A tree falls in Alabama.
A package is opened in Illinois.
Two actions at opposite ends of a closely related sequence.
One action collects a basic raw material.
The other completes the sequence with end use of the material.
Between these two extremes are other actions, each related to all, all related to each.
First is material, then structure, research, machinery, graphic design, printing and production, and marketing.
Together, these components comprise the packaging system, a unique development by Container Corporation of America.
A package really starts with a plan, a plan of structure determined by the needs of the product to be packaged.
Product protection and mobility are fundamental.
Size, weight, perishability, storage conditions and distribution patterns, display opportunities and economy must also be taken into account.
In addition to their own highly refined creative and technical skills, CCA structural designers have the cumulative experience of the company's more than three decades of leadership in packaging to draw upon.
Past experience, however, is always in support of, and never a substitute for, new and better solutions to packaging problems.
One of the first decisions the structural designer makes on a new assignment is the material to be used.
The CCA structural designer is not limited to standard boards, normally in good supply and adequate for average applications.
He can go all the way back to the source of his company's wide range of paper boards.
From the virgin -fibred boards produced in Bruton, Alabama, and Fernandina Beach, Florida, to the variety of cylinder grades formed on the machines of the company's northern, western, and midwestern board mills.
The CCA structural designer can rely on special blends of pine and hardwood to produce other special qualities in the board he is specifying.
He can rely also on the availability of wood and paper stock at all times because of the strategic location of company board mills near the sources of supply.
Music First stop on the long trail from wood to paper board is the debarking drum.
From here on, the procedures will involve chemical as well as physical actions.
The approaches to a board mill are marked by a complex array of chutes, tanks, pipes, stacks, and exhausts.
But the inside operations are even more complex.
Music All of these operations contribute directly or indirectly to the extracting and refining of raw wood fibers and their further processing into finished paper boards.
Craft papers, used widely by the company in the manufacture of shipping containers, are made from unbleached pulp and retain the natural color of wood fibers.
Where absolute whiteness is a requirement, fibers are put through elaborate bleaching processes.
The trick is to remove the natural color without removing the natural strength of the fibers.
After passing every test along their route of preparation, the refined fibers are mixed with pure water to a proportion of less than 1 % fibers to more than 99 % water and fed at high speed onto the paper machine.
At the beginning of the process, the fibers can hardly be seen in the fast moving water.
The natural tendency of the fibers to interlock causes them to form quickly into a loose wet sheet, soon capable of supporting itself across the rollers.
Once the sheet is formed, the problem becomes one of drying and finishing.
This is accomplished through several hundred feet of heat and pressure, applied by a succession of pressing, heating, coating, and calendaring rollers, under precise control all the way.
This combination of heat and pressure extracts most of the high proportion of water the paper started with, leaving only the moisture content specified for optimum performance.
Although the solid bleached sulfate board being run on this machine has a naturally smooth pure white surface, its printing qualities can be further refined by the addition of special coatings.
Such coatings have long been a major feature of Container Corporation's paper board developments, with many of the finest quality box boards being formed and coated on the cylinder machines of the company's mills all over the country.
Every finished roll of CCA paper board is tested for a variety of prescribed responses.
High on the list of these tests is principality, the ability of paper board to carry the finest details of multicolor reproduction.
Production tests assure quality control over each run of material.
These tests become more meaningful when they are related to company -wide testing procedures covering total performance of the material at every stage of package production and end use.
Such comprehensive testing is basic to the research and development carried on in several special centers by Container Corporation.
The Container Division Laboratory in Chicago is one such center.
Activities of the Container Division Laboratory relate primarily to the performance of shipping containers.
These activities cover two broad categories of research.
One is concerned with materials and procedures presently in use, while the other deals with new materials and new techniques continuously in development to improve production and performance of shipping containers.
In the course of these operations, Container Division Laboratory specialists have developed both the procedures and instruments for testing, which have become industry standards.
The Concora medium flutter prepares samples for one of two basic tests applied to shipping container material.
The Concora medium test, known in laboratories everywhere as CMT, tests corrugating medium for resistance to flat crush, a critical attribute of corrugated board, affecting many important aspects of container performance.
The Concora liner test, CLT, assesses liner material's resistance to compression, a determining factor in a shipping container's ability to withstand stacking pressures in transit and in storage.
Here again, the testing equipment was designed by laboratory personnel.
A key element in both of these tests is their ability to predict the performance of a material before it is fabricated into containers.
Another Container Division Laboratory development is the torsion tear tester, a device which provides more positive data in an important area of paperboard testing.
The importance of appearance to several aspects of container performance makes ink the object of continued study and research in the Container Division Laboratory.
Printing press roller action, simulated here by the IncoMeter, tests ink tack.
