On August 25, 2010, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of canned foods when Peter Durand patented his tinplate containers as a means preserving animal and vegetable foods.
To read more about the anniversary and a little history, click HERE.
At this time, I’d like to salute some of my all-time favorite canned foods: Heinz Baked Beans; Hormel Food‘s Spam; Hereford Corned Beef; Mott’s Clamato; Clover Leaf Tuna; Brunswick Sardines; Chef Boyardee (Mini Bites!!); Campbell’s Soup; and Nestlé‘s Dr. Ballard’s dog food (although I still have scars from the slashes earned while opening up food for my cocker spaniels and rottweilers, I miss that brand – and I had two rottweilers live to be nearly 18). I miss the dogs as well.
Excluding the dog food, I still get a childhood thrill whenever I crack open a can of any of the above-mentioned products. As for the rest of you brand owners not mentioned – the odds are high that I am a purchaser of your goods… I just wanted a short list of some of the different shapes and sizes of cans from my past. There’s a whole lotta soda pop, beer, fruit cups, veggies and darn near every product ever available either here or in Japan that I have sampled as well. I love Pocari Sweat.
What’s the point of all this? It’s really just to offer a great big congratulations to the canning industry as a whole – a few scars aside, I can’t even fathom what life would be like without such useful packaging.
But, here’s something to wonder about amongst yourselves. Seeing as how canned goods were widely used just a few years after the can’s patent and that the first commercial can opener was patented by Robert Yates in 1855 – how the heck were they opening cans before that?
Somewhere with a hammer,
Andrew Joseph
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