How Cellophane Changed the Way We Shop for Food
Don’t feel bad if you haven’t spent much time considering cellophane. It’s deliberately transparent, after all. You’re meant to consider whatever it’s wrapping instead.
Yet, it turns out that cellophane has a story worth telling. A new research paper exposes the historical significance of the packaging material, focusing on its key role in the development of self-service merchandising systems in American grocery stores, but also revealing how cellophane manufacturers tried to control the narrative of how women buy food.
“Cellophane changed how people shopped,” says Ai Hisano, the Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in Business History at Harvard Business School and author of the paper Cellophane, the New Visuality, and the Creation of Self-Service Food Retailing.
Hisano is at work on a wide-ranging book about the history of creating the color of foods, which has been the focus of her research during her yearlong study at HBS. She’ll present some of her findings at a June 29 workshop called “Capitalism and the Senses,” which “brings together scholars from various disciplines, including marketing, history, and anthropology, to explore how businesses developed marketing strategies to appeal to consumers’ senses from the nineteenth century to today.”
Cellophane gets an entire chapter in Hisano’s book. As she explains in the paper, cellophane packaging let food vendors manipulate the appearance of foods by controlling the amount of moisture and oxygen that touched a product, thus preventing discoloration. “Cellophane played a big part in how the color of food started to be controlled and standardized,” she says.
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