From glass to Tetra Pak: the Swede who revolutionized packaging

It's the 1920s, in Barcelona. You've left home to buy milk: you enter the store, wait behind the counter, ask for six liters, and the clerk pours it for you in glass bottles. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the ritual has already changed. In the United States, customers no longer ask for anything: they simply take it. The products are on the shelves, packaged, ready to go. In cities like New York, a completely new way of understanding food sales is taking root. Packaging, once secondary, has become the center of everything. It's key to ensuring hygiene, facilitating transport, and extending the shelf life of products.

One of the customers who frequently visits these innovative supermarkets is a young Swede studying economics in the United States. His name is Ruben Rausing. He doesn't know it yet, but he will end up being the founder of Tetra Pak and the man who will lay the foundations for what we know today as the Tetra Pak carton.

Today, Tetra Pak is a multinational company present in more than 160 countries, with annual sales exceeding €12.8 billion and a production of nearly 178 billion packages each year. With more than 50 production plants worldwide, the company has become a key player in the global food industry, alongside other major players in the sector such as SIG Combibloc and Elopak, also specializing in carton packaging for beverages. But who was Rausing, and how did he build this empire?

Rausing's Roots

Ruben Rausing was born in 1895 in a small fishing village in southern Sweden, into a humble family. With financial help from an aunt, he studied economics in Stockholm and, shortly after, won a scholarship to further his studies at Columbia University in New York. It was there that he came into contact with the first self-service supermarkets and realized that the future of food lay in packaging. When he returned to Sweden, he began working in the printing and packaging sector, where he gained experience in a field that was still secondary within the food industry at the time. But Rausing saw great potential. Therefore, in 1929, he took the decisive step: together with the industrialist Erik Åkerlund, he founded a cardboard packaging company in Malmö. Initially, they focused on packaging dry goods, but their goal was much more ambitious: to find an efficient, hygienic, and inexpensive way to package liquids, especially milk.

The challenge was significant. In Europe at the time, milk was distributed in bulk or in heavy, impractical glass bottles. Rausing wanted to completely overhaul this model, but the technology and the industry weren't yet ready. The idea for it took time. In 1944, a company engineer, Erik Wallenberg, proposed a tetrahedron-shaped container made from a folded and sealed paper tube. Rausing found it simple, strong, and more efficient. But the real key wasn't just the shape, but the process: achieving continuous and reliable filling and sealing of the containers. Once they solved this, the idea ceased to be an experiment and became a viable industrial solution.

From Idea to Global Revolution

However, success was not immediate: for years, the system accumulated technical problems and economic difficulties. The definitive breakthrough came in the 1960s. After challenging years, Tetra Pak launched the Tetra Brik, whose aseptic technology allowed milk to be preserved for months without refrigeration. This opened the door to transporting food over long distances and entering new markets, especially in developing countries. From then on, the company began a rapid international expansion that made it a key player in the industry.

Over time, Tetra Pak not only grew but also transformed. In 1991, it acquired the Swedish company Alfa Laval, specializing in food processing, in a key transaction that allowed it to offer comprehensive solutions: from product treatment to packaging. Integrated into the Tetra Laval group and still controlled by the Rausing family, the company has maintained its independence and continued to expand worldwide.