Evolution in Packaging Is at New Stage : Cellophane Was 1st Big Step, Now Plastic Beverage Cans Arrive

Until recently, I hadn’t stopped to figure out what ever happened to the butcher behind the meat counter in the old A&P; grocery store in my New Jersey home town. Now I realize cellophane helped do him in.

The butcher, standing on the sawdust covered floor beneath the ceiling fan and flypaper, is a lasting memory of that store. (The other is the thick aroma of fresh-ground coffee.) He cut, sawed and trimmed each day’s fresh meat for the line of customers in front of his counter and was a center of the store’s cracker barrel conversations.

Thanks to cellophane, the chops, chicken and hamburger that the butcher once cut to order could be fixed in advance, wrapped and kept fresh for days in display cases. This mass marketing was a key feature of the much larger, more efficient supermarkets that put grocery stores out of business 30 years ago, for better or worse.

Cellophane comes to mind because Du Pont, which introduced the original cellophane products to the United States in 1924, has decided to abandon the product and will sell its cellophane plant in Kansas to its only U.S. competitor, Flexel Inc.

No Longer Revolutionary

The product that once helped alter a basic slice of American life is no longer revolutionary. Cellophane is a commodity now, like roofing nails and shoe laces, and commodities aren’t Du Pont’s bag. Its search is for state-of-the-art products whose novelty, quality or uniqueness justify premium prices (It profits as well from having customers perceive it as a state-of-the-art producer, notes the marketing maven Theodore Levitt.).

Cellophane was the creation of a Swiss textile chemist named Jacques Edwin Brandenberger, who wanted to perfect a hard coating for tablecloths that would make them spill-proof, according to Du Pont’s history of the product.

The cloth Brandenberger produced was too stiff and brittle, but he kept fiddling and, in time, came up with a thin film he called cellophane. The name blended cellulose, for the wood pulp that was the main raw material, and the Greek word for transparent.

The process of innovation begins with tinkerers. Brandenberger was one. So is Nathaniel C. Wyeth, who consults for Du Pont after retiring 10 years ago as a senior engineering fellow.

Artist Relatives

Wyeth describes himself as practically the only member of his family to hold down a regular job. Most of the rest are or were artists--his father N. C. Wyeth, his brother Andrew, his nephew Jamie, two of his sisters, one of his sons, and more.

Within the plastics industry, he has won fame of his own as the principal inventor of the plastic soda bottle. Since the introduction of the two-liter plastic soft drink bottle in 1978, production of these bottles has grown exponentially.

An Atlanta plant will begin making transparent plastic soda cans this year and many companies are trying to adapt the technology to produce containers for wine, liquor, food and beer. Consumers now buy 6 billion of the plastic bottles a year, and that total could jump to 25 billion annually by 1995 if some substantial engineering, product-quality and recycling issues are solved, some analysts estimate.

The idea for this new industry grew in fits and starts over two decades, first in Wyeth’s imagination, then as a back-burner research project at Du Pont to which he kept returning when spare time and money existed.

His notion was that, if engineers could make molecules line up in proper order to make nylon and other synthetic fabrics, they could perform the same trick to make plastic soda bottles. The proper molecular array was crucial because the plastic had to be strong enough to contain carbonated beverages without stretching, and dense enough to keep carbon dioxide from leaking before the bottles left store shelves.

After a frustrating trial of different materials in the 1970s, with 10,000 failures, the right plastic compound was found.

What kept him going for two decades was the goal of creating a new kind of container--a utilitarian product that would solve major problems for the food and beverage industry, using materials and technologies that Du Pont had mastered. “I’d been sold by knowledgeable people in the container market that this would be a wonderful replacement for glass bottles,” he says.

Black-Sheep Engineer

While the rest of his family was dabbling in the world of colors, Wyeth became the black-sheep engineer. But his father constantly reassured him that engineers could be just as artistic as painters, and Wyeth says he was a believer. Now he offers other engineers three lessons about creativity, learned from his struggles with the plastic bottle.

“First, one of the most fundamental elements of the creativity process is recognizing the true nature of the problem. . . . Often, we waste energy, to say nothing of time and money, by trying to solve the wrong problems,” he told an American Chemical Society meeting this spring.

Second is his belief that the best solutions often are those that challenge conventional thinking. “Nylon, the silicon chip, the transistor, the helicopter and polio vaccine--all in their fashion--were discoveries which challenged conventional wisdom, but seem to us today to be as obvious as a natural phenomenon like gravity.”

Finally, there is the creative role of the subconscious, which solves problems during sleep and presents the answers during a morning shower or after a midday snooze. “I once had a brilliant engineer working with me who insisted his best ideas came to him while he was napping,” said Wyeth. “Certainly, there are examples of this from the lives of Descartes, Leibnitz, Milton and Rossini, who claimed that their best thinking took place under a blanket. I mention this not because I am suggesting that every engineering lab should be equipped with beds, but rather that we ask ourselves whether we offer our colleagues or employees an environment that nurtures creativity.”