Pepsi cans from the 1960s, Air India travel cases, a 1935 cigar box... find all these and more at a unique museum.
Ever thought that the metal can you just finished drinking from and flung off carelessly would be of interest to anyone 100 years from now? Or that the plastic wrapper of the detergent you use is a collectible that you must keep carefully?
If you didn’t, then perhaps you should visit the packaging museum at Manjushree Technopack’s PET bottle and pre-form manufacturing facility at Bammasandra in south Bangalore. The result of its CEO Vimal Kedia’s passion for packaging, the technologies used, and its evolution over the centuries, this unique museum houses 4,000 artefacts — some of them over a century old — that Kedia has collected from all over.
These include metal tins of Parry’s and Nutrine confectionery, Amulspray and Lactogen milk powder, a Philips radio of yore, a bottle of VAT 69, Kodak camera cases (from the early cardboard ones to leather, then wood and Rexine...and back to cardboard today, but of a much better quality), an old Army hipflask, a wooden cigar box from 1935, tea boxes and so on. There’s also a Ronson hair dryer from the 1960s, which is as big as a vacuum cleaner and required the user to put her head under a hot cap. Another curiosity is an Air India travel case that the airline once used to give to every woman passenger. Don’t miss the old Kenwood mixer placed inside a papier mache box — there was no thermocole or bubble wrap in those days, explains Kedia.
The museum was set up in 2003, on the suggestion of one of Kedia’s FMCG clients from the US, but it was thrown open to the public only recently.
Browsing the exhibits at the museum, one gets an insight into the world of consumer goods and into evolving consumer tastes and lifestyles. Attractive packaging goes a long way in helping sell a product. Companies know this, says Kedia, and “go in for rebranding every two years or so. This involves change in packaging too.”
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Kedia is clearly an authority on the subject. Soda bottles, he explains, initially came with a marble fitted tightly inside so that the fizz did not escape. Then came bottles with a ceramic cap and a lever that acted as a tight lock. These were followed by bottles with the cork-crown.
Technology, particularly the advancements of the last 100 years, has greatly changed packaging. Over the last few years especially, more sturdy and resilient materials have been developed.
Coke and Pepsi cans from the 1960s, for instance, had the aluminium tins welded on the sides — a reason why the cans had a lower shelf life, explains Kedia. Today, the beverage cans are extruded through a single mould.