SIC 2032 Canned Specialties

Contenidos

• NAICS CODE(S).
• INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT.
• BACKGROUND AND DEVELOPMENT.
• Canned Soups.
• Baby Foods.
• Ethnic Foods.
• CURRENT CONDITIONS.
• INDUSTRY LEADERS.
• Campbell Soup Company.
• Gerber Products Company.
• FURTHER READING.

SIC 2032

This category covers establishments primarily engaged in canning specialty products, such as baby foods, nationality specialty foods, and soups, except seafood.

NAICS CODE(S)

311422

Specialty Canning

311999

All Other Miscellaneous Food Manufacturing

INDUSTRY SNAPSHOT

Canned foods suffered a decline at the beginning of the 1990s as consumers turned to fresh and frozen products in a search of healthier foods. However, thanks to new nutritional labeling and canned products that featured lower salt and lighter syrups, that trend showed signs of reversing by the latter part of the decade. Soup led the category in sales, with condensed soup as the best-selling canned food item on the shelf. Ethnic foods were the fastest growing aspect of the industry. By 2002, all sectors of the canned food industry were reporting growth.

BACKGROUND AND DEVELOPMENT

Cans have unquestioned advantages as food containers. Hermetically sealed, they protect their contents from contamination as well as prevent undesirable fluctuations in moisture content; the absorption of oxygen, gases, and undesirable odors; and exposure to light. In addition, they allow for high-speed filling, sealing, and casing, and retailers can display them easily and attractively.

Compared to other methods of food preservation, canning is a recent development. Freezing goes back to the ice ages, and even smoking and drying were used before recorded history. Canning did not come along until the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Nicholas Appert, a French confectioner and chef, theorized in 1795 that if food is heated in a container with no air in it, the food will keep. He worked on his theorem for 14 years, cooking foods in cork-stoppered bottles in boiling water. Sent around the world on sailing ships, Appert's preserved fruits and vegetables remained wholesome. Eventually an English merchant, Peter Durand, would develop the use of tin canisters in 1810.

The first U.S. patent for tin containers was granted in 1825. At first, cans were made by hand; even an expert in the process could turn out only five or six an hour. The term canning came to mean sterilizing food by heat and sealing it in airtight containers, either metal or glass, at an individual's home or in a processing plant.

The Civil War accelerated the need for canned foods and, by the war's end, production of canned foods had increased six times—and Americans had learned to trust them. The importance of canned foods to the military was underscored again during World War II, when two-thirds of the food supplies for the U.S. and Allied forces came in cans. When the Japanese capture of Malaya cut off important sources of tin, conservation of the metal in the United States became critical. At the same time, glass containers, which had always been used for some foods, were used to replace tin cans.

Technological advances in the canning industry accelerated after the Civil War. The...