Milk packaging in the USSR. Remembering the USSR

How did such an original milk package come about? How did you even come up with this?

In the late 1930s, the famous popular science magazine "La Science et la Vie" burst out with an April Fool's article about the mysteries Egyptian pyramids and unusual properties of regular tetrahedra. Quite in the spirit of the time, I must say. After all, it was in those years that the French chemist and mystic Jacques Bergier told on the pages of specialized publications that bovine blood placed in a reduced cardboard copy of the tomb of Cheops did not coagulate, and the meat remained fresh for an unusually long time. And at about the same time, a certain M.A. Bovey argued that in exactly the same tetrahedrons, oriented to the cardinal points, the corpses of small animals do not decompose, but are mummified.

The authors of the article in “La Science et la Vie” had a lot of fun with people’s faith in such quackery. They reported, in particular, that sleeping in a regular tetrahedron rejuvenates, the razor blades inside it self-sharpen, and milk does not turn sour. They laughed and forgot.

But this number a few years later caught the eye of the Swedish inventor Eric Wallenberg, an employee of the Åkerlund Rausing laboratory, who was inspired by the idea of ​​​​reducing the losses of milk traders. In 1944, the prototype of tetrahedron-shaped cardboard packaging first appeared. And six years later, AB Tetra Pak was born, whose branded packaging is for a long time became a Tetra Classic® cardboard pyramid.

A huge advantage of such packages was the minimum waste during production and its almost complete automation. The base - soft cardboard combined with polyethylene - was rolled into a cylinder, the junction of the opposite ends was thermally welded, then milk, kefir or cream was poured inside, after which the machine made two more thermal seams and cut off the finished package, which safely fell into a special container. No complications and almost no losses.

True, everything further on the way to the buyer was not so technologically advanced. One of the significant disadvantages of tetrahedron bags was the absolute impossibility of packing them tightly into rectangular boxes. Therefore, special hexagonal containers were used to store dairy products packaged in pyramids. But this led to an unreasonable increase in transport and storage costs - air had to be transported and stored to a large extent.

And then it turned out that milk in pyramids turns sour in almost the same way as in any other package. That is, there were no rational reasons to remain committed to this packaging, despite its ease of production.

As a result, Sweden already in 1959 began to abandon Tetra Classic® milk tetrahedrons.

It seemed the company had no choice but to leave the market. But its director, Ruben Rausing, was able to sell his technology Soviet Union. They say that an old article from La Science et la Vie played a role in convincing the Soviet ministers. However, they may have fallen for the apparent cheapness of production.

And the second, very long, life of triangular milk cartons began. They were used in the USSR for almost 30 years, until the mid-1980s.

They write that their quality was quite average. The pyramids often tore and leaked. Although they say the bottles didn’t break at all less. Trade habitually wrote off losses as cost. Such bags were also inconvenient to carry and store. In general, cost-effective production ultimately resulted in rather burdensome consumption. Of course, on a scale huge country it was all a small thing.

But there was interest in buying unusual bags for residents of distant regions :-)

From a mathematical point of view, the milk carton that we traditionally call triangular or pyramidal was actually shaped like a tetrahedron. The proposal to bottle milk in similar, easy-to-use bags first appeared in Sweden in 1944. However, it was not possible to immediately introduce this innovation due to the lack of technology for internally coating cardboard with polyethylene. Without it, the cardboard instantly became soggy and the milk spoiled. The necessary device for creating a package in the shape of a tetrahedron covered with film on the inside appeared only in 1952 from the Tetra pack company. Today using this technology, package huge amounts of dairy products and juices around the world, but the Swedish company pioneered the technology in the 1950s. True, it is still not really known who invented this unusual packaging, nor who was the first to propose an algorithm for closing a pyramidal milk package. It is believed that this person was Ruben Rausing, the creator and owner of the Tetra pack. However, a number of sources claim that in fact the milk tetrahedron was invented by laboratory assistant Eric Wallenberg, and the method of closing the package was first thought of by an ordinary company employee, Eric Thorudt. However, the dishonest and treacherous Rausing, as the owner of the company, appropriated the laurels of his employees. However, despite internal disagreements in the company, the appearance on the market Food Industry pyramidal cardboard bags caused a real revolution, significantly displacing heavy and inconvenient, although more environmentally friendly glass containers.