The Weatherometer permits study of ink samples in a range of light and humidity conditions, accurately simulating long exposure in a relatively short period.
Actual proof presses check the response, both of ink to board and board to ink, in close duplication of the demands which printing quality makes on shipping container materials.
Container Division Laboratory is responsible for maintaining the accuracy of all the division's testing equipment.
This activity is a primary factor in maintaining uniformity of quality control, in the 26 plants of the Container Division's domestic operations.
Company -wide circulation of information and data compiled by the Container Division Laboratory is supplemented by reports on all significant structural and merchandising developments.
This information is augmented by frequent coverage in the trade press, both domestic and foreign.
Container Corporation's research activities extend solidly into the field of plastics packaging, through the operations of its GAR mold division testing center.
The work here is applied to exploration and refinement of innovations in plastics packaging.
This installation tests new mold designs for forming squeeze bottles by blow molding techniques.
Some four miles from the GAR mold testing center in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is another establishment dedicated to creative inquiry, the Valley Forge Marketing and Research Center.
This new Container Corporation Center focuses a unique concentration of personnel and facility on a wide range of research activity.
The scope of these activities extends far beyond the testing procedures and controls usually associated with such centers.
Nevertheless, this area of activity is an essential function, and it gets the full attention of the Marketing and Research Center's Technical Laboratory.
The Technical Laboratory works for continuous improvement of the folding carton division's output.
To this end, every aspect of the performance of carton material, structure, and production is tested and evaluated by laboratory specialists.
For some tests, special instruments have been designed, such as this peel tester, which checks lamination strength.
Packaging for frozen food has additional areas of testing.
The way a board responds to quick freezing, for example, and to prolonged storage at below zero temperatures are important factors in its selection for these special assignments.
Results of tests made in the Technical Laboratory, as well as abstracts of relevant material sent in from the field, are distributed to personnel concerned with these activities in the folding carton division's plants and offices everywhere.
It is appropriate here to stress the importance of the exchange of information afforded by the company's system of completely integrated facilities, encompassing some 74 domestic and 52 foreign establishments.
Achievements by our personnel in the foreign plants and mills have added significantly to the company's packaging accomplishments.
With this kind of broad gauge background in material and supporting research, structural designers in all divisions can plan and specify with full confidence in the finished container's ability to perform in every area.
One of these areas of performance is packaging machinery.
Packaging must receive, enclose, and move the product along at production line speeds.
In support of this, the company's structural designers work closely with its machinery development engineers to make certain that each new carton design has the special characteristics required by high -speed packaging machinery.
In some instances, existing machinery can be used or adapted.
In others, new machinery must be developed.
CCA engineers work with established manufacturers to provide exactly what the job requires.
They work also with the company's customers to reduce costs and increase efficiency of packaging line layout.
The result of this cooperative effort is a range of packaging machinery installations covering many product categories in many locations.
They include varieties of vegetables in California.
Fish fillets in Washington.
Frozen pies in Pennsylvania.
Cookies in Illinois.
Textile products in North Carolina.
Bacon, again in California.
And so on and on.
Equipment for automatically closing and sealing large packages is the special responsibility of the container division machinery development department.
This water heater container sealer is a good example of the way packaging of heavy appliances is facilitated by the right equipment.
Other installations bring the advantages of automatic packaging to a great variety of shipping container styles and sizes.
For both containers and cartons, the machinery component of the packaging system makes solid contributions to the speed and efficiency of product distribution.
The packaging system components thus far, material, structure, research, and machinery, work together to produce containers and related equipment to get products safely and efficiently to market.
No matter how far away the market or what method of transport is used.
But getting the product to market is only one of the major responsibilities of the packaging system.
The second area of packaging responsibility is selling the product in the marketplace.
The growing diversity and quantity of products competing for the consumer's interest places the highest premium on the elements of sales appeal.
Since in most instances, the product on sale is visually represented by its package.
It is the package which must communicate the essential appeal of the product on sale.
The basis for the visual appeal of the package is graphic design.
This component of the packaging system is itself a total of several elements.
Color, typography, illustration, design form, texture, and trademark.
The best disposition of these various elements of graphic design depends mostly on the creative intuition of the artist.
Which brings us to the Design Laboratory, home base for the package designers of container corporations.
Branches of the Design Laboratory operate in plants of both the folding carton and container divisions all over the United States as well as in the company's foreign establishments.
Designers of the Design Laboratory's company -wide staff have one primary motivation.
To create individuality and uniqueness and utility of design for each product's package.
To achieve this end, all of the resources of graphic design are skillfully applied.
One of the most valuable of these resources is color.
In the important area of color, Design Laboratory artists enlist the aid of the Color Harmony Manual.
Developed by Container Corporation as a special tool for the choice and application of color.
The Color Harmony Manual is used by business, industrial, and educational organizations all over the world.
