This Day In Cereal History

Dateline 1879, and milk is sold in glass bottles for the first time in the United States. It’s a clear improvement in hygiene and convenience - really, who want's to have to suck off a cow teet after a complete stranger?

Until that time, people bought milk as a bulk item, with the seller dispensing milk out of a keg or bucket into whatever jugs, pails or other containers the customers brought. That practice left a lot to be desired on the cleanliness front. Some dairies tried offering milk in fruit jars, perhaps because customers had started bringing the resealable containers to them to be filled.

Echo Farms Dairy introduced the first purpose-made milk bottles in New York City, delivering the milk from Litchfield, Connecticut. Other dealers initially feared the expense of breakage, and some customers didn’t like the drugstore look of the containers. But the new method of delivery eventually caught on. By the first decade of the 20th century, some cities were legally requiring that milk be delivered in glass bottles.

Early bottles had many designs, including models with stoppers on wire loops, like the bottles still used today by some European and specialty breweries. Many had the name of the dairy embossed on the glass. Because milk has a short shelf life, consumers used the contents quickly and returned them when they went to the market or when fresh milk was delivered to their doors by milkmen. The The typical milk bottle made 22.5 round trips in the early 1900s before getting broken, lost or diverted by consumers to other purposes.

The loss of bottles — as well as the expense of returning them to the bottling plant, washing and sterilizing them — contributed to the eventual abandonment of the glass bottle. Producers and consumers were also concerned about the health implications of transporting fresh milk in the same trucks right next to empty, unwashed bottles. Worse yet, unscrupulous (but crafty) milkmen would split a fresh quart into two empty (and not-yet washed) pint bottles to fill a customer’s order, or reverse the process and combine two pints into an empty quart. Though why they're fussing with milk containers if it's all going to the same customer is beyond me.

All this led to the development of single-use containers. The earliest wax containers appeared in the 1890s. Shapes ranged from simple boxes to cylinders to cones to truncated pyramids, even ones that imitated the shape of a typical round glass bottle. What finally prevailed, in the 1940s, was a rectangular column design, with a small, round pull-up cap on a flat top piece. They were lightweight and compact, wasting little space in milk trucks. Flat-top boxes were replaced in the 1950s by square cartons with “gable tops” that opened out into a spout for easy pouring. This design had actually been patented in 1915.

Milk in glass bottles is a specialty or niche market these days, and home milk delivery is pretty much a thing of the past. The wax gable-top design and the more-recent plastic bottles account for nearly all the retail milk sold in the United States, and you gotta go to the store to get ‘em...unless you have your mom go instead.