science et la Vie" had a lot of frolic over people's belief in such quackery. They reported, in particular, that sleeping in a regular tetrahedron rejuvenates, the razor blades inside it are self-sharpening, and the milk does not turn sour. They laughed and forgot.

But this number a few years later caught the eye of the Swedish inventor Erik Wallenberg, an employee of the Åkerlund Rausing laboratory, who was inspired by the idea of reducing the losses of milk traders. In 1944, a prototype of a tetrahedron-shaped cardboard package was first born. And six years later, AB Tetra Pak was born, whose branded packaging for a long time became the Tetra Classic® cardboard pyramid.

A huge advantage of such bags was the minimum of waste during production and its almost complete automation. The base - soft cardboard connected to polyethylene - was rolled up into a cylinder, the junction of the opposite ends was thermally welded, then milk, kefir or cream was poured inside, after which the machine made two more thermal seams and cut off the finished package, which safely fell into a special container. No complications and almost no losses.

True, everything further on the way to the buyer was not so technologically advanced. One of the significant disadvantages of tetrahedral bags was the absolute impossibility of packing them tightly into rectangular boxes. Therefore, special hexagonal containers were used to store the dairy products packaged in pyramids. But this led to an unreasonable increase in transport and storage costs - it was necessary to transport and store air to a large extent.

And then it turned out that milk in the pyramids turns sour in almost the same way as in any other package. That is, there was no rational reason to remain committed to this packaging, despite all its simplicity in production.

As a result, Sweden began to abandon the Tetra Classic® milk tetrahedra already in 1959.

The company seemed to have no choice but to exit the market. But its leader, Ruben Rausing, was able to sell his technology to the Soviet Union. A longstanding article from La Science et la Vie is said to have played a role in persuading Soviet ministers. However, they may have been led to the seeming cheapness of production.

And the second, very long, life of triangular milk bags began. They were used in the USSR for almost 30 years, until the mid-1980s.

They write that their quality was quite average. The pyramids were often torn and leaked. Although they say the bottles were not breaking less. Trade used to write off losses as cost price. Such packages were also inconvenient in carrying and storage. In general, economically efficient production ended up being quite burdensome consumption. Of course, on the scale of a huge country, all this was a trifle.

But there was an interest in buying unusual bags for residents of distant regions:-)