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- This
column by John Cosway is a mix of 50 years of media memories
and 15 years of buying and selling experiences via live and online
auctions, flea markets, antique stores and markets etc.
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- Cosway's Corner -
Foodstuffs a mecca for collectors
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- Foodstuffs packaging provides a mecca
for collectors
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- By John Cosway
- The next time you see supermarket shelves lined with a wide
variety of canned goods, say a silent thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte.
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- It was the French military master who, in 1795, offered a
prize of 12,000 francs to the inventor who could create a safe
way of preserving food for his vast armies on the battlefields.
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- The winner was Nicholas Appet, a French chef. He unveiled
his glass container invention to Napoleon in 1809. Liquids had
been bottled for centuries, so why not pack foodstuffs in glass
containers?
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- Leave it to the English, among the foes of Napoleon, to quickly
one-up the emperor a year later. That is when Englishman Peter
Durand patented the first tin can. His containers were made
of "tin-coated sheets of iron" that proved more reliable
than breakable glass containers.
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- Talk about food fights.
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- Another Englishman, Thomas Kensett, is credited with
introducing canned food to North America soon after arriving
in the United States in 1812. That timeline gives collectors
almost 200 years of cans to pursue.
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- Foodstuffs in general provide North American collectors with
enough challenges to last a lifetime, from early bottles, cans,
bags, cartons, boxes made of tin and wood and related utensils
used for storing, cooking, slicing, dicing, serving and eating.
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- Think food, think collectible.
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- Few things are as nostalgic as containers used for foodstuffs
and related promotional products first hyped in 19th century
newspapers ads and other publications, followed by radio commercials,
films, television and the Internet.
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- For baby boomers, their Top 10 lists might include bubble
gum wrappers, cereal boxes, soup tins, pop/beer bottles and cans
and related promotional products.
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- There are numerous bottle collector clubs across North America
One of the more popular clubs in Ontario is the Four Seasons
Bottle Collectors Club - www.canadianbottlecollectors.com/
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 Coca-Cola, a soft
drink that has been consumed by the masses since 1886, when Atlanta
pharmacist John Styth Pemberton first bottled his secret
soda pop brew, has a lock on the global marketing of related
advertising products.
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- Peter Wright, president of the 100-plus member Ontario
Chapter of the U.S.-based Coca-Cola Collectors Club, says Ontario
members gather four times a year for meetings and hold special
public events in the spring and fall.
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- "There is an infinite number of bottle variations, depending
on the market," Wright tells the Wayback Times. "The
bottles can range from plastic to glass and multiple volume sizes."
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- As for the hunt, Wright says Coke cans were introduced in
1960, but cans most in demand include the 1962 issue, which lists
around $400, and the space cans, which would be worth "considerably
more."
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- You can e-mail Wright at ontariochapterpresident@yahoo.com
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- Beer can collectors have it relatively easy in their quest
for a collection with depth. The first commercial cans of beer
were Kruger Cream Ale, a product of the Kruger Brewing Co. of
Richmond, Virginia, introduced on Jan. 24, 1935.
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- If beer can collecting is something you want to tackle, a
good place to start is rustycans.com,
which has a lengthy list of clubs to consider.
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- And novices might find a detailed and lengthy Collectors
Weekly interview online with collector Bobby Kiao at tinyurl.com/pl7y4z
helpful.
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 Back to bottles and
a quick quiz: If you were holding Canada's first bottle of Heinz
Ketchup in your hands, how old would that bottle be? Can you
sense the anticipation?
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- If you shouted out 100 years, you must be a junk food junkie.
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- But did you also know the first Heinz bottling plant in Canada
opened in a former tobacco factory in Leamington, Ontario, in
1909 and is still going strong? It remains the second largest
Heinz plant in the world.
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- Everything you wanted to know about the H.J. Heinz Company
can be found at www.heinz.com/our-company/about-heinz/history.aspx
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- Early tea tins and boxes, coffee tins, a variety of jars,
milk bottles, flour and spices tins and packaging for a variety
of other foodstuffs can be a challenge. There are no limits,
other than hunt time, display space and budget.
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- Fig Newtons packaging, for example, dates back to 1891. Tea
tins have been around since the early 1700s. Pie tins in the
1880s were tossed like Frisbees. Home delivery of bottled milk
began in the late 1800s.
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- The foodstuffs collectibles list goes on. Paper and cardboard
have been used for food packaging since the late 1800s
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- Kraft Foods got its start in 1903 in Chicago, with J.L.
Kraft, a $65 bankroll, a rented wagon and a horse named Paddy.
Four brothers would partner with him and build a wholesale cheese
distribution empire.
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- The original 1937 Kraft Macaroni & Cheese dinner packaging
is a collector's item, as are numerous variations of the KD box
from the past 72 years. The contents have also changed in shape
and flavour and continue to be an economical tummy-filler for
all ages.
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- Kraft Miracle Whip? People have been consuming that since
1933.
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- Kraft Canada's website - kraftcanada.com/
- includes a detailed history of Kraft and notes: "Among
the products now sold by Kraft Foods Inc. are so many 'firsts'
and innovations that a history of the company is almost a history
of the food industry."
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 A lot of the romance
in collecting foodstuff containers vanished in 1954 when Gerry
Thomas, an American inventor, introduced Swanson TV Dinners,
with consumers paying less than a dollar for a variety of frozen
dishes and ready to eat in minutes.
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- There are TV dinner ads and cookbooks to be found online,
but original, unopened 1954 Swanson TV dinner boxes and aluminum
trays are a rare find, even when more than 10 million were sold
that first year. They just weren't keepers, what with odors and
all.
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- But you can find one at the Smithsonian Institution. The
Washington, D.C., museum accepted a Swanson TV aluminum dinner
tray in 1987 to acknowledge the profound change in the dinner
habits of North American households. .
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- TV dinners and television: a baby boomer's 1950s dream combo
that continues to keep them content into their senior years.
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- The dinners have doubled in price, but at $2 or so, still
a meal deal.
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- Which containers today will be considered collectibles 50
to 100 years from now? Plastic water bottles? Coke cans, as usual?
Those colourful energy drink containers? Cereal boxes? Coffee
and tea packaging?
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- We'd predict bottles and cans would be a safe bet. And perhaps
a milk carton or two.
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