Food Preservation in First Industrial Evolution

The Industrial Revolution, which took place from 1760 to 1840, started in Great Britain.As the industrial
revolution opened greater transport opportunities, food items could be shipped to varying destinations.
Villages no longer needed to be self sufficient, they could now focus on growing the crops that best
suited their land and climate and trade with farmers growing different crops. As the transport grew even
further, so did the quantity of people that were accessible to trade with. No longer were communities
limited to localised trade. Food could now be transported and traded over large distances. Some food
items were suitable for long distance trading as they had a long storage life, like soups and salted meats.
Other items were perishable and needed to be preserved. There became a need to develop a food
storage system that would enable food items to be handled and transported without compromising the
food. It was these circumstances that lead to the development and use of food canning.

The idea of the tin can first came into being when the French government decided to offer a cash reward
for anyone who could come up with a cheap and effective method of preserving food. In 1809 Nicolas
Appert observed that food cooked in air-tight glass jars wouldn’t spoil unless it leaked. Why the food was
kept edible wasn’t discovered until 50 years later when Louis Pasteur (the discoverer of Pasteurisation)
demonstrated the roll bacteria played in food expiry.

in 1772 the Dutch Navy developed an earlier technique of preserving food similar to the tin can. The
Dutch would catch salmon, clean it, and boil it in brine and the place it in tin-plated iron boxes

During the Industrial Revolution, factory workers often ate leftover pie at lunch. They would pack it in a
tin pail and eat it cold, much like we do today — but minus the ice cream or whipped cream on top. In
fact, pies were so common that pie stalls were set up outside the factories.