Page 40 - Packaging News May-June 2021

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FOOD PACKAGING | TETRA PAK 60 YEARS www.packagingnews.com.au | May-June 2021
Shaping the future of the F&B industry
As packaging and processing pioneer Tetra Pak marks 60 years of F&B innovation in Australia, Lindy Hughson sits down with Andrew Pooch, MD Tetra Pak Oceania, to talk about the heritage of the brand, milestones on the journey so far, and the view down the road ahead.
the business, in the early 1960s it was the iconic Sunny Boy ice-lolly package that made Tetra Pak a household name. This pack marked Tetra Pak’s first foray into non-dairy products, a success the company would come to repeat many times over with the aseptic packaging for fruit juice, coconut water, water, and plant-based ‘milk’ products.
In the late 1960s, the pasteurised milk market – previously dominated by glass packaging – opened its doors to the gable-top carton, and by the 1970s, 20 per cent of Australia’s pas- teurised milk was in cartons. Fast forward to the 1980s, the glass bottle share had dropped to two per cent, but the carton’s dominance was short-lived in fresh milk with the emergence of HDPE bottles, which remain prevalent today.
Meanwhile, by the 1970s, aseptic processing and packaging technol- ogy for UHT milk had been commer- cialised, and this boosted growth for Tetra Pak’s carton lines. Around the same time, the company opened its own packaging material plant for both pasteurised and aseptic mate- rial in Fairfield, Sydney. (This has since closed, with the company’s expansion globally seeing centres of excellence for material supply and production emerging in other mar- kets, like Singapore and Taiwan.)
With a local material source, the company ramped up production and
NY story on Tetra Pak must start with the classic tale of how the compa- ny’s founder, the late Ruben Rausing, while attending univer- sity in the US before World War II, witnessed the emergence of self- service retail and observed the gap in self-service packaging. On return to Europe, as Tetra Pak Oceania MD Andrew Pooch relates, he realised the trend would soon find its way across the Atlantic, and he set about
filling that market opportunity.
“So unlike most entrepreneurs who have a fantastic idea, and then have to create a market for the prod- uct, he saw the market, and created the product for it,” Pooch says, “and it’s this form of innovative think- ing that has been a hallmark of
Tetra Pak since its inception.”
The global company was founded in 1951, and within six years it had
established a presence in Australia. By 1959, Tetra Pak had packaging instal- lations in Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth – the latter at Brownes Dairy Company, which remains a customer today. In fact, in 2019 Brownes made headlines when it became the first dairy in Australia to move to a fully renewable and recyclable milk carton from Tetra Pak, the Tetra Rex Plant- Based Carton – a packaging world first with carton and closure made entirely from renewable materials.
Back to the timeline, while the com- pany was progressing the dairy side of
Ruben Rausing and colleagues with the first Tetra Pak model to demonstrate the idea of a filling concept, built in 1946.
So suddenly, we had a company that could think about ‘cow to consumer’ and we still do today.”