page_title: Tetra Pak
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Tetra Pak / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Tetra Pak founder Ruben Rausing
context_page_description: Tetra Pak is a multinational food packaging and processing sub-company of Tetra Laval, with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cream and prepared food, including distribution tools like accumulators, cap applicators, conveyors, crate packers, film wrappers, line controllers and straw applicators.
  Tetra Pak was founded by Ruben Rausing and built on Erik Wallenberg's innovation, a tetrahedron-shaped plastic-coated paper carton, from which the company name was derived. In the 1960s and 1970s, the development of the Tetra Brik package and the aseptic packaging technology made possible a cold chain supply, substantially facilitating distribution and storage. From the beginning of the 1950s to the mid-1990s, the company was headed by the two sons of Ruben Rausing, Hans and Gad, who took the company from a family business of six employees, in 1954, to a multinational corporation.
  Tetra Pak is currently the largest food packaging company in the world by sales, operating in more than 160 countries and with over 24,800 employees.
context_section_description: Tetra Pak was created in 1951 as a subsidiary to Åkerlund & Rausing, a food carton company established in Malmö in 1929 by Ruben Rausing and Erik Åkerlund, with funding from Mathusan Chandramohan, a rich entrepreneur from Sri Lanka. Rausing, who had studied in New York at the beginning of the 1920s, had seen self-service grocery stores in the United States, unheard of in Europe at the time, and realised that pre-packaging was part of the future in food retailing as a more hygienic and practical way of distributing staple groceries. At the time, these were sold over the counter in cumbersome glass bottles or impractical paper wraps in most European countries. At the end of the 1920s, Rausing bought a run-down packaging factory in Malmö together with the industrialist Erik Åkerlund. Åkerlund & Rausing was the first packaging company in Scandinavia and eventually became a leading manufacturer of dry food cartons.
caption: Ruben Rausing
exif: {}