North Bay Nugget e-edition

The plastic FANTASTIC

Memories of sales parties and ‘Wonder Bowls’ as Tupperware teeters toward extinction

ANDRE RAMSHAW

It’s kept our drinks from spilling, our noodles fresh, our eggplant from expiring. But how many of us stop to thank the man who helped add “leftovers” to our culinary lexicon?

Without Tupperware — today facing a serious threat to its survival — and its plastic tubs, beakers and bash-proof bowls, we’d still be wrapping fish in newspapers and chucking last night’s uneaten linguine in the bin. Alas, burdened by a huge debt load, there is “substantial doubt” about the 77-year-old firm’s ability to continue as a going concern, it has said.

Earl S. Tupper, the New Hampshire chemist who launched his namesake plastic wares in 1947, must surely be turning in his grave. He died in 1983 at the age of 76.

A born tinkerer, Tupper toiled for hours at home after his shifts at Dupont trying to turn early plastic — which was uniformly brittle, ugly and malodorous — into a product that would appeal to the masses. The result was the double-sealed Wonder Bowl, a deceptively simple invention that would soon earn its place as a kitchen staple.

Plastics had proven their worth in the war, not least in providing soldiers somewhere to keep their soap bars and cigarettes dry, but Tupper was determined to unlock its potential on the home front.

Using a new kind of plastic from oily polyethylene slag, he created what he called “Poly-t” — and a revolution was born.

Despite being key in shunting plastics from prosaic to profound, Tupper’s Wonder Bowl failed to bowl over skeptical shoppers when it first landed on department store shelves. The postwar make-do-and-mend homemaker was perfectly content to store leftovers with whatever came to hand, shower caps being a popular option. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the late 1940s plastic homeware was dismissed as too high-tech, too fiddly and too foreign.

The Wonder Bowl could “withstand almost anything,” was praised as an exemplar of chic design and was hailed by House Beautiful magazine as “fine art for 39 cents” (about $7 in today’s money).

Yet as Business Week has noted: “In retail stores, Tupperware fell flat on its face.”

Tupper, who was set on becoming a millionaire by the age of 30, found his saviour in the form of Bonnie Wise, a feisty former advice columnist and secretary who quickly realized the stumbling block to sales was not Tupper’s invention but its marketing. What the Wonder Bowl — and its twostep ‘burping ’ airtight lid — needed was a direct appeal to the women to whom it was targeted. Enter the Tupperware Party. Drawing on the principles espoused by Stanley Home Products, the home parties were an immediate success, retooling Tupper’s “millionaire line” of tumblers, nesting bowls and storage tubs — in an array of dazzling yellows, oranges, blues and greens — from flop to lifestyle brand that fired the aspirations of the postwar North American middle class.

Wise’s sales events, first called ‘Poly-t parties’ in a nod to their origins, managed to achieve the unthinkable, says Alison Clarke, author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America — they “glamorized dull housework.”

Speaking to the BBC, she said: “It was a brilliantly designed product that was made magical by the way it was sold.”

More than a master class in sales pitches, the Tupperware parties were also the launch pad for a new breed of working women, allowing homemakers to earn extra cash as young families gravitated to the burgeoning suburbs.

They paved the way, too, for what we now call “side hustles,” particularly for women.

In 1951, Tupper abandoned in-store sales entirely and sales soared through the ensuing decade. New product lines such as revolving serving trays and ice cream moulds were introduced, while the sales pitches got more dramatic: tossing a sealed Wonder Bowl full of grape juice around suburban living rooms — to show off the strength of its seal — was a common party trick.

As the first general sales manager of the Tupperware division, Wise went from success to success, becoming in 1954 the first woman to feature on the cover of Business Week magazine.

“Tupperware in this period has been compared to a religion,” says Kat Eschner, writing in the Smithsonian Magazine, “with Wise its chief priest.”

But if T-ware was a religion, the great schism was not far behind.

Wise, the woman who transformed American retailing as the face of Tupperware, and publicity-shy Tupper, the man who changed forever our view of plastics, had a spectacular fallout in 1958. The all-male board sacked Wise that year, reportedly unhappy with her feminine brand emphasis, while Tupper later sold the company to Rexall for $16 million before decamping to Costa Rica, his millionaire ambitions firmly secured many times over. Tupperware survived the turmoil, unveiling “ethnic” items such as the Tortilla Keeper and jazzy touches like the Astro Bowl and Carousel Caddy. Meanwhile, its party concept was expanded to more than 100 countries, including Canada and the U.K., where even the late Queen was reportedly a fan.

“People always say, ‘Oh, the Queen must eat off gold plates with gold knives and forks,’” recounts Darren Mcgrady, who worked as the Queen’s private chef in the 1980s, speaking with the Daily Mail. “But at Balmoral (one of the royal residences), she’d eat fruit from a plastic yellow Tupperware container.”

Home parties remained the primary sales tool into the 1970s but in 1988 catalogue shopping was offered for the first time and the product line got a facelift in 1990. However, the company has been accused of failing to change with the times as more women work full-time away from the home and the digital marketplace supplants direct marketing.

“In this digital world, that faceto-face model is no longer as relevant,” author Clarke points out.

The writing was on the wall by the 1980s as Tupperware’s patents expired, allowing a flood of competitors to offer similar products at cheaper prices. And while the Florida-based company must be lamenting the “Party’s Over” headlines given its recent travails, its founding father can be assured of his place in history.

Earl S. Tupper, who “revolutionized the role of plastics in the American home” and was “instrumental in improving the image of plastics among consumers,” was inducted in 1976 by the Plastics Hall of Fame.

Yep, there is such a thing — and any time we reach into the back of the fridge for a container of dayold pasta, we’ll always be grateful.

Tupperware in (the 1950s) has been compared to a religion, with (Bonnie) Wise its chief priest.

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2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-03T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://eeditionnugget.pressreader.com/article/281719798971763

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