The unique array of Design Laboratory instruments helps make objective evaluation of designs and design elements under consideration.
Legibility under varying light conditions and angles of approach is a key area of study.
Other instruments and studies probe further into the design's total ability to move the consumer to buy the product being packaged.
These tests help reduce the chance for errors in creative judgment before the design is put into production.
The outer surface is by no means the limit of design application in packaging.
The nature of certain products encourages special shaping of the package.
Sometimes of the outer structure, sometimes of other containers carried inside the primary package.
This extra dimension of package design gets its most dramatic expression through the Design Laboratory's work with the company's display division.
The variety of dramatic structures produced by the display division greatly expands the product's selling effort with no increase in the retailer's effort.
These structures include coulter displays, floor panels, and floor panels.
Floor stands, spectaculars, and many others, all designed and produced to express the fullest measure of paperboard's great potential for imaginative promotion.
A wall -to -wall, floor -to -ceiling file is the repository for visual material compiled from various research projects.
Selected slides supplement other material prepared for Design Laboratory customer presentations.
In comprehensive presentations, Design Laboratory specialists combine visual and verbal material to summarize the department's research and design conclusions to customer representatives.
It is in such presentations that the case is made for the packaging design program recommended.
The packaging design program is designed to be a After the package is planned, it must be produced, exactly as planned, which is where the printing and production component of the packaging system takes over.
Once the design treatment is approved, it is translated into production drawings, black and white renditions of each color, from which printing plates will be made.
This translation from designer's concept to working drawings is a painstaking step in which the artist must know both the designer's intentions and the printer's requirements.
Ultimately, all of the power and subtlety so carefully worked into the original design must be transferred, first to metal, then to paperboard by high -speed presses.
This progression sets up the requirement for craftsmanship in make -ready of plates and presses.
Craftsmanship of the highest order continues with the careful shaping of special wood blocks and the meticulous setting of steel knives and scoring rules of the dies, which score and cut the folding carton blanks.
The whole complex assembly must register perfectly with the multi -unit carton designs printed on sheets of paperboard.
Careful preparation of plates and dies and continuous inspection and adjustment throughout the press run produces precisely printed, cut, and scored sheets ready for their finishing operations.
As the world's largest industrial printer, Container Corporation has a particular interest in maintaining highest levels of printing quality in all of its carton and container plants.
Basic to production in plants of the Container Division is the combining operation which produces corrugated board, although solid fiber production is also an important material.
Here, the freshly corrugated medium is faced with liner materials fed from rolls and glued to both of its surfaces to form the light, strong board, which is the backbone of shipping container production.
Press make -ready is also a familiar scene in Container Division plants.
This high -speed press represents a recent advance, especially valuable for long -run production.
This special press preprints rolls of liner before the combining operation, which forms the board for the finished container.
The major portion of the company's shipping container printing is produced on other presses.
An interesting change of pace and scene in production operations is affected by the application of decorative material to plastics packaging.
In this instance, to the tops of cosmetics packages in a plant of the Garmel Division.
Certainly one of the most dramatic expressions of the pace of production is represented by the operations of the company's septum fiber can division.
In one smooth progression, the structure is formed.
A string device for easy opening is added.
The label is applied, and individual units are separated.
Metal ends are formed at high speed and attached to finished fiber can bodies in a development which dramatically symbolizes the colorful multiplicity of high production.
High production, which must be directed to a predictable high consumption if the production is to prosper.
It is the importance of measuring and predicting consumer response that makes marketing such a vital component of the packaging system.
One section of Container Corporation's marketing activities is directed primarily toward helping the company's customers sell their products.
Implementing this direction are dealer and distributor interviews, design and advertising analyses, and consumer research.
These projects are the responsibility of the design laboratory.
One of its special operations is the Consumer Research Department in Park Forest, Illinois, a unique community for this kind of comprehensive marketing study.
The department has some 10 ,000 names on file, providing the large sampling essential to responsible inquiry.
A second broader area of marketing activity is concentrated on the development of new markets and the materials, manufacturing processes, and packaging developments required to support new markets.
The Valley Forge Marketing and Research Center is the focal point of the company's operations in this strategic area of marketing.
To help achieve wider understanding of the complexities of marketing, Container Corporation sponsors regional meetings featuring panels of nationally known marketing specialists.
These seminars provide unusual opportunities for valuable exchange of information and experience in marketing.
Typical are these scenes from a seminar held in Arlington, Texas, attended by executives from all over the Southwest.
You have seen the CCA packaging system in plan, in action, in result.
Ultimate goal of the system is to find the shortest route from producer to consumer in point of time, space, and cost.
We are certain that any or all of the components of the CCA packaging system work for the maximum benefit of our customers, whatever their product, whatever their packaging need.
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