SUGAR PACKET And The Legend Behind Them
Hello everyone today we’re going to walk you through a very popular myth that surrounds sugar sticks.
Sugar packets... those little pieces of packaging heaven that make our lives a little bit sweeter every time. The preferred delivery method for single sugar servings; sugar packets were invented to replace sugar cubes, bowls, and dispensers commonly available in restaurants and coffeehouses. Their primary goal was to help consumers sweeten their drinks in a neater, more sanitized, and portion-controlled manner.
#1 - The need
In a time when restaurants used sugar cubes, bowls, or heavier glass dispensers to which the lack of hygiene contributed to the formation of sugar sachets inside, a man named Benjamin Eisenstadt came up with the idea of packing each sugar dose individually, using disposable packets.
Benjamin first came across this issue while operating a cafeteria across the Brooklyn Navy Yard where one of his most cumbersome daily tasks involved refilling and unclogging all the cafeteria’s sugar dispensers.
#2 - The invention
The end of the war turned the Navy Yard into a ghost town leaving Eisenstadt with very few clients and a business in decline in his hands; To turn his luck around, Eisenstadt would end up closing the cafeteria and turning it into a tea bag factory. The association with this industry, made Ben realize the potential for the machines used to pack tea bags leading him to idealize that if they could pack tea into individual bags, they could also pack sugar into individual packets.
And that’s how, in the mid-1940s, a revolution in the way restaurants and coffee houses presented sugar to their clients began.
#3 - A missed opportunity
Eisenstadt’s enthusiasm led him to proudly present his operation to other big players in the sugar industry, even before considering the hypothesis of patenting his own idea. This would later turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes he has made/ when most of the companies to whom he proudly showed his factory around/ ended up setting up their own sugar-packet operations, avoiding paying any royalties to Eisenstadt in the process.
Eisenstadt’s sugar sachet design was not perfect. The squared packages and packing method allowed for air and, therefore humidity, to get trapped inside leading sugar to become compacted over time.
Despite this, the adoption of sugar sachets across restaurants, coffee and tea houses around the world did not slow down. Their sizes, shapes and weights also differ widely among them; with the typical American sachet containing around 2 to 4 grams of sugar and the Poland ones topping up at an amazing 5 to 10 grams each.
This fact however, does not pull the United States from the top spot of the list of countries that have the highest average individual sugar consumption with each American consuming the equivalent of 42 sachets of sugar per day.
#4 - Incremental improvement
With time, new forms of disposable sugar packaging emerged being the so-called sugar stick the most common ones around today. These have revealed to be more economical to produce than Eisenstadt’s squared ones with the added bonus of allowing sugar to be packaged without any air trapped within.
Despite the fact they had an anonymous inventor, sugar sticks have been designed to be opened using one hand only. This task should be accomplished by breaking the stick in half to allow for their content to conveniently pour out while leaving a single piece of paper behind.
#5 - The myth
Oh and don’t worry if you don’t use the sugar stick like it was intended to; in fact, it is so uncommon for people to do so that it started an urban legend around the death of its inventor. The legend goes by that the sugar stick’s inventor committed suicide after realizing no one knew and did not understand how his product was meant to be used.
There is however, a big lesson to take from all of this: when designing for other people, what is obvious for you, might not be for them!
What started as an aesthetic and most importantly hygienic product in the 1940s, is nowadays a must have and ominous product in all homes, restaurants, and coffeehouses.
From the need to the legend that originated around it, going through its invention, missed opportunity and incremental improvement; these were the top 5 facts about sugar packets that you were probably not aware of.