If you’ve ever browsed the shelves of your grocery store looking for a specific item you probably know that certain foods always look a certain way on the store shelves. For example salad dressing comes in a bottle tortilla chips come in a crinkly bag and tuna comes in a small round can.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 Factora | 2023-08-14 19:51:49 |  73,736 Views |
How is canned tuna made?
You know what ready-made products look like but have you ever wondered why they’re packaged the way they are? For some ingredients the reason for the packaging may be obvious (and for others it may never be — like the reasons flour is sold in a paper bag) but for something like canned tuna it’s a familiarity that’s neither questioned nor understood. It turns out that the origins of canned tuna say a lot about why it’s sold the way it is.
According to legend canned tuna was born out of necessity — a California fisherman named Albert P. Halfhil realized that sardines were getting harder to catch so he filled his empty sardine cans with the tuna he caught. Those short round tuna cans we're used to seeing only exist because that's how sardines were packaged when canned tuna was invented.
In the early 1900s the California coast was teeming with sardines but by 1903 problems like overfishing and rough seas caused the source to dry up. Halfhil who made his living fishing for sardines had to improvise. So he turned to the second most common fish to catch in the area: tuna. He began filling sardine cans with tuna which helped him keep making money and within a decade or so he was reportedly selling 400000 cases a year—up from 700 cases the first year he tried it.
