They also woke up to benefits of publicity. The Canned Food Alliance, a partnership between can manufacturers and food processors, has struck agreements with celebrity chef Jacques Pepin and Oprah Winfrey's personal trainer, Bob Greene, to promote the can's convenience and nutritional appeal.
Some of the canning industry's innovations, such as the easy-to-open lids, are widespread. Campbell's Soup and Progresso brand soup, for example, now use ring-pull lids, which do not require a can opener. Industry executives estimate that such pull-tabs, originally introduced for pet food in part so pet owners didn't have to use their can opener on Kitty's liver dinner and then on their own canned corn, are used in more than 40 percent of all new food cans.
Other designs, such as the resealable can lid and shaped cans, are just trickling into the U.S. market. Hirzel is using the lids on only two product lines, its dips and pizza sauces, though the company may eventually apply them to more foods. So far, sales are healthy, Hirzel said: "We are pleased."
Can manufacturers describe the new features as a long-overdue makeover for the tired old can, which has dutifully preserved everything from peach slices to baked beans over the past two centuries.
French chef Nicolas Appert is credited with inventing the sealed tin can in the early 1800s, but the technology enabling mass production was not in place until the 1940s, said Len Jenkins, an industry veteran and vice president of technology and development at Crown Holdings Inc., a Philadelphia can manufacturer.
The can soon became the country's most popular packaging device, extolled for its durability, sterility and low price. But even though manufacturers were improving cans over the past 30 years -- for instance, getting rid of the of telltale "tinny" taste with ever-improving interior coatings -- sales were dropping dramatically as foodmakers, grocers and consumers rushed toward competing products and packages.
In 1971, can manufacturers shipped 31 billion cans to retailers, a figure that fell to 24.5 billion a decade later and has remained essentially flat through 2003, when they shipped 24 billion, the Can Manufacturers Institute found.
Why did it take the makers so long to shake up the can? Industry executives blame an over-emphasis on cost cutting and a series of mergers throughout the past two decades, which kept the industry's focus on integrating companies, not tweaking their products.
"The business model for cans has been, for some years, 'increase production and reduce cost,' " said Ben Miyares, vice president of industry relations at the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute, a trade group. "If you were thinking of innovating, the response, almost universally, was 'only if it does not cost more.' " But that is beginning to change.
Take Hirzel's new can, which its manufacturer, Silgan Containers Corp. of Woodland Hills, Calif., calls the dot-top lid. The resealable system is not only convenient, it extends the length of time a can -- and therefore, a brand name -- remains inside a consumer's home. Today, most shoppers dump a can's contents into a pan and, whether they have used it all or not, quickly toss the container into the trash.
