Over the years, many custom cardboard boxes have iterated, evolved and improved as manufacturing techniques get better and the rise of computer-aided design means that every product can have packaging precisely designed for it.

This is why many products, particularly electronics, have been stored in progressively smaller, more protective and often very stylised boxes, which in turn saves manufacturing and shipping costs whilst also ensuring expensive products are better protected.

One of the most fascinating examples of this is a cardboard box that has not fundamentally changed its design in 95 years, but has, in turn, changed fundamentally how we approach packaging and protecting fragile objects such as glasses and electronic components.

To understand why recyclable cardboard pulp egg boxes changed everything, it is important to understand the problem they were designed to fix and how they managed to achieve it in such a way that it has only been slightly amended over nearly a century.

Why Was The Cardboard Egg Box Created?

The cardboard egg box or egg carton was a late-19th-century solution meant to fix a problem that had existed since the emergence of poultry farming as far back as 7,000 years ago.

Eggs are a very important food item; they are rich in protein, easy to cook, nutrient-dense, relatively low in calories and saturated fat and more affordable than meat or other sources of protein.

The age-old problem, however, was transporting them; eggs have a shell, but too much movement and too firm a contact with either each other or the walls of the container they are stored in will cause them to crack and leave a sticky, expensive mess.

According to the Smithsonian Institute, over $100,000 per month (and over $1.5m adjusted for inflation) worth of egg breakage claims were reported by one railway transport company in the United States alone.

Most of the time, this was the result of using the wrong type of packaging; eggs were typically stored in open baskets or crates with straw used to cushion them. It worked about as well as one could expect on an express train.

What Was The First Cardboard Egg Box?

The problem was quickly identified as a lack of separation of all the breakable eggs, but the initial solution was rather more primitive than it would later become.

The first solution was the Humpty Dumpty, a wooden crate with separate dividers that at least removed the issue of eggs breaking against each other, especially if judicious amounts of straw or filler were used to protect the egg in the 1890s.

These early boxes, whilst huge and not necessarily useful for customers, were very useful for farmers and manufacturers, as they often acted not only as egg storage but as stock-keeping units in their own right.

By the early 20th century, wood pulp and cardboard could be moulded to make more useful packaging solutions, which led to the development of the Raylite egg box in 1906.

This was the first cardboard box made specifically to house a particularly fragile product that had historically required a fair degree of luck and really careful packaging to fix. 

The Raylite box, invented by and patented by Thomas Bethell of Liverpool, opened the floodgates for cardboard transportation and showcased the effectiveness of clever design and wood pulp moulding that allowed for eggs to be transported further distances with far less chance of breaking.

Who Invented The Modern Egg Box?

There were several iterations of the egg box that became popular over the years, and the effectiveness of cardboard for use in transportation was largely established through these various iterations of egg boxes and similar moulded boxes used for transportation.

There was the Coyle box made by Joseph Coyle of British Columbia, allegedly to fix a dispute between a local farmer and a hotel owner that he happened to overhear.

This version had a V-shaped ridge in each cardboard slot, meaning that eggs moved around far less and thus would not typically break.

This system established the principles for cardboard egg boxes afterwards, one that would be taken further by Morris Koppelman in 1921, who created a box with specific holders for eggs that would stop them from moving even further and could be folded flat after being used.

Finally, the genesis of the modern egg carton was invented in 1931 by Francis Sherman. It was the first to use paper pulp, to have a folding lid flap, and to otherwise largely resemble the egg boxes we have today.

Once the egg box was solved, the floodgates were opened to use cardboard and paper pulp to create a wide number of customisable protective inlays.