Hans Rausing, who has globalized Tetra Pak, is dead

Lars A. Lindqvist / Public Domain

In 1929, his father, Ruben Rausing, founded a plant in southern Sweden that specializes in packaging. He developed the first cardboard packaging of tetrahedron form, a carton, for dairy products, which will revolutionize the packaging of beverages.

From 7 employees to 36,000

Born in 1926, Hans Rausing grew the company, named in 1951 Tetra Pak, with reference to the shape of packaging. Director-General then president of the group, he multiplies the innovations that make him known beyond the borders of the Scandinavian kingdom.

"When I started as CEO in 1954, Tetra Pak had seven employees and in 1993 when I left my position, we were 36,000," he explained in a rare interview to the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan in 2008.

Under his leadership, and that of his brother to whom he will sell his shares in 1995, Tetra Pak improves its packaging with aseptic materials and new forms – it is the creation of bricks, but also the packaging of milk by developing the machines. UHT milk.

A sordid news story in the family

In 1991, Tetra Pak acquired Alfa Laval, a leading global supplier of equipment and plants for the agri-food and agricultural industries. The group then becomes Tetra Laval.

The fortune of Hans Rausing, who had left Sweden for the UK for tax reasons in the 1980s, is estimated at $ 12 billion (10.9 billion euros) according to Forbes magazine.

The family's reputation was tainted in 2012 when his addict son was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence for failing to bury his wife, whose decomposed body had been found at their home. The corpse of Eva Rausing, whom he had met in the late 1980s in a detox clinic, was then in a state of advanced decomposition.

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