85EY Family Business Yearbook 2016 |84 | EY Family Business Yearbook 2016

Award winners Europe Sweden

Mention the brand Tetra Pak to almost anyone

in the world, and they will most likely identify it

with the carton packages used for distributing

beverages such as milk and juice. Behind the

success of the Swedish Tetra Pak company has

been the Rausing family. Three generations

have worked to create the multibillion-dollar

company Tetra Pak, a company that is now one

part of the Tetra Laval Group. With the vision

and drive of Ruben Rausing at the beginning,

the entrepreneurship of the second generation

and the strategic leadership of the third, each

generation has played a crucial role in Tetra Pak’s

success.

Europe

North America

Latin America

Asia-Pacific

Kirsten, Finn and Jörn RausingTetra Laval Group

“Doing something that nobody else has done before is actually quite hard.”

Ruben Rausing, Founder,

Tetra Pak

87EY Family Business Yearbook 2016 |86 | EY Family Business Yearbook 2016

Family businesses are often strongly connected to a town or region. And for Tetra Pak, that connection is with Lund. Although the company’s headquarters are now in Switzerland, Tetra Pak still has many facilities in the city, which many would say is Tetra Pak’s spiritual home.

Developing the Tetra Pak filling machines

As a true visionary, Ruben foresaw a time when packaging would become a much more important part of the food and drink distribution chain. And in the 1930s, Åkerlund & Rausing grew rapidly under his leadership. The big breakthrough for the company came in 1944, when an engineer working for the company came up with the idea of a tetrahedron-shaped carton to store milk. Ruben backed the idea and filed the patent for the “Tetra Pak.” And a few years later, Tetra Pak was set up as a subsidiary of Åkerlund & Rausing.

Although coming up with the idea of the Tetra Pak package may have been a eureka moment for Ruben and his colleagues, it then took nearly 10 years to develop a suitable material that could be produced on a large enough scale to make the carton a commercially viable product. As Ruben once said, “Doing something that nobody else has done before is actually quite hard.”

Part of the difficulty in developing the packaging concept was in coming up with a machine that could continuously fill the new

In revenue terms, Tetra Pak is the largest packaging and food processing equipment company in the world. The privately held company, despite being headquartered in Switzerland, is very much a product of Sweden. And it is now overseen by the third generation of the Rausing family.

Tetra Pak employs more than 23,000 people in over 80 countries; in 2015, it had net sales of €11.8b and sold more than 180 billion Tetra Pak packages, made using more than 8,000 packaging machines. Tetra Pak is instrumental in the processing and packaging of many different kinds of food and drink. When you open a milk or juice carton anywhere in the world, chances are it was made by Tetra Pak. Tetra Pak’s importance to the food and drink industry has been immense. Indeed, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences has said that the Tetra Pak packaging system is one of Sweden’s most successful inventions of all time.

Ruben Rausing: Sweden’s great entrepreneur

The story of the company starts with Ruben Rausing. Born near the town of Helsingborg in southern Sweden in 1895, Ruben was to become one of the country’s greatest entrepreneurs of the 20th century. When he was in his 30s, Ruben set up a packaging company with Erik Åkerlund called Åkerlund & Rausing. A few years later, Ruben bought out Åkerlund and moved the company’s headquarters to Lund, a university city in southern Sweden.

Managing Director of Tetra Pak in 1954, at the age of just 28. Together, over the next 32 years, the two brothers built Tetra Pak into the globally active multinational it has become. Much of the company’s growth was driven by international expansion and further innovations.

Internationalization started in the 1950s

The first Tetra Pak machine was exported to Germany in 1954, and the first Tetra Pak production plant outside Sweden was

cartons. This problem was solved by the idea of a chain-driven machine, which eventually became the template for all Tetra Pak filling machines. In 1952, the first Tetra Pak machine was delivered to a dairy in Lund, and the packing of cream in Tetra Pak 100ml cartons started. And so began a revolution in the commercial packaging of beverages.

Ruben’s eldest son Gad Rausing led the technical development for Tetra Pak. Hans Rausing, Ruben’s second son, joined the family business soon after his elder brother. He was appointed

Award winners Europe Sweden

Ruben Rausing founded Tetra Pak in 1951.

DeLaval is a world leader in the dairy farming industry, providing integrated milking solutions designed to improve dairy farmers’ production and animal welfare.

01 An early Tetra Pak advertisment for milk packages; 02 Founder Ruben Rausing with a wood-model of a filling machine; 03 Tetra Pack packaging in supermarket.

01 02 03

89EY Family Business Yearbook 2016 |88 | EY Family Business Yearbook 2016

Finn, Jörn and Kirsten RausingMembers of the Board

Company name: Tetra Laval Group

Generation(s): Third

Founded: 1951 in Lund, Sweden

Industry: Liquid food processing and packaging

Employees (2014): Approx. 33,760

Revenue (2014): Approx. €13.45b

opened in Mexico six years later, in 1960. By the mid-1970s, Tetra Pak was firmly established, with operations in many countries around the world. The energy and entrepreneurship of Gad and Hans represents a classic case of the second generation taking the business created by the first to altogether greater heights.

The group was created

In 1991, Tetra Pak made its first big acquisition by buying Alfa Laval, one of the world’s largest suppliers of food processing equipment. Two years later, Tetra Laval Group was created, which today consists of three industry groups: Tetra Pak, Sidel (which specializes in equipment for the carbonated beverage industry) and DeLaval (specialized in the dairy farming equipment). But no matter how successful they are, few family businesses progress in a linear way, with all the family members working in perfect unity. In 1995, having left the family business two years before, Hans and his family decided to dispose of their interest in the company. This meant that Gad’s three children, Kirsten, Finn and Jörn, became the family representatives on the board. By this time, the management of the business had been placed in the hands of non-family professionals.

Few would deny that Tetra Pak’s influence on the global packaging and processing sector has been immense, and that global influence has been the product of one of Europe’s most successful family businesses of the last 100 years.

Award winners Europe Sweden

Tetra Pak plant and office buildings in Lund, Sweden.

Children drinking school milk in Vietnam.

Tetra Rex bio-based carton package.

Liquid food products in Tetra Pak packaging can be found all around the world.