The Eggshell’s Outer Shell

Egg carton design: Something the federal government had a stake in

Depending on where you look, you will see people credited with inventing the egg carton in either the late 18th century or early 19th century. One look at Google Patents suggests that the amount of prior out there makes it difficult to say that any one person gave us the modern egg carton, with its caressing slots protecting some sensitive cargo.

But no matter who came up with the distinctive contoured shape of the egg carton, it is clear that the invention was an evolution made by many hands.

In fact, once the egg carton was in wide use, the emphasis on “many hands” shaped how cartons were distributed. Like dairy crates, the topic of a single-serving site I haven’t updated in a long time, egg producers have traditionally gotten support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency, still with us (for now), has periodically released guides about how to ship eggs to both consumers and in commercial settings.

One such document, which was an excellent discovery, was the 1958 booklet United States Standards for Shell Egg Packs, a booklet that goes through various shipping containers and consumer package types for shell eggs:

These standards are issued primarily for the use of producers, packers, distributors, and other egg handlers as a guide in making purchases of new shell egg containers and inner packing materials and as a basis for the development of uniform specifications for transportation and purchasing agencies.

As different containers and inner packing materials are found to be satisfactory and practical for use in packing chicken, turkey, and duck eggs, they will be added to these standards in future revisions.

This was not the USDA’s first rodeo with egg shipment recommendations. The 1930 USDA booklet Construction and Packing of an Egg Case breaks down its recommendations to egg sellers: essentially, focus on appearance. From the booklet:

The price that a buyer will pay for a case of eggs in a market is influenced not only by the appearance and quality of the eggs, but by the soundness and appearance of the package. It is important, therefore, that producers, packers, and shippers of eggs employ the methods that give best results with containers, in regard to the construction of the case and the use of packing materials—fillers and flats. As an increasing number of producers pack and ship eggs, either individually or by groups, it is important that they use the best methods. The egg-receiving room of any produce firm that receives miscellaneous shipments of eggs direct from producers suggests the tremendous losses in the industry resulting from careless and indifferent methods of packing and the use of unsound packages and packing materials.

Of course, when the federal government builds standards for something (recent acts notwithstanding) that reflects how an industry has matured. And by the time the 1930 booklet had come about, the agriculture sector had been working on the egg carrier problem for 70 years.

Eventually, one of these inventors was going to figure it out.

The case against claiming there was a single “inventor” of the egg carton

One troubling thing about modern inventor storytelling is how one person often gets the lion’s share of the credit for inventing the thing. Which is not to say they didn’t do something innovative, but it often erases the history around the object, when in reality, it was the culmination of numerous people working nights and weekends, working on the same problem everyone else was. And the fragility of eggs, let’s face it, was a huge problem.

The first patent filing I can find related to the storage and delivery of eggs is the egg holder, produced by Francis Arnold in 1855. Arnold had invented a wooden briefcase for holding eggs, complete with elastic handles, as was apparently the style at the time.

By the above improvement, eggs may be safely transported in boxes without the trouble and expense of packing them with straw, which is now done, and which does not prevent them from breaking when the boxes and casks are roughly handled. The cost of the clamps is trifling, and they may be placed in as common or cheap boxes as those now used for the purpose.

(Admit it, if you walked into a party with an egg briefcase, everyone would know what’s up.)

Later inventions on this front, such as W. Bramwell’s “Improvement in Egg Carriers,” relied on wood framing to deliver eggs, and likely would feel very bulky by today’s standards.

There were many patent filings just for egg boxes or egg crates during this era—far too many to cover here, though there were hundreds. Some held just a few eggs. Some held many. But the dominant theme was essentially, “we’re trying to figure out how to deliver these fragile things without breaking them.”

The weirdest one I found—created by A.M. Blinval in 1864—involves individually wrapping and tying the eggs in a series of paper envelopes, in a shape not dissimilar to an onion.

Given the amount of work that went into finding egg storage mechanisms, it was perhaps inevitable that one design would emerge victorious. Dozens of inventors of all stripes worked on this problem.

Which is honestly why I feel uncomfortable crediting this invention to just one person. But I will note that the person most credited for this invention is a man from British Columbia named Joseph Coyle. His design, called the Coyle Safety Carton, is made of cardboard that essentially “wraps” around the egg.

Coyle, a newspaper publisher, learned about the problem after overhearing a conversation between a hotel owner and a farmer. That knowledge of newsprint presumably went into his eventual design, the Coyle Egg Safety Carton. The invention, patented in 1918, leaned on something many prior designs missed: an egg-hugging shape.

“The object of my invention is to provide a simple, inexpensive, and safe receptacle for the carrying and handling of eggs, in which the eggs are suspended and supported clear of each other, so that the breakage is reduced to the minimum, and in which receptacle is included a handy and convenient means for lifting out the eggs when desired,” Coyle wrote in the patent filing.

