Tetra Pak is a Swedish multinational food packaging and processing company headquartered in Switzerland.
Keystone-SDA / Christian Beutler
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Listening: Tetra Pak inventor dies in Switzerland aged 101
The inventor of the modern Tetra Pak drinks carton, Ake Gustafson, has died in Switzerland at the age of 101. The Swedish national died on Thursday, December 19, at his home in Châtel-St-Denis, in the Swiss canton of Fribourg, as his trustee announced in an obituary.
The industrialist joined the packaging company Tetra Pak in 1959, when it was still producing pyramid-shaped milk cartons. Under Gustafson’s leadership, the packaging was further developed into a stackable, rectangular shape (‘Tetra Brik’), according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. It came onto the market in 1963. Hundreds of billions of units of the packaging system are still produced today.
Initially, however, some of the cartons leaked and there were problems with pouring. This popularised the ambiguous saying: ‘Buy Tetra Pak and you’ll always have milk on the table.’ The packaging material also insulated the inventor’s house in Châtel-St-Denis, where he spent the rest of his life, as reported by the paper La Liberté.
Gustafson was born in Sweden on May 7,1923 and settled in the canton of Fribourg in 1965. In 1977, he acquired the company Sokymat, which was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time and manufactured coils for small motors. After he restarted the company, it grew over the years and was finally taken over by the Swedish group Assa Abloy in 2003.
Translated from German by DeepL/jdp
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