Packaging, what a mistery! If we consider it carefully, the act itself of packaging something has a whole lot of extremely different meanings, when those meanings aren't , even, radically opposed. We package an object to protect it from the environment, of course: but that most certainly isn't the whole of the matter. We package to hide the details of an object, and at the same time to emphasize how desirable that same product is; we package to surprise the person who will be receiving our gift, and at the same time, again, to make our product recognizable as a part of a specific , coherent line; we want our product to be central in the customer's mind and eye, but at the same time, we want an intriguing, well noticeable packaging... well, in short, every time we are packaging something we have to deal with dozens of thoughts and possibilities, both practical and theoretical, which we often don't even consciously notice or process. And this was exactly the topic of a recent chat we had with Promopak, a Company which has at its disposal a priceless experience amounting to more than forty years in the daily business of packaging products of every kind and size.



And actually, that of packaging food and other objects is an action with an extremely remote origin, which started out with a merely practical, and very obvious, purpose, and took long to gain all the addirional connotations which we were mentioning just a few lines above.

All indications from archaeological findings, actually, lead us to think that already well before recorded history, in the rare, fortunate instances when hunted prey was so abundant to exceed the immediate needs of a tribe, teh need existed to preserve and protect the leftovers. Of course, lacking completely in any kind of reliability from a hygienical point of view, such rudimentary packages were next to useless, and this problem lead - an issue which we can find today as well, in many among the developing Countries - to a waste of resources bordering on a full fifty percent. And it was, in fact, only with the invention of glass, in Egypt, no less than six thousand years ago, that a reliable method for preserving and containing agricultural products was born. And if the Middle Ages saw the wooden barrel reach an all-encompassing presence as a container, as its robustness was seen as the ideal solution not just against the threats of humidity adn temperature, but also to the far more material menaces of brigands and pirates present on the roads and the seas of the time, it is the period which we call the Industrial Revolution that shows the true, great boom of packaging. 1810 is the year of birth of the can, which was originally not made of tin, but of glass; it was tested for the first time on the battlefields of Crimea and the American Civil War, where it was first used for the conservation of food and rations for the troops. And at the end of that same century, just shortly before 1900, Robert Gair gave birth to a form of packaging which later became practically omnipresent, as it is today, namely the pre-cut cardboard box, which is today the packaging of choice for dozens of different products.

But undoubtedly, it is 1900 that sees the birth of the product which is to become the one and true prince of packaging: and we mean Plastic. Born by mistake in 1933 with polyethylene, it was plastic that allowed the creation and development of all the special packagings which, today, allow us to preserve frozen foods, present products in neat transparent blisters, and generally have at our disposal packagings which are flexible in both their form and their function.

Most definitely a long, long and successful career, if we consider the humble beginnings of packaging, as no more than a few leaves wrapped around the hunted preys of our far ancestors...