For years, packing material used for shipping was an
afterthought. When we filled a crate with apples and
oranges or a box with pots and pans, we cast about for
a material to insulate the goods from bumps, dings,
and bruises. We grabbed whatever was around and left
over. Old straw or yesterday’s newspaper was the stuff
of choice and convenience.
Today, filler is no longer a postscript. In recent decades,
smart inventors and shrewd entrepreneurs have spent
plenty of time and resources developing products that
are meant to fill up vacant commercial space. Fillers
have become a business of substance. The most ubiquitous
contemporary example of this phenomenon is a filler
that is made with nothing more substantial than air.
Consider the origins of bubble wrap, a vital enabler
in the world of online shopping and mail-order catalogs.
It had an unlikely start in 1957, at the dawning of
the jet age, when two engineers, Alfred Fielding and
Marc Chavannes, took two plastic curtains and ironed
them together. They created a sheet pockmarked by a
bunch of air bubbles. Fielding and Chavannes knew they
had something valuable on their hands, but they weren’t
sure what it was. When they founded their company, Sealed
Air, the duo certainly hadn’t set out to market a material
that would change the world of packing.
Rather, they decided to roll out a mod new product
for the comparatively glamorous world of home decor.
They believed that hip young homeowners would be interested
in plastering the new material on their walls. The idea
fell flat. Next they tried to market the material as
an insulation for greenhouses, but again there were
few takers.
It wasn’t until the early 1960s that Fielding and Chavannes
hit pay dirt. At the time, most companies were using
shredded newspaper for packing material. The broadsheet
industry was thriving, and newspapers were cheap and
available. One forward-looking company, however, realized
that its futuristic product called for a futuristic
packaging material. IBM, then known as International
Business Machines Corporation, needed some inventive
stuffing to insulate the boxes that carried its new
1401 business computers. Filled with vacuum tubes and
intricate wiring, the 1401 was expensive and fragile.
IBM found that the bubble wrap produced by Sealed Air
shielded the electronic brain from shocks and jolts.
The rest is plastics history. In the past four decades,
bubble wrap has emerged as a staple of global industry.
The stuff that can be easily popped by children’s fingers
is nonetheless incredibly tough. To demonstrate bubble
wrap’s strength, Sealed Air took it to a pumpkin-dropping
contest in Iowa in 2000. Gourdzilla, a mutant pumpkin
that tipped the scales at a whopping 815 pounds, was
winched up by a 35-foot crane and released onto a mound
of bubble wrap. The engineers anticipated the force,
and the bubble wrap protected the pumpkin’s fall — until
it bounced off the wrap and onto the ground.
The alternatives still exist — newspapers (especially
for folks at home) and polystyrene peanuts. But bubble
wrap is far more pervasive and welcome. Peanuts and
papers generally have but one life as a wrap, but bubble
wrap is easily redeployed (or popped for fun).
Today, bubble wrap is but one of several filler products
made by Sealed Air. Other products that effectively
insulate precious content, whether it’s books or steaks,
include Jiffy mailers, Instapak foam cushioning, and
Fill-Air inflatable packs. But bubble wrap, which accounts
for about 10 percent of its $4.1 billion in annual sales,
is still the bestknown. As Forbes noted recently,
“The company churns out enough bubble wrap every year
to wrap the equator ten times.” And it’s the most appreciated.
Bubble wrap is one of the unheralded but crucial cogs
that helps the global economy function smoothly. It
gets things where they need to go in one piece, helping
products survive jarring truck rides and the jostling
and jiggling of cargo holds, hand carts, and 18-wheelers.
The concept of turning filler into profits also took
root in the 1950s in another industry that, curiously,
also relied on a form of plastic: vinyl records. LPs
and 45s used to be stamped in vinyl, generally with
one hit song that the label was pushing. But unlike
CDs, vinyl discs were two-sided. And so the record companies
figured they’d fill the empty space. It didn’t make
sense, however, to put a second hot song opposite the
first chart buster. (A second hit could be another sale.)
The main song became the A-side, while the flipside
was a throw in. Generally the B-side was a tune that
didn’t get airplay. It was merely an afterthought, a
product of lesser quality, sometimes just pure filler.
By and large, B-sides were utterly forgettable. It was
a rare occasion that they turned out to be bigger hits
than the A-side. Gloria Gaynor’s enduring “I Will Survive”
was a B-side. So too was the Beatles’ “Revolution” (“Hey
Jude” was on the A-side), Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog,”
and Queen’s “We Will Rock You.”
But entertainment is an unpredictable business. Every
year in Hollywood a few expensive surefire hits from
a studio’s A-list turn out to be B-films or bombs.
And every year, a few modestly budgeted indie productions,
small movies designed to fill out slates, turn out to
be box-office champions.
But rock ’n’ roll isn’t the only all-American phenomenon
in which filler plays an important role. What would
the traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner be without filler,
or stuffing? Thanks to the labors of an unheralded inventor,
our traditional stuffing has become a huge year-round
business for one of the world’s largest food companies.
In the early 1970s, Ruth Siems, who worked for General
Foods in research and development, was asked to come
up with an instant stuffing for chickens and turkey.
Stuffing, a laborious product to make, was generally
associated with Thanksgiving, when people take time
from their busy lives and devote a day to preparing
a meal. In modern America, time had become increasingly
difficult to find, almost impossible. But the marketers
at General Foods reasoned that an instant version of
the stuffing would be appealing to harried consumers
and could expand it from a labor-intensive, once-a-year
treat to a convenient, year-round side dish.
It took some doing, but Siems helped develop a dry
long-lasting product, close enough to the real thing,
that would absorb water and maintain a consistency appealing
to finicky eaters. General Foods tested the product
in the spring of 1972, and a year later it hit the market.
Siems received a reported $125 one-time bonus for her
work. But General Foods (now part of Kraft) has reaped
dividends from Stove Top stuffing year after year. The
one-billionth box of Stove Top was sold in 1984. And
each year, Kraft sells about 60 million boxes in November
alone.
DAN GROSS
writes the Moneybox column for Slate magazine.
He can be heard frequently on National Public Radio.
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