The tetrahedral milk carton was invented in 1944, but was introduced into production only after the Second World War, when special technology and equipment were developed to protect the paper surface with polyethylene.
The activities of the Tetra pack company began with the production of such packaging. There were various rumors about the invention of milk packaging, some believed that Ruben Rausing himself invented it, but many company employees say that this wonderful idea came to the mind of the company’s laboratory assistant, Eric Wallenberg. The same thing happened with the problem encountered when filling and hermetically sealing the pyramid. The solution to this problem came to the mind of another ordinary company specialist, Eric Thorudt. But all these inventions were appropriated by Rausing, who at that time already had sole control of the company. But Rausing's big plus was that he was always obsessed with the company's difficulties and always thought through all the problems carefully, even when they had already been finalized and accepted for development. So his milk pyramid gave a real revolutionary impetus to the development of the food packaging industry. The first tests of the tetrahedron began only in 1952, and were successfully completed only a few years later. It took people a long time to adapt to the first milk pyramids, since when the upper part was cut off, the milk often splashed out. Tetra Classic packaging was launched in 1952 (the currently more popular type of packaging, the Tetra Brik parallelepiped, was created in 1963). One of the significant disadvantages of this type of package was the impossibility of packing them tightly into rectangular boxes and containers (special hexagonal containers were used for their storage), which led to an unproductive increase in transport and storage costs.
In 1959, the production of tetra bags began in the USSR, while in Sweden itself their production was stopped just this year. They were produced in different capacities: 500 gram (for milk and kefir), 300 gram (milk, cream) and 100 gram (for cream, produced in the year of the 1980 Olympics). They were designed differently depending on the type of product. Thus, bags for pasteurized milk and for sterilized milk had different designs. It was often possible to observe construction workers, during their lunch break, drinking milk from such a triangular paper bag and a loaf of bread. The advantage of such bags was that the printed bag could be placed and the milk would not spill. The Soviet science fiction film "Moscow - Cassiopeia" mentions milk cartons as a prototype for garbage bags that were thrown into open space and self-destructed.

Why was the milk in triangular bags? July 11th, 2017

Someone else remembers, and someone often saw such triangular milk bags in retro posts and topics dedicated to the USSR. This is quite a rare occurrence for “non-Muscovites”. For example, I saw my parents once bring such milk from Moscow. Agree, a very interesting and original form. Probably not very convenient to transport and handle.

So how did such an original milk package come about? How did you even come up with this?

This is the version the blogger told a_nalgin :

In the late 1930s, the famous popular science magazine “La Science et la Vie” burst out with an April Fool's article about the mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids and the unusual properties of regular tetrahedra. Quite in the spirit of the time, I must say. After all, it was in those years that the French chemist and mystic Jacques Bergier told on the pages of specialized publications that bovine blood placed in a reduced cardboard copy of the tomb of Cheops did not coagulate, and the meat remained fresh for an unusually long time. And at about the same time, a certain M.A. Bovey argued that in exactly the same tetrahedrons, oriented to the cardinal points, the corpses of small animals do not decompose, but are mummified.

The authors of the article in “La Science et la Vie” had a lot of fun with people’s faith in such quackery. They reported, in particular, that sleeping in a regular tetrahedron rejuvenates, the razor blades inside it self-sharpen, and milk does not turn sour. They laughed and forgot.

But this number a few years later caught the eye of the Swedish inventor Eric Wallenberg, an employee of the Åkerlund Rausing laboratory, who was inspired by the idea of ​​​​reducing the losses of milk traders. In 1944, the prototype of a tetrahedron-shaped cardboard packaging first appeared. And six years later, the AB Tetra Pak company was born, whose signature packaging for a long time became the Tetra Classic® cardboard pyramid.

A huge advantage of such packages was the minimum waste during production and its almost complete automation. The base - soft cardboard combined with polyethylene - was rolled into a cylinder, the junction of the opposite ends was thermally welded, then milk, kefir or cream was poured inside, after which the machine made two more thermal seams and cut off the finished package, which safely fell into a special container. No complications and almost no losses.

