Today everyone seems to be peddling a hi-tech means to get rich - sure that their new app, financial product or environmental gizmo will soon see them coining it in.
But if you really want to create a ubiquitous product, you might want to start with some altogether simpler aims.
Like Swedish innovator Ruben Rausing who - sick of cumbersome glass bottles in the 1950s - merely sought to create a more practical means of storing and moving beverages. From this germ of an idea was born Tetra Pak, now a huge global food processing and packaging firm whose products can be found in more than 170 countries.
The humble cartons Rausing pioneered were certainly worth his while - in fact his sons and heirs Gad and Hans were still topping lists of the richest people residing in Britain well into the 1990s. Hans was still 83rd on the Forbes rich list of the world's wealthiest as recently as 2011. Such are the rewards for creating a product of such ubiquity. Last year Tetra Pak sold 173 billion of its packs across the globe.
Anyone of a certain age has no doubt unsuccessfully wrestled with one of the firm's milk cartons in their youth - but today's designs are altogether more modern, boasting twist-to-open 'dream caps' and relentlessly tested aseptic technology. The firm today makes more than 7,000 different types of containers. And there's no shortage of them in this region, Tetra Pak Arabia marketing director Riccardo Castagnetti tells 7DAYS at the huge Gulfood showcase in Dubai.
Last year Tetra Pak sold 7.2 billion packages in the GCC countries and Yemen.
"If you consider that is a population of 68 million people, this means 105 packages per head," says Castagnetti, who has clearly done his sums. The firm's containers have a strong appeal in a region that, he notes somewhat understatedly, is "quite hot", and where food handling by transit firms sometimes leaves something to be desired.
Together with its lesser known processing business, where it helps firms to treat their products to make them stay fresh longer, the company promises its customers that it can get their products to consumers in an impeccable state. UHT milk should last three or four months, Castagnetti says, with other packed products good for up to a year.
"Imagine systems that can allow only two, three or four weeks shelf-life - if you don't sell the product within that specific time then you have to return it or it goes to waste," he says.
And waste is something that the firm wants to see less of in this region. Despite successes in other territories, recycling in the Middle East "just doesn't happen", says Castagnetti.
"In Turkey where we have very good data and there is strong government backing we have reached 60 per cent," he says. But in this region that figure is "much, much lower" he says. In the future, he says, you might be as likely to get peas out of a Tetra Pak package as peach juice - as the firm looks to expand into solid food packaging.
One Saudi firm is already putting beans and other foods in the firm's carton-like packs. Which just goes to show the enduring value of a simple idea.
© 7Days 2013
