Yesterday’s newspaper (7/2/25) revealed that the Del Monte Food Company filed for bankruptcy (Chapter 11). Is the Age Of The Tin Can over?
Tinned foods have been with us since a patent for tin cans was recorded in the UK in 1811. The older generations of this nation were raised in large part on readily available, inexpensive foods preserved in tin cans. Cans were made of steel, but were “tinned” on the interior with a very thin layer of tin metal (Tin or Sn) which is a gray, non-reactive soft metal. The tin layer protected the steel metal can from reacting with food acids, and the consumer from chemically altered foods. Yes the tin did slowly dissolve and react to some extent with food, but tin is inert and as solution of tin ions into food occurred these did help to maintain food color and perhaps texture. Modern cans are often lined with plastics or other even less “healthful” inert interiors.
Canning preserved foods almost indefinitely. One recent story supporting this reveals that a team of Arctic explorers discovered a 60 year old food cache near Centrum Lake in Greenland’s northerly arctic desert. The cans were left behind by an early US Geological Survey team. The modern discoverers, collected the tins and on the way back to camp consumed the sixty-year old canned food, which was comprised of meatballs, and beans. The courageous explorers recorded them as “still delicious and edible” (See Nat Geo 2015). Τhough I would caution such explorers about the dangers of botulism.
In the “tin can age” everyone had a dangerous looking, rusted, dagger type “can opener” ready at hand, to punch down into the top rim of the metal cylinder and then raggedly open ones favorite can of baked beans, tuna, condensed milk, or a wide variety of soups, meats, fish, scrapple, “Polish” cooked hams, and nutritious stews.
A summer beach party on the Jersey Shore or Long Island’s Atlantic beach was not complete without a fire and a cook-out featuring baked beans and frankfurters on a stick. The fire was fueled using sun-drenched, dry and sandy drift wood. Baked beans were cooked right in their tin cans. The cans were arrayed on the upwind side of the fire. The bean cans, with their sharp jagged tops opened (often with the ministrations of a sturdy folding knife) were bent back to expose the beans and to act as “handle” for removal after the beans were bubbling hot. The “dogs” were speared onto long thin sticks, cut from drift wood branches. Each beach goer had one to spear their frank and broil it to their desired crispiness. Ahh… I can smell smoke and the cooked beans, feel the warm land breeze on my face and almost see my old friends in the red glow of the blazing beach fire right now.
During this author’s childhood, the tin can was king. In my grandfather’s rural Long Island homestead of the 1950s, there were no prepared foods, no frozen foods, no plastic containers, and no refrigeration. The only cold things were found in an old brass and wood framed ice box, where a few food items —a bottle of milk, a roughly pried- open can of evaporated milk, a tub of butter, and an old Campbell soup can half full of hard bacon drippings. In the coldest spot a cut of meat or fish lay wrapped in butcher paper— laying on top of the big block of blue-gray ice, draped in damp newspapers.
Granma’s pantry, was packed full with tin cans, bright with colorful pictures of tomatoes, vegetables, green beans, spinach, fruits and the famous red and yellow crest of the Del Monte company. My favorites were that company’s fruit cocktail, as well as pears in syrup, and especially, big sweet cling peaches each luscious slice sporting a bright red clingy-part close to where the pit had been, all in thick sweet syrup. Kids loved that syrup and sweet fruit.
The rest of the pantry was home to a bag flour, green coffee beans, a slab of bacon draped in muslin, a dusty dark box of Long Island potatoes, and papery skinned yellow onions. A few dried herbs were hung by a nail. Life and foods were much simpler then.
Once tinned cans served the good purpose of preserving and delivering nutritious food, the containers—empty tins—were not just tossed into a trash barrel. Tin cans had a life of their own after they were opened and their contents consumed.
Almost everyone saved stuff and the old food container had a second life for this purpose. They were ready for use for dry storage as soon as they were emptied. Granpa’s shed had a whole wall of rough cut wood shelves with neat rows of old cans each filled with some useful saved items. Like the tin cans themselves, old nails, rusted or bent, wood screws, old hinges, scraps of wrought iron, nuts and bolts of various sizes, fish hooks, lead fish weights, were all kept in cans for some not yet envisioned time when they might be needed.
Gifted tinkerers who knew what tin snips were and how to use them could cut the tin cans open, flatten them and make other useful items. Grandpa made a perfectly lovely rooster-shaped wind vane for the top of the barn, and a broom-dust scoop for grandma. As a youngster I made a candle holder, out of two tin cans with the upper part punched full of holes. So at night the candle light shone through like stars in the sky.
Del Monte, as noted above has filed for bankruptcy! The “tin can grocery” giant was first seen on shelves in Monterey, California in way back in 1886. From that time the fruit and vegetable giant, “Del (from) Monte” making good on its business motto: “the gold standard of goodness” kept American families fed and its business thriving for 139 years. With nearly $3 billion dollars invested in flourishing companies such as: Contadina, Kitchen Basics, College Inn, and S&W this former “giant of groceries” is in financial trouble that appears can only be solved by restructuring its debt. What are its problems?
Since 2017 when Del Monte was sold to Nutri Asia, the old US firm has stumbled. The new owners seem to ignore the “grocery of America’s” long US history, its devoted workforce and look only to strip its components apart to seek sale and profit in its demise.
But the truth is that Del Monte does have significant debt. Today Del Monte debt service has risen as a result of recent much higher interest rates put in place to control a previous administration’s staggering high inflation. The fall in sales during the pandemic led to unsold inventory and higher storage costs. The impact of high inflation during the Biden era also altered consumer spending habits, encouraging consumers to abandon Del Monte’s premium canned foods for cheaper “house brands”. Also the rising price of steel (for cans) perhaps due to Trump tariff regulations will bring steel making home, but add to costs and decrease profits for Del Monte.
But most importantly it is the unrelenting shift of consumer demand away from canned foods. Consumers use less and less tinned foods..relying more on: “take out”, prepared and “ready to eat”—just heat and eat- packaged products, as well as vast quantities and variety of frozen foods. And as well, modern consumers have become advocates of fresh produce and meats. Today the tin can is passe’!
The tin can’s ability to keep food nutritious and water potable almost indefinitely and with little special attention to storage conditions, recommends it for special purposes. Those who enjoy the more rustic life of camping know of its practicality on a camping trip. (Though not for backpackers!) Then too survivalists pack away tons of canned goods underground for the uncertain future. So who knows?
Future archeologists will surely find artifacts of our “make and throw away” era. No doubt there will be vast quantities of flattened and rusted cans in some historic archeological dig of the future. Perhaps dug up on the outskirts of long-gone urbanized areas. The walls of these dig pits will feature thin reddish colored soil horizons—or occupation levels marked by iron rust stains. Samples of the soil will reveal evidence of the element Tin in soil samples. This test will confirm that the horizon as a definitive chronomarker for the “Age of the Tin Can”. The “Can Age” will be an era dated by these future archeologists from about the late 19th Century to the mid 21st Century (as we would call it).
At a soil level just above the “Age of Cans” these future historic investigators will most likely record massive amounts of aluminum and plastic. These crushed by weight, but still intact and shiny artifacts, often with printed or engraved images and hieroglyphs of a bygone era will serve the future historians as chronomarkers for the Age of the Aluminum Can. Much of that soil level will likely be removed and disappear as a result of being exploited by workers extracting aluminum (rare in the future) and plastic from the soil.
Above that level? ………”unknown… radioactive too dangerous— can-not access data”.
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