Canned Food Marks 200th Anniversary

The industry grew using automated processes and by the beginning of the 20th century there were more than 2,000 canneries filling 600 million cans a year. It has since grown into a worldwide industry making more than 400 billion canned food and drinks products a year.

Aug 25 2010 --- The history of canned foods is precisely 200 years old. On August 25, 1810, a Londoner by the name of Peter Durand was granted a British patent No 3372 for preserving animal and vegetable foods that described the use of tinplate containers.

Two years later, the patent was sold for £1,000 to partners Bryan Donkin and John Hall who set up the first canmaking factory and cannery at Bermondsey in South London to produce canned foods for the British Admiralty.

The health of crews on expeditions was improved by the canned foods, and those later discovered in the 1930s were found to be safe to eat, having lain untouched for more than a century.

In North America, Thomas Kensett and Ezra Daggett set up a food preserving company in 1819 using glass bottles. Once tinplate cans were adopted the technique became more commercially successful, with canning plants for products such as condensed milk being set up in the 1850s. The industry grew using automated processes and by the beginning of the 20th century there were more than 2,000 canneries filling 600 million cans a year.

It has since grown into a worldwide industry making more than 400 billion canned food and drinks products a year.

But Peter Durand didn’t invent canned food. Frenchman Nicolas Appert started experimenting with the preservation of foods in 1804, using sealed glass bottles. In 1809, he had succeeded and presented his findings to the French government, but it required that his findings be published. His findings appeared in 1810 under the title L'Art de Conserver pendant plusieurs années toutes les Substances Animales et Végétales (The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances) and Appert was presented with a 12,000 Franc award. He was also awarded a gold medal from the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (Society for the Encouragement of National Industry).

Appert used the award to finance his canning factory at Massy, south of Paris, which continued to operate until 1933. In France, he is celebrated by the canning process being called Appertisation.

Another Frenchman, Phillipe de Girard, has been shown to have first demonstrated canned foods at the Royal Society in London in January 1811. In registering the patent, Durand had acted as an agent for de Girard during the time when France was at war with England.


The Canmaker, the leading business magazine for the global metal packaging industry, has been serialising the history of canmaking. Key canmaking facts include:

• The first tinplate cans made in 1812 by Donkin & Hall were fabricated manually using soldering for the side seams and the lids.
• Rolled tinplate had been available from mills in south Wales since the end of the 18th century and had already been used for making tin boxes and utensils.
• The first commercial can opener was patented by Londoner Robert Yates in 1855.
• Cans of the type used now were first made with rolled seams in Europe in the 1880s and later adopted in the US with automated techniques. They were called ‘sanitary’ cans because only the exterior of the side seam was soldered.
• Following the development of internal coatings, cans for beer were first produced commercially in the US in 1935 for the Krueger Brewery, 75 years ago this year.
• Soldered cans started to be phased out in the 1960s, being replaced with welded cans.
• The first aluminium cans for beer were produced by Coors in Colorado in January 1959.
• Ring pulls appeared on cans in 1960, following the development of the riveted tab by Ernie Fraze in Ohio.
• Easy-open ends for heat-processed foods, developed by Carnaud in France and Metal Box in England, started being used at the end of the 1980s.