Food Packaging, Plastics and the New Desire: the du Pont Company, WWII.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 159

I was initially drawn to this small collection of pamphlets because of the very provocative assertion that candy is food (but is food candy?) which, I guess, it is, technically speaking.  (Maybe we should determine what food is on a sliding scale of what we would take to a deserted island somewhere and have to depend on those foods for survival.  I don’t think that I’d have a trunk full of Mounds bars with me.  Evidently if you had to choose one food product (and one product only) to survive on for a year it looks like the best thing to select is dry dog food.)

The Candy is Delicious Food pamphlet was published in 1939 with the intent of instructing the grocer how to better sell candyFood—expressing the ease, storage and profit margin.  Curiously, the thing was published in September  1939, a few months into the war—I wonder if the publisher (saved for naming below to more effect) was prescient in determining the coming problems with food, and that candy would certainly not have those issues during a global conflict? 

The Post-War Food Dollar was also the product of the same publisher.  Published in 1943, this pamphlet exhorted the grocer to prepare for the coming peace, explaining where the new dollars might be spent once the war (and the supply and ration problems) was won. 

As it turns out these pamphlets were mostly about display and merchandising, and finding the goods that looked best on the shelves—and evidently that which looked best was that which the product could be seen.  And the way that the product could be seen was with the use of the “new”packaging filament, cellophane, produced in the United States (almost exclusively) by du Pont (E.I. du Pont de Nempours & Co. with  their chemist William Hale Charch figuring out how to make cellophane moisture –proof, which led to very large-scale good packaging using the product.)   Another very big bit which turns up unmentioned but illustrated in this pamhlet is seen in this The Future is Now! scene of a modern supermarket--the "SERVE YOURSELF" butcher/meat section, which was a new idea in the early 1940's, and one that was not at all common in the consuming world.  This idea wasn't as big a deal as the invention of mass produced sliced bread (or, as Squidward Tentacles encountered in one episode of SpongeBob, "Bread in a Can--the best Thing Since Sliced Bread"), but it was a very important de3velopm,ent in marketing--and also another gargantuanly consumptive venue for the sale of the packaging element, cellophane.

It was DuPont who published this series of pamphlets for the sole purpose of marketing foods and ideas to grocers that were almost entirely dependent upon cellophane, and DuPont manufactured 75% of all cellophane made in the U.S.  So, to me, it seems as thought all of this business about Food being Candy and the Post-War food spending dollar was really just about selling cellophane—the food was incidental, which is why the cellophane-encased candy was called “food” to begin with.  (It was Whitman Candies who first used cellophane in the U.S. , in  1912, to package their goods for retail.)
As an aside it is interesting to note that du Pont was brought to court in 1947 over their alleged monopolization of cellophane manufacturing in the United States.  Thus was the U. S. v. DUPONT (THE CELLOPHANE CASE)  filed December 13, 1947, which “charged Du Pont with monopolizing, attempting to monopolize and conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in cellophane and cellulosic caps and bands in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act”.   DuPont successfully defended themselves in this case.

The other, minor, thing here that really caught my attention was on page 10 of the Candy is Delicious Food pamphlet—an innocent picture of the grocer tallying up the customer’s purchases, sure enough, but if you look at the detail you can see the grocer writing it all down on the bag that he’d use bag up the purchases.  I have a dim memory of seeing this done in the across-the-street-from-the-A&P Mom & Pop grocery sawdust-strewn store (on Main Street, of course) in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, when I was a kid in the early 1960’s.  I
 
don’t recall this being done after that, what with real cash registers and then, much later on, with more sophisticated inventory control hardware.  I’m sure that I recall this being done in hardware shops (almost all gone), and my Mother recalls this more recently—in the 1970’s—in butcher shops, but I think this recording practice was pretty much extinct by the mid  1960’s.  I know that this means nothing, but the picture of this guy writing on the bag was so sharp in my memory that I needed to record the emotion.
 

Comments

[connie carpenter macko]

Very cool (I especially enjoyed the "Sponge Bob" quote... quite unexpected yet delighful to see!) As a former Dow employee, I always thought that Saran development was the driving factor in packaging change. Good to know there were others marketing food just to sell more packaging materials!