True, everything further on the way to the buyer was not so technologically advanced. One of the significant disadvantages of tetrahedron bags was the absolute impossibility of packing them tightly into rectangular boxes. Therefore, special hexagonal containers were used to store dairy products packaged in pyramids. But this led to an unreasonable increase in transport and storage costs - air had to be transported and stored to a large extent.

And then it turned out that milk in pyramids turns sour in almost the same way as in any other package. That is, there were no rational reasons to remain committed to this packaging, despite its ease of production.

As a result, Sweden already in 1959 began to abandon Tetra Classic® milk tetrahedrons.

It seemed the company had no choice but to leave the market. But its leader, Ruben Rausing, was able to sell his technology to the Soviet Union. They say that an old article from La Science et la Vie played a role in convincing the Soviet ministers. However, they may have fallen for the apparent cheapness of production.

And the second, very long, life of triangular milk cartons began. They were used in the USSR for almost 30 years, until the mid-1980s.

They write that their quality was quite average. The pyramids often tore and leaked. Although they say the bottles were not beating at all less. Trade habitually wrote off losses as cost. Such bags were also inconvenient to carry and store. In general, cost-effective production ultimately resulted in rather burdensome consumption. Of course, on the scale of a huge country, all this was a trifle.

But there was interest in buying unusual bags for residents of distant regions :-)

By the way, a week ago it turns out that a hurricane demolished the mystical Pyramid of Hunger:

From a powerful gust of wind, the pyramid should have folded inward, says Alexander Golod. “But she just fell on her side.” Despite its large mass, its structures were weakened (it is made of wood covered with fiberglass). Luckily no one was hurt. Our security was instructed in this regard and in advance, literally 5 minutes before the fall, took all visitors, there were several of them, out into the street. Our building collapsed on an ostrich farm located nearby, but everything turned out well there too. The pyramid fell on one of the ostriches, but fortunately he survived.

Hunger, according to him, is not too worried about what happened, since he himself soon intended to demolish the old version of the pyramid and build a new one in this place, this time a major one, 2.5 times higher than the previous one.

In general, I used to think that this was for weight loss or some kind of pyramid. But it turns out that this is the name of the person who built it.

The Pyramids of Golod are structures designed by Russian engineer Alexander Golod. They belong to the so-called “energy pyramids”, which in occultism are considered converters or accumulators of some kind of “bioenergy” unknown to science.

A distinctive feature of the Hunger pyramids is that in them the proportion of the golden ratio is applied to the ratio of the diameters of neighboring balls, successively inscribed in a regular tetrahedral pyramid. If this condition is met, the ratio of the height of the pyramid to the side of the square at its base is ≈ 2.058, and the angle between the faces of the pyramid is ≈ 27.3°, which gives it a characteristic pointed appearance.

sources

“Milk in the Soviet Union was made from milk. There was sour cream in the sour cream, kefir in the kefir, and butter in the butter. And the milk also turned sour. In one or two days. And it turned out to be yogurt. My mother used this yogurt to make amazing pancakes.

Every schoolchild went for milk. After school, we very often went shortly before the end of the lunch break to the grocery store or the Milk store. There they stood among other schoolchildren, young mothers with strollers and pensioners, waiting for a fat saleswoman in a stale white robe to open the doors of the store. Then everyone rushed to the departments.

Post sponsor: Apartment for an hour. Rent/rent an apartment for daily rent! Source: Zhzhurnal/dubikvit In our city, grocery stores usually brought fresh milk, bread and some other products during the lunch break. Therefore, the store that opened after the lunch break often made it possible to buy everything specified by the parents. Moreover, it’s fresh.

This was more than relevant for milk and dairy products. After all, that milk actually turned sour very quickly - within a day. And if it had stood in the store for half a day or a day before, the likelihood that it would turn sour by the morning, or even by the evening, was high,” says Vitaly Dubogrey.

1. I still remember those grocery stores. With several departments. Each department sold its own product groups. Many stores were equipped with universal cash registers. In them you had to stand in line and pay for the goods, naming the department, the product and the price for it, for example: dairy, half-liter bottle of milk and a jar of sour cream - 65 kopecks. Cashier on a huge triangular looking cash register knocked out a check that had to be handed over to the saleswoman in the department.

