It is known that containers, mostly made of cardboard and having a substantially parallelepipedal shape, provided with pouring spouts are commonly used for pouring various kinds of products in granule or powder form, such as salt, sugar and soluble food products. These spouts are made of metallic material (aluminium), plastic material or cardboard, and are fixed to a pivotable tab formed in a wall of the container, possibly by making a cut in this wall in the shape of an inverted U, the tab being fixed to a central portion of the spout. The pouring spout is inserted in the pouring opening and is movable between a retracted, closed position and an extracted position in which it is possible to pour a certain quantity of a product contained in the container.
Recently it has been proposed that pouring spouts should also be applied to saltshakers for containing fine table salt. These containers, generally of cylindrical shape and made of plastic material, have two pouring openings, namely a first opening for pouring the salt in bulk and a second opening for sprinkling a controlled portion of salt. This second pouring opening has a dispensing spout associated with a perforated wall that covers the pouring opening and allows the salt to pass out through the circular perforations only.
Saltshakers of the aforesaid type are limited in that a certain diameter of the perforations generally provides good controlled dispensing of salt having a specific degree of fineness, but the perforations impede the pouring of the salt if it has a coarser particle size, or allow too much salt to pass out if the salt has a finer particle size. Since salt is hygroscopic, the perforations easily tend to become occluded when moisture is present, especially in the case of salt which is not very fine. It would therefore be necessary to provide different types of saltshaker, having walls with perforations whose diameters are differentiated according to the degree of fineness of the salt contained.