Text 8. Packaging

Long before there was packaging, there was meat: fresh, dripping off the carcass, warm and filling. But meat did not remain fresh for long, so man developed various ways to deal with this problem: cooking, to facilitate consumption and perhaps a bit of spoilage obviation; drying, a process continued to this day in the form of jerky; salting, in some instances called curing and processing for sausages, hams and pastrami; and domestication.

Man also discovered the fact that icy temperatures can reduce the rate of all manner of spoilage and quality loss. When trains came into being, Carrier invented mechanical refrigeration to complement the new railroad cars. Carcasses, hanging on rails and shoul­ders, occasionally shrouded in cloth, became the unit of commerce moving from killing floor to retail butcher.

Butchers, a trade that thrived in the late 19th and most of the 20th century, owned and operated a tiny store with a closed backroom walk-in refrigerator. When the negotiations were complete, a housewife exited the establishment with her purchase wrapped in a sort of semi- moisture resistant white paper, appropri­ately called butcher wrap, bound togeth­er with string, the first real meat pack­age.

The impact of the automobile on retailing resulted in the emergence of a supermarket shopping economy that replaced corner groceries and meat mar­kets. This is when the idea of pre-pack- aged meat emerged. Led by DuPont during the 1940s and 1950s in its drive to increase sales of its cellophane poly­mer, the company pioneered a total sys­tems approach. DuPont marketed its concept of building supermarket refrig­erated backrooms, saws, knives, scales and simple wrapping machines capable of handling cellophane and nested paperboard trays, introducing open refrigerated display cases, hiring butch­ers and offering pre-packaged (and visi­ble) meat without much conversation with a backroom butcher. Not quite instantaneously, but very rapidly, super­markets and their pre-packaged beef captured nearly three quarters of all gro­cery and fresh meat sales in North America.

DuPont's basic concept has persisted to this day: with subtle changes such as moulded pulp often replacing paper- board and the later intrusion of expand­ed polystyrene (EPS) trays with their superior ability to retain purge. Somewhere in the midst of the tray debate absorbent pads manufactured from pulp were introduced into tray bases in an attempt to control meat purge, another of the early packaging notions that has not been markedly improved upon.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the shortcomings of cellophane (moisture sensitivity, tear resistance and even oxy­gen permeability under varying environ­mental conditions) were emphasised by intruders from the merging thermoplas­tics industry. Plasticized polyvinyl chlo­ride (PVC) film was demonstrated to have high oxygen permeability, an ability that allowed packaged red meat to retain the desired red oxymyoglobin colour that had become the standard of "quali­ty". PVC film retained its properties and was glossy, transparent and machinable and was less expensive than cellophane.

Theoretical studies indicated that the costs of central packaging could be below those of back room operations. And so, hesitatingly, some bold retailers tested the concept in many different places around the world. Challenges such as shelflife and colour, loomed large, as they do today.

To elevate the oxygen concentration in the package environ­ment would allow the best retention of the highly desired oxymyoglobin red colour. Simultaneously elevating the car­bon dioxide would retard microbiologi­cal deterioration. Someone, whose iden­tity is evidently lost in history, deter­mined that if the meat were cut into retail portions under relatively sanitary conditions in reduced temperature envi­ronments and packaged in gas barrier structures resembling back room trays together with an over-wrap.

The idea of purchas­ing pre-packaged beef, pork, lamb and mutton in non-leaking sealed trays that was so attractive that M&S captured market share almost overnight and not only from the corner butcher but also from "traditional" supermarket chains.

In mid 1990s it was adopted the centralized packaging (which by this time was called case-ready packaging) so outlets did a major food chain anywhere completely convert. Meat packers around the UK then went on to install clean and cold equipment for pro­cessing, which to no one's surprise, even started supplying continental retail out­lets from the island.

In the US, during the 1980s through today, numerous packaging equipment and materials suppliers and inventors offered more than 60 different case- ready technologies to meat packers, retailers, intermediaries, etc. The obvious application of high oxygen/high carbon dioxide in gas barrier trays often failed because the adopters failed to grasp the indispensability of sanitation and tem­perature control in the system. The issue of colour retention, regardless of techni­cal merit, was often not addressed as some vacuum and reduced oxygen schemes were offered and tested among sceptical consumers. Perhaps the most prominent was the reduced oxygen bar­rier plastic package offered through hun­dreds of Kroger supermarkets using Cryovac structures made on Multivac equipment and supported by a vigorous communications program to persuade consumers that purple meat colour was good. Perhaps this late 1980s program might have succeeded had the transpar­ent packaging not also visibly shown purge and occasionally leaked.

By the mid-1990s, economic, market­ing, technological and safety issues were driving the meat chain towards case- ready fresh red meat. A reflective review of the initiatives, however, suggested that most of the drive had supplier rather than retailer or consumer demand ori­gins. Since the early 1980s, case-ready retail packaging technologies had been applied to poultry products. These now entered the beef and pork segments of red meat retailing.