To do this, you had to stand in a queue of the same people with checks. It was worse if the department sold goods by weight. After all, first you had to stand in line - small or large. Then they wrote out the weight and price for you on the piece. Then go to the cash register, there’s a line there, get a check, and then line up again at the department. Smaller stores did not have such a system, and everyone there simply stood in line at the department. There were also self-service supermarkets - similar to today's markets. There, goods were paid for at the checkout when leaving the hall.

2. Dairy store. Behind the glass you can see those same cash registers with women knocking out checks for departments.

3. By the way, dairy products were often stored in dairy departments and stores in metal mesh boxes. Empty containers were then placed in them at glass collection points. When a milk truck drove down the street, the rattling of these boxes in it could be heard from afar.

4. Basically, all liquid dairy products in the USSR were packaged in glass containers, which were then washed and handed over to special points glass containers or directly at the dairy store. A half-liter milk bottle cost 15 kopecks, a liter - 20, a jar of sour cream - 10 kopecks.

The price of the bottle was necessarily included in the price of milk or kefir. In the photo there are samples of milk containers: left and right - half- liter bottles, in the center - a liter milk container. On the right bottle there is a plastic cap, which could be bought at a hardware store for closing milk bottles.

5. There were no labels on the bottles. The label was on the lid. These bottles were closed with caps made of soft foil. different color. The name of the product, date of manufacture, and cost were written on the lid. In order to open the bottle, it was enough to simply press the cap with your thumb - it easily sunk a little inside, and the cap was removed.

Silver cap - milk (28 kopecks - 0.5 liters, 46 kopecks - 1 liter); dark yellow - baked milk (30 kopecks); green (or turquoise) - kefir (28 kopecks); silver-light green striped - low-fat kefir; blue (or purple) - acidophilus; purple (or pink) - fermented baked milk (29 kopecks); silver with a yellow stripe - sour cream (35 kopecks); pink - sweet kefir drink “Snowball”; yellow-silver striped - for cream; blue - for honey kefir drink “Kolomensky”; light brown - for chocolate milk.

6. In addition to bottles, milk was sold in triangular bags with a capacity of half a liter. Their peculiarity was that they were carried out shopping room in large aluminum trays or plastic boxes, and when there were few bags left in the tray, it was clear that the tray was covered in milk. The fact is that these bags had a stubborn tendency to leak in the corners. But they were convenient to place and convenient to drink directly from the bags, cutting off a corner.

7. Already at the very end of the Soviet era, dairy containers began their transformation. First, liter bottles disappeared. A year or two later, liter tetrapacks began to appear instead of traditional half-liter milk bottles. The packages were not thrown away. They were washed, cut off at the top and used for whatever purpose - for storing bulk items, for growing seedlings in early spring on the windowsills...

8. Sour cream was sold in 200-ml jars, all under the same foil lid, or poured from large metal cans, poured into the jar you brought with a large ladle.

9. A special product was butter. When I was a child, there was almost always a line behind him. Especially when they brought butter packaged in the usual packs. There were several types of butter - butter and sandwich. The sandwich had a lower fat content. But in its composition it was much better than today's spreads offered to us under the guise butter. Loose butter cost 3 rubles 40 kopecks per kilogram, and a pack of butter cost 72 kopecks.

10. Another iconic dairy product in the USSR was condensed milk. Children's favorite treat. They drank it straight from the can, punching two holes with a can opener. It was added to coffee. It was boiled directly in a closed jar to be eaten boiled or used for cake. This was the most valuable currency in the pioneer camp.

11. And there was concentrated milk. Theoretically, it had to be diluted, but it was a special relish to drink it undiluted, after punching two holes with a knife.

12. At that time milk was also sold from barrels. Milk barrels, except for color and inscription, were no different from barrels of kvass or beer. And the queue for them was shorter than for beer :)

13. Well, how can we not remember the children’s favorite treat - a milkshake. In my city, the best milkshakes were made in the Donuts cafe near the Oktyabr children's cinema. And always after the show the cafe was filled with children.

14. They also made the most delicious ice cream from milk.

15. Milk and dairy products took up enough significant place in the diet Soviet man. Porridge was cooked in milk. Noodles and horns were cooked with milk. They simply drank milk from a glass, like we drink juices today. They also drank kefir, fermented baked milk, and acidophilus.