Tetra Brik is a

brand name A brand is a name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that distinguishes one seller's good or service from those of other sellers. Brands are used in business, marketing, and advertising for recognition and, importantly, to create an ...

for a carton package produced by the Swedish packaging company

Tetra Pak Tetra Pak is a Swedish–Swiss multinational food packaging and processing company with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cre ...

. Its shape is cubic or cuboid, and it is available with or without various different caps. The Tetra Brik is the best-known and most sold package in the Tetra Pak packaging family, to the extent that Tetra Brik is sometimes mistaken for the brand name. The Tetra Brik comes in either chilled (Tetra Brik) or ambient (Tetra Brik Aseptic) package types.

Background

The Tetra Brik package was introduced in 1963, after a long process of development and built on the previous

Tetra Classic Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA; formerly known as Trans-European Trunked Radio), a European standard for a trunked radio system, is a professional mobile radio and two-way transceiver specification. TETRA was specifically designed for use by go ...

tetrahedron In geometry, a tetrahedron (plural: tetrahedra or tetrahedrons), also known as a triangular pyramid, is a polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, six straight edges, and four vertex corners. The tetrahedron is the simplest of all ...

package that laid the foundation for Tetra Pak. Despite the revolutionary character of the new retail system, by the end of the 1950s

Ruben Rausing Anders Ruben Rausing (; né Andersson; 17 June 1895 – 10 August 1983) was a Swedish industrialist and the founder of the liquid food packaging company Tetra Pak. Early life Anders Ruben Andersson was born in 1895 in Råå, a small fishing ham ...

and the Tetra Pak management team realised that the Tetra Pak package portfolio needed to be supplemented by an additional rectangular model to continue to be competitive. Large amounts were spent on development, and in 1963 the first Tetra Brik packaging machine was installed in

Motala Motala () is a locality and the seat of Motala Municipality, Östergötland County, Sweden with 29,823 inhabitants (41,956 in the entire municipality) in 2010. It is the third largest city of Östergötland, following Linköping and Norrköping. ...

in central Sweden. Due to its effective use of space and materials and the increased efficiency in distribution and storage that resulted from the rectangular shape, the Tetra Brik soon became Tetra Pak's best seller in Sweden and internationally and paved the way for Tetra Pak's enormous success during the 1970s and onwards.

Tetra Brik Aseptic

The Tetra Brik Aseptic came onto the market in 1969 and soon became Tetra Pak's flagship package. Due to the aseptic technology, there was no longer a need for a

cold chain A cold chain is a low temperature-controlled supply chain network. An unbroken cold chain is an uninterrupted series of refrigerated production, storage and distribution activities, along with associated equipment and logistics, which maintain qu ...

, which made the package economical and suitable for warmer climates, something that greatly expanded potential markets.

Today

The Tetra Brik package family has since been extended and is currently composed of Tetra Brik and Tetra Brik Aseptic in the shapes Base, Square and Edge, ranging from volumes of 80 to 2000 ml and with a number of different caps. Tetra Brik has been distinguished as one of the 20th century's design icons. It featured in the 2004

Museum of Modern Art New York The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of the ...

exhibition ''Humble Masterpieces'' and in the 2011 London Science Museum/

Vitra Design Museum The Vitra Design Museum is a privately owned museum for design in Weil am Rhein, Germany. Former Vitra CEO, and son of Vitra founders Willi and Erika Fehlbaum, Rolf Fehlbaum founded the museum in 1989 as an independent private foundation. The ...

exhibition ''Hidden Heroes – The Genius of Everyday Things''. It is now part of the permanent collection at the MoMA in New York.Tetra Brik
Museum of Modern Art, New York

References

External links

Tetra Pak's Homepage
*How cartons are made

{{packaging Packaging Products introduced in 1963 Swedish inventions Milk containers

Background

Tetra Brik Aseptic

Today

See also

References

Further reading

External links