Tetra Pak is a Swedish–Swiss multinational food packaging and processing company with head offices in Lund, Sweden, and Pully, Switzerland. The company offers packaging, filling machines and processing for dairy, beverages, cheese, ice cream and prepared food, including distribution tools like accumulators, cap applicators, conveyors, crate packers, film wrappers, line controllers and straw applicators. Tetra Pak was founded by Ruben Rausing and built on Erik Wallenberg's innovation, a tetrahedron-shaped plastic-coated paper carton, from which the company name was derived. In the 1960s and 1970s, the development of the Tetra Brik package and the aseptic packaging technology made possible a cold chain supply, substantially facilitating distribution and storage. From the beginning of the 1950s to the mid-1990s, the company was headed by Rausing's two sons, Hans and Gad, who took the company from a family business with six employees in 1954 to a multinational corporation, operating in more than 160 countries and with over 25,000 employees as of 2021. The company is privately owned by the family of Gad Rausing through the Swiss-based holding company Tetra Laval, which also includes the dairy farming equipment producer DeLaval and the PET bottle manufacturer Sidel. History Åkerlund & Rausing In 1929, Ruben Rausing and Erik Åkerlund established a food carton company in Malmö. Rausing, who had studied in New York at the beginning of the 1920s, had seen self-service grocery stores in the United States, unheard of in Europe at the time, and realised that pre-packaging was part of the future in food retailing as a more hygienic and practical way of distributing staple groceries. At the time, these were sold over the counter in cumbersome glass bottles or impractical paper wraps in most European countries. At the end of the 1920s, Rausing bought a run-down packaging factory in Malmö together with the industrialist Erik Åkerlund. Åkerlund & Rausing was the first packaging company in Scandinavia and eventually became a leading manufacturer of dry food cartons, producing various paper packaging for dry staple groceries. Formation By the early 1940s, Rausing, (now the sole owner of the company), began developing dairy packaging that could compete with loose milk. Erik Wallenberg, an assistant in the Åkerlund & Rausing lab, came up with the idea to construct a tetrahedron-shaped package out of a tube of paper in 1944. On March 27, 1944, Rausing filed a patent for the idea. Rausing's wife Elisabeth reportedly came up with the