History of Aseptic Packaging

History of Aseptic Packaging
Aseptic packaging is an area of food packaging in which a food product and a package are commercially sterilized separately and combined in a commercially sterile environment.

The aseptic processing and packaging process has seen tremendous growth and remarkable advances since its inception in the 1940s.

The first invention was likely a device for carrying food. Hunters and gatherers needed to lighten the burden of bringing food back to a central camp.

These early camps were undoubtedly located near water, because the means of transporting liquid was still long way off.

As population grew and were forced to move father away from a secure source of water, the need to carry liquids became urgent. Skins and shells, followed by pottery and ceramics and then glass, metals and plastics, became the materials needed for storing, preserving and transporting liquids.

The used of glass containers for food dates back to 1200 BC. Glass proved to be particularly useful type of food packaging, because it did not react with food and was a highly effective barrier against oxygen, a common cause of food spoilage or deterioration.

Packaging food in paper began around 200 BC , when the Chinese used a type of paper made from tree bark to package foods.

Paper products evolved slowly until the late nineteenth century, when advances made during the industrial revolution helped make the production of paper bags and other products possible.

Canning truly revolutionized food packaging. There is evidence that containers made of tin-plated iron was used as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but the use of these containers was not widespread, because they were considered poisonous to food.

In 1989 the Institute of Food Technologist an organization of food scientists devoted to improving the production and distribution of food, selected aseptic packaging as “the most significant food science innovation in the past fifty years”.

Ruben Rausing in Sweden reportedly conceived the concept for holding milk in a container made form a paperboard composite.

The original package had a tetrahedral shape and was called a Tetra Pak.

This new technology was married to aseptic technology, and a new industry was born. The box-shaped package that is so widely available is a laminate of six layers of three materials: paperboard 70% polyethylene 24%, and aluminum 6 %.

Innovations in plastic technology and plasma discharge silica coating technology offer the promise that more foods will be packaged in efficient septic packages during the twenty first century.
History of Aseptic Packaging