The canning of food began early in the nineteenth century when Nicholas Appert, a French chef and candy maker, responded to a contest held by Napoleon Bonaparte. Bonaparte hoped to supply his troops with wholesome preserved foods when on campaign.
Appert invented canning in glass containers in 1809. Britain, Napoleon's chief political adversary, rapidly responded. In 1810 the Englishman Peter Durand received a patent for food preservation. He used containers made of tin-coated sheets of iron hoping to produce a less breakable and more easily transported product. Durand was thus the inventor of the tin can, so called-although tin was only a coating intended to protect the underlying metal from the acids in foods. Canning expanded rapidly.
Can making commenced in the United States in 1812, brought from Europe by Thomas Kensett, an immigrant from England. The Civil War greatly accelerated use of canned foods. Just before the war began in 1861 production was around 5 million cans per year; after the war production had reached 30 million cans. In 1900, less than one hundred years after the basic technology had been invented, the so-called sanitary can made its debut. This was a can made with double-folded seams, the seams covering up the solder and thus preventing its migration into the food. By the early 1920s automated can making had been developed and cans were churned out at the rate of 250 cans per minute as compared to roughly 10 cans per day per laborer before. After that, technological improvements came in stages. Cans began to emerge in the beverage market in the 1950s and aluminum cans appeared in the 1960s. Lead solder gave way to other ways of seaming cans.
Ever more sophisticated coatings were introduced to protect the can from the food and the food from the can. Dual-metal (steel-aluminum) closures were introduced for easy-to-open cans. Cans became lighter, their production more automated, and can making and canning operations more tightly integrated. The purpose of canning is food preservation. From this perspective canning-whether the container is metal or glass-provides the same protection. Both types of containers are vacuum-sealed when holding perishable foods, accomplished by applying seals as the contents are submerged in boiling water. The phrase home canning refers to preserving fruits and vegetables in glass containers. Over time, however, canned food has come to mean food packaged in metal cans. The Census Bureau's reporting follows this convention. Until 1997 foods and beverages were a single industry category (“Food and Kindred Products”) under the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. After that date, with the introduction of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), Food Manufacturing was separated from Beverage & Tobacco Products. In this essay we follow the earlier convention and will discuss both canned food and beverage products under the general term Canned Foods.
Food preservation continues to be the principal reason for using metal cans as packaging. Canning, however, has expanded beyond its original purpose so that some foods are packaged in metal cans even when other packaging would do as well. An example is distribution of cookies, salted nuts, and roasted coffee in attractive metal cans. The great majority of foods and beverages delivered in cans, however, are in metal containers in order to protect them.
Although canned foods as a category is in common use both in popular and in commercial speech, no precise measurement of the total category is available from the Census Bureau. Put more precisely, the Bureau provides census data on a range of major industry subcategories in which the packaging mode is specified. Examples are some of the biggest categories like fruits and vegetables, soft drinks and beer, pet food, dairy products, and salted nuts. In other food categories, however, the mode of packaging is not provided and requires estimates based on such data as, for instance, the industry's consumption of different kinds of packaging materials. An alternative source of information is provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) which, in reporting on food consumption by the public, identifies quantities consumed in fresh or canned forms.
Data from the USDA dealing with food availability per person per year provide one view of canned food. Thus in 2005 just under 1,650 pounds of food were available for consumption per person, up from 1,634 pounds in 1995. Availability should not be confused with actual consumption because substantial quantities of food are lost in processing. These data also exclude beverages. Of this total, however, around 8.6 percent reached consumers in canned packaging in 2005, down slightly from the 1995 level of 8.7 percent. In that these data inevitably miss some of the food that ends up in cans-because no basis is provided for a good estimate-it may be reasonable to assume that approximately 10 to 12 percent of all food may come to us in cans of some sort. Major categories include:
Fruits: 17% of all food, 6.1% canned
Vegetables: 25% of all food, 25.3% canned
Dairy: 17% of all food, 0.6% canned
Meat and Poultry: 11% of all food, 2.5% canned
Fish: 1% of all food, 15% canned
Fats and Oils: 5% of all food, 12% canned
Tree Nuts: 0.2% of all good, 15% canned
Coffee: 0.6% of all food, 53% canned
All Other: 23% of all food, the canned proportion unknown The All Other category includes grains, dried legumes, sweeteners, eggs, and peanuts. It is possible to produce a rank order of canned foods from this listing by weighting the canned portion by the quantitative magnitude of the food category. Using that method, the top five categories of canned foods are vegetables, fruit, fats and oils (primarily vegetable shortenings), coffee, and fish (primarily seafood). Another way of looking at the category is from an industrial perspective. A look from that viewpoint will be carried out under the Market subheading below in which, alongside the look at food, beverage packaging in cans will be included as well.