This design presumably set the stage for later egg-hugging designs, but other innovations were making themselves known. Just a couple years later, inventor Morris Koppelman came up with a design that was much more minimal, but grabbed the eggs at the top and bottom. A 1933 patent got even closer to the design we’re all familiar with. In many ways, what we got effectively combined Koppelman’s design and Coyle’s design.

(The egg carton design with the solid top and contoured bottom didn’t appear until roughly the 1950s, at which time multiple inventors were working on the issue. Here’s one credited to Ruth M. Schilling, which imagines the top section being dedicated to advertising.)

But even then, I struggle to say these designs are the final ones. There’s a mention of an egg crate design, similar to Coyle’s, in a 1913 issue of Popular Mechanics, and a design from the Self Locking Carton Company, patented in 1914 on a 2011 filing, was granted to Edwin R. Ashton. By 1919, this company was heavily advertising in industry trade publications.

And none of these designs ultimately match the highly contoured paper-pulp design people generally associate with egg cartons. Those didn’t appear until the 1950s. (More on that in a second.)

I think anyone saying “this person invented the egg carton” is looking for a hero’s narrative when the facts suggest something less clear-cut.

The early battle over polystyrene egg containers: A three-paragraph story vs. a giant ad

In recent years, expanded polystyrene foam, often confused for Styrofoam, has been heavily targeted by environmentalists for its lack of recyclability, making its single-use tendencies particularly frustrating.

So, while it’s less common these days to see polystyrene egg cartons, in part because the containers have been banned in some states, they are around if you know where to look. But what if I told you that the tension around polystyrene egg cartons existed almost from the beginning?

The polystyrene egg carton format made its public debut in the late 1960s, and it was only on the market a few years before it started making consumers mad.

The movement kicked off thanks to a concerned citizen who attended a pollution seminar at a university. Evansville, Indiana-based writer Mary Frances Baugh kicked off the movement after attending an environmental seminar at a nearby university and reaching out to nearby grocery stores. The result? She got two stores to drop polystyrene containers for their eggs, just like that. Baugh, who later became a published author and contributed articles to the Evansville Courier and Press, was credited by one store owner, John Holdren of the Great Scot food chain, for making a great argument against the containers.

“Her reasoning made sense, and quite frankly I agree with her—we must start somewhere in ending pollution,” he told the newspaper.

She wasn’t alone. Soon, other people from across the country were making similar observations about the environmental impact of egg cartons. Margaret Adams, a Roanoke, Virginia resident, noticed how egg cartons would take up a lot of extra space in her trash can—and reached out to her local grocery store to see if an egg carton exchange program was possible.

And in 1972, the Red Owl grocery store chain, responding to customer concerns about polystyrene, did an analysis of the two primary kinds of egg containers, and made a call:

“Pulp and poly foam have a similar impact on the environment in all the above categories, with one exception,” a column, which appeared in the chain’s newspaper advertisement for The Minneapolis Star in 1972, stated. “The manufacture of polystyrene egg cartons consumes a significant amount of nonrenewable fossil fuel compared to pulp cartons. This difference is largely accounted for by the fact that 30% to 60% of pulp used is from recycled paper.”

Hard to argue with that, especially given that the fuel crisis was kicking off around this time, but the packaging industry was trying. The thing that made me want to write about this specific wrinkle came in April 1971, when the Dolco Packaging Corporation, a major manufacturer of polystyrene egg containers, published a wild argument defending its business practices in a huge newspaper ad.

“Then, mysteriously, certain people who probably meant well, began to attack the plastic egg carton without much regard for the facts,” the wild screed says. “And in the name of ‘ecology.’”

The really bizarre thing is that I can’t figure out why they ran the ad in the two Spokane newspapers at the time. It didn’t run anywhere else, just in Spokane. And Dolco doesn’t seem to have run any similar ads in the months before or after.

There was a tiny story in the Spokane News-Review, published three weeks prior, that announced that the local Safeway was using biodegradable egg cartons. However, that in no way deserved a giant ad in two local newspapers in response. Dolco had seemingly implied that a grocery chain slandered their entire business.

It was a three-paragraph news story, published on page 6 of that day’s newspaper, barely even a blip. And the packaging industry’s response was to take out the largest possible ad, weeks after the original story, suggesting a conspiracy was afoot.

Certain grocery chains have gained unmeasured free publicity by making loud public protestations against plastic egg cartons while they go right on quietly selling high-profit products packaged in a variety of materials that are indeed far more damaging to our ecology than either paper pulp or plastic foam egg cartons.

Don’t print that I’m mad in the newspaper, indeed.

If this is how they respond to Safeway getting a three-column-inch news story in a local newspaper, it’s no wonder how the plastics industry eventually lost the war over polystyrene egg cartons. (However, at least in Washington State, it took 53 years for the war to be totally lost—the ban on polystyrene packaging only took effect last year.)

Oh well. At least there’s meat